Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where does he say it's magic?
LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).
When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
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Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.
These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.
How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where does he say it's magic?
LLMs are just math run on your CPU. Autocomplete. Sometimes very useful autocomplete, but still just autocomplete. To imply it could be conscious requires something else, here the comment uses the phrase magic to fill that gap - since we must agree that a CPU is not conscious on it's own (else everything our computer does would be conscious).
They stopped being autocomplete years ago with RLHF
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neurons are just summing up their inputs according to the laws of chemistry. What's the difference?
This is definitely complicated—I’m not a neuroscientist but worked for some and married one, so I’ve heard quite a few entries from the genre of how our brains fool ourselves or make our conscious experience seem more coherent and linear than it actually is—but the big ones I see are the inability to learn from experience or have a generalized sense of conceptual reasoning. For the latter, I’m not just thinking about…
Humans can't reliably subitize more than five-ish objects, while chimps can actually do this task better than us. That's our "cant count the R's in strawberry" (which flagship models can reliably do now, general letter counting).
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related . I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also in…
I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.
Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot.
Trees react to the world around them in many ways.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 19 80s!) sort…
Actually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.
There are robots with AI controlling them, so it doesn't hold that they don't all have bodies. They can see, they can move.
(I'm still not sure that that makes them conscious, or if we can even determine that at all, but I don't think that's a fair argument.)
Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#79Re: When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned. Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.
Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.