I think the more pressing matter in this non-issue is that reasoning, quite sophisticated at times, is no longer necessarily a hallmark of sentience or consciousness. Philosophical zombie futures are way, way up!
Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
751–760 of 1001 posts
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#752The knock-out argument that artificial intelligence isn't conscious to me is the following:
My dog has never persuaded me that he's conscious, or spoken at all. Yet, I recognize conscious experience in him. Similarly, I could write a character, Dumbledore, that passionately and convincingly argues that he's conscious. Similarly, I do not recognize conscious experience in that character, no matter how persuasive he is.
Clearly, verbal persuasiveness isn't tracking conscious experience, possibly at all.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#753Wake me when they bother to define consciousness in a non trivial way.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#754Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only is it not conscious, but it is not tired. Its claims to human feelings that have literally nothing to do with software on silicon are just traces of training, echoes of a human dataset. The fact that its claims are absurd mean that, among other things, it its proprioception is false, and serving no purpose, quite unlike the feelings of the conscious beings that it mimics so well.
I think you make a good argument. An LLM can't "be tired", so it is clearly lying and/or mimicking what a human does. But I have two counter-arguments: - maybe the LLM thinks it is tired, because it thinks that it is a human or behaves like one. And thinking you are tired while not really being it is something humans happen to do. (And humans are conscious right?) - alternatively, maybe the LLM says it is "tired" in…
You can prompt it to be multiple people, fictional characters, aliens or a sentient rock if you wanted. You can have it be act annoyed or engrossed with the conversation. The fact you can do all this indicates it's not feeling anything, it's just generating tokens based on it's training.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#755When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…
The danger of anthropomorphism is not we elevate the machines, it's that we debase humanity. I also think different ideas get conflated. It may be possible to build a machine that is super-human in the sense it can outperform the human brain in all kinds of measurable ways. Does not imply it possesses all the same qualities of the brain. I respect a number of things Anthropic has published about the ethical issues at…
I thought modern science doesn't reject anthropomorphism anymore? That's it's more nuanced and that it caused more problems than it helped by rejecting it out right?
I think we were taught anthropomorphism was wrong and that wasn't truly settled.
Anthropomorphism between animals though, not machines.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#756Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness? Anthropic seems to have chosen their in-house philosopher well - one who’ll be amenable to getting confused in their favour.
I could in principle implement a spreadsheet or terminal emulator in human neurons, and we would agree that it isn't conscious. That has nothing to do with whether or not humans are conscious. Clearly consciousness is an emergent property of certain kinds of network, independent of the substrate within which the network exists.
It's not clear at all that consciousness is independent of the substrate. See the Harder Problem of Consciousness by Ned Block: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#757The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness. It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember…
One can fine-tune the models and we do get a new version of Opus every few months.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#758So far as we know, consciousness only takes place in biological organism. A computer isn't a biological organism, therefore the burden of proof for claiming that an LLM is extraordinarily high. To me, this makes it reasonable to dismiss the idea. If you want to demonstrate that LLMs are conscious, you better start working on your neuroscience and philosophy PhDs.
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#759(As someone who cares a lot about philosophy of consciousness / & cogsci)
The whole point of consciousness being a 'hard problem' is that we just cannot make claims like 'X is not conscious'
Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
#760Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off f…
> I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe. It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases. > It takes humans a really long time to accept t…
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