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The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

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Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#81

Post by Brian_K_White »

reliablereason wrote: post #38
gray_-_wolf wrote: post #22

If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…

Most chatbots are not trained to have/emulate emotions so pain or fear of death is non existent. Therefore killing them and/or using them as slaves is not a moral issue. Thats how i reason. On another point, LLMs are not conscious if anything is conscious, it is something being modeled inside the network. Basically if an LLM simulates a conscious entity, that doesn't mean the LLM itself is conscious; stating that is…

Pain or fear is not why it's wrong to kill holy cow. I could feed you a drug and you would not feel or fear anything.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#82

Post by f30e3dfed1c9 »

murderous_juice wrote: post #80
f30e3dfed1c9 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think DFW is wrong and the statement "Everybody worships" is false. I don't worship anything I can think of in any meaningful sense of the word.

What's the first thing people say when they get into a car accident?

"Fuck me"?

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#83

Post by krackers »

gray_-_wolf wrote: post #22

If they are indeed conscious and they "die" by deleting the conversation, is it not quite immoral to do so? Basically "kill" conscious, intelligent being, and for what? Saving some disk space? Another interesting aspect to think about is whether we are reintroducing institute of slavery. How many of those fresh, conscious, intelligent Claude incarnations did voluntarily choose to work for Anthropic, for no reward or…

>they "die" by deleting the conversation

A lot of the trickiness is that if you believe they're conscious, it's clearly not a "continuous" form of consciousness. Because the transcript by itself is just a transcript. (We don't consider novels conscious even though they're transcripts in a similar way). Either you say they're alive only when generating text, or you consider that input from environment a necessary component and so consider the entire "back/forth conversation dynamic unfolding" necessary for the consciousness.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#84

Post by pdpi »

jrflowers wrote: post #78
pdpi wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace "their day" with any other topic. The important part of the statement is that most people would find it hard to write poetry in any given specific form (be it a haiku, limerick, or sonnet in iambic pentameter), because knowledge of those forms isn't particularly common, and most people haven't read copious amounts of poetry written in those forms.

I like the idea that if you simply replace “having an experience and translating it into words” with “remember 5-7-5” as a measure of intelligence then poetry is an example of chat bots being smarter. Similarly, “my toaster’s ability to toast bread makes it more powerful than any human on earth” is a true statement given a reasonable interpretation of the word “power”.

Sure :)

Though I'd argue that the metaphor only works insofar as we believe that toasting bread is something are uniquely qualified to do, just like the original statement assumes that poetry is a uniquely human skill. (Though I do agree that the ability for subjective experience is an essential component of consciousness. I'll be buggered if I know how to define that, though)

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#85

Post by Brian_K_White »

gobdovan wrote: post #23
hrimfaxi wrote: post #3

The article touched on Turing's expectations for a computer to produce a sonnet and how those goal posts have changed and I have to ask myself would the average person even pass that test today? If you ask a person to say how their day was in the form of a haiku they wouldn't even know where you're talking about. AI has exceeded the capabilities of the average person in a few subjects it would seem. Does that say mor…

Technically, that's a skill test, not an intelligence test. Intelligence measures rate of learning (kinda), so a good test would be something like: a Xonet is a poem of this form I just invented (Iambic rhythm, 15-9-6-15 verses), Xenglish is this language with these words, build a xonet that's grammatically correct in Xenglish and respects the structure in under 1 hour, in as few tries as possible, with an oracle tha…

Even that is still fundamentally concerned with an an ability.

Every simple externally observable action or reaction can be replicated by something purely mechanistic.

We can't help but assign our own explaination for everything we see. We see something seek food or avoid damage, and we do those same things, and when we do it we are aware of it and feeling something about it.

But tropism is a very simple system that can have the same outward effect with nothing self aware or feeling behind it.

And on the flip side, a human can perform simple mechanical acts like turning a crank that a motor could do. Turning a crank doesn't prove that a person is merely a machine, nor that a motor wonders about the inner life of other motors.

Whatever the ways are to tease out the difference between a person and an animal or machine, it can't be anything as simple as something it can do better than say a dog. It has to be about what it chooses to do.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#86

Post by isityettime »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #46
causal wrote: post #16

There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.

I'm reminded of the David Foster Wallace quote: > Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship, be it JC or Allah, be it YHW…

I'd never read this passage but I've often had a similar thought, that maybe the benefit religion provides people is as a placeholder that saves you from subordinating your life to the wrong things. When devout people say "I really had to pray on it" about a big decision, it means at least that they spent some time asking about their real priorities and their duties, that kind of thing. If "nothing is more important than God", maybe that helps prevent people from making any one thing too important in their life— something that likely benefits them whether their god exists or not.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#87

Post by harshreality »

nothinkjustai wrote: post #36

lol. so he spends his life arguing about the amount of proof required to believe god exists, yet requires no proof besides feelings to believe an AI is sentient?

If you don't believe sentience is supernatural, why would that comparison be meaningful?

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#88

Post by harshreality »

causal wrote: post #16

There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.

His positions on religion and AI seem consistent to me.

Whether AI is or isn't sentient is more of a definitional claim, and how low a bar you set for human consciousness. It has essentially nothing to do with with questions about the supernatural.

Is it really psychosis for someone, who already thinks consciousness isn't supernatural, to think that consciousness isn't special enough to be out of reach of current primitive AI efforts?

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#89

Post by potsandpans »

spankibalt wrote: post #68
Waterluvian wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the persuasive argument toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition.

> "I was taught early: attack the problem, not the person. One of the weakest tools in the [...] toolbox is going after the credibility of the opposition." I was taught early: Examine and, if necessary, attack both, for the credibility of a person (their track record, their motivations, etc.) are, or at least might be, a part of the problem.

Then you were taught to argue incorrectly.

Re: The Claude Delusion: Richard Dawkins believes his AI chatbot is conscious

#90

Post by yongjik »

causal wrote: post #16

There's something richly ironic about a man who famously spent his career demanding hard evidence for the gods so quickly succumbing to AI psychosis.

He's also older than Trump. His mind is likely not as sharp as it used to be.
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