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The New AI Consciousness Paper
71–80 of 313 posts
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#72Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand. The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at." "You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??" "Yes", the genie responds. "And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?" "…
I'm flipping it at the genie first, then removing the sentience requirement in 30 seconds.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe. And this is precisely where LLMs fall short, through no fault of their own. The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of…
Coherence here isn't about legible text, it's environmental coherence where you can deduce truths about the world through hypotheses and experimentation. Coherence isn't about a consistent story narrative, it's about a persistent world with falsifiable beliefs and consequences.
Peoples interior model of the world is very tenuously related to reality. We don't have a direct experience of waves, quantum mechanics, the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. The whole thing is a bunch of shortcuts and hacks that allow people to survive, the brain isn't really setup to probe reality and produce true beliefs, and the extent to which our internal models of reality naturally match actual reality is related to how much that mattered to our personal survival before the advent of civilization and writing, etc.
It's really only been a very brief amount of time in human history where we had a deliberate method for trying to probe reality and create true beliefs, and I am fairly sure that if consciousness existed in humanity, it existed before the advent of the scientific method.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#74Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand. The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at." "You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??" "Yes", the genie responds. "And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?" "…
I'm flipping it at the genie first, then removing the sentience requirement in 30 seconds.
Hey not fair!
While you're in there I have a few favors to ask...
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#75Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand. The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at." "You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??" "Yes", the genie responds. "And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?" "…
I'm flipping it at the genie first, then removing the sentience requirement in 30 seconds.
Seems very bold to assume the genie is sentient
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#76> For some people (including me), a sense of phenomenal consciousness feels like the bedrock of existence, the least deniable thing; the sheer redness of red is so mysterious as to seem almost impossible to ground. Other people have the opposite intuition: consciousness doesn’t bother them, red is just a color, obviously matter can do computation, what’s everyone so worked up about? Philosophers naturally interpret this as a philosophical dispute, but I’m increasingly convinced it’s an equivalent of aphantasia, where people’s minds work in very different ways and they can’t even agree on the raw facts to be explained.
Is Scott accusing people who don't grasp the hardness of the hard problem of consciousness of being p-zombies?
(TBH I've occasionally wondered this myself.)
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#77Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand. The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at." "You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??" "Yes", the genie responds. "And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?" "…
How does the wand know what I'm flicking it at? What if I miss? Maybe the wand thinks I'm targeting some tiny organism that lives on the organism that I'm actually targeting. Can I target the wand with itself?
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#78Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#79I'm waiting for someone to transcend the concept of I know it when I see it about consciousness.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#80Let's say a genie hands you a magic wand. The genie says "you can flick this wand at anything in the universe and - for 30 seconds - you will swap places with what you point it at." "You mean that if I flick it at my partner then I will 'be' her for 30 seconds and experience exactly how she feels and what she thinks??" "Yes", the genie responds. "And when I go back to my own body I will remember what it felt like?" "…
How does the wand know what I'm flicking it at? What if I miss? Maybe the wand thinks I'm targeting some tiny organism that lives on the organism that I'm actually targeting. Can I target the wand with itself?
> How does the wand know what I'm flicking it at?
Magic! (i.e. not purely part of the thought experiment, unless I'm missing something interesting)
> What if I miss?
Panpsychism better be true :)
> Can I target the wand with itself?
John Malkovich? Is that you?!