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Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

theatlantic.com

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#961

Post by sp1nningaway »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #959

Regardless of Ted Chiang's qualifications as a cognitive or computer scientist, he's correct. Claiming that a computational model is conscious falls squarely in the category of "extraordinary" and as Carl Sagan said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Because the claim is extraordinary, the burden of proof is on the claimant of consciousness, not on those who deny that LLMs are conscious. The fact…

I'm surprised at the largely negative sentiment HN has for this essay. He stakes out his claims in a refreshing and readable way. Most of the criticisms here, and general "philosophical" LLM writings that pop up on HN are dense, unfocused and fairly inscrutable.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#962

Post by Grimblewald »

Always with this topic of articles I find a common theme. No one defines the load-bearing terms and just assumes we all mean the same thing by it, which we know is not the case. That lack of engagement with the topic always has the same effect: the few interesting things said, if any, dont apply to the subject matter claimed generally. Its more of an insight into the authors mind, than the claimed topic. Why can't we all just do the more effective thing, and offer our personal definition for what constitutes conciousness, which is the only thing these articles offer. It would save so much time and make discussion far clearer.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#963

Post by grantcas »

haswell wrote: post #529
rickydroll wrote: post #505

Earlier 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…

> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is? Isn't this a bit like saying "So, if we had proof that god exists, how long would it take for you to accept that to be true?". When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested. Until then, I don't see a good reason to take the idea…

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Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#964

Post by [deleted] »

Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

[deleted]

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#965

Post by sp1nningaway »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #606
haktan wrote: post #586

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create t…

That's the "Chinese room" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room It has been very well discussed before I don't understand how anyone sane can argue against it (and indeed you can see on Wikipedia that the replies to it are sparse and don't make any sense).

I like this bit from the wiki article:

Speaking through Zarubin, Dneprov writes that "the only way to prove that machines can think is to turn yourself into a machine and examine your thinking process", and he concludes, as Searle does, that "even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."

That feels similar to what Chiang is saying. The physical state of being a human is part of human consciousness. An LLM would require many more "levels" that haven't been achieved yet. An LLM with a body, sense organs, physical tools, social dynamics, etc. would all be steps on the path to a "conscious" LLM.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#966

Post by sp1nningaway »

nonfamous wrote: post #949
pegasus wrote: post #923

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? Where are you seeing such claims? I.e. that only humans can be conscious, that AI in general is not conscious by definition?? Seems to me you've put up an easy-to-dismiss strawman. Here's how I would summarize crux of the argument: LLMs (specifically) are, by construction, chameleons. More precisely, role-playing machines. When compelled to have a conversation as "themselves", all they do is take on the role of…

Err… right here in TFA? >> The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs LLMs may be chameleons, but, to steal an excellent quote, if you can’t tell does it really matter. My personal take on this is that consciousness is a thing induced, not a thing evoked. If it generates a response on the observer as a conscious thing would it is, by my definition, cons…

If TFA says "only humans can be conscious," you may know many more humans that have a virtual body made up of virtual organs than I do.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#967

Post by Gooblebrai »

slibhb wrote: post #916
andrewflnr wrote: post #839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't think neuroscience can solve it either. Science could decide whether, e.g. equivalent physical processes are occurring in dogs and humans, and you could argue that solves the question for things with physical brains, but even then it can't measure whether another brain has the same subjective experience as you do. It can't really do that for other humans. It certainly can't answer that question for h…

> I actually don't think neuroscience can solve it either. Science could decide whether, e.g. equivalent physical processes are occurring in dogs and humans, and you could argue that solves the question for things with physical brains, but even then it can't measure whether another brain has the same subjective experience as you do. It can't really do that for other humans Imagine a device that you put on your head a…

Strange Days

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#969

Post by krupan »

tsukikage wrote: post #640
krupan wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do." But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.

Your “and then” is doing a lot of work there. The steps between may or may not include some form of “learn to understand humans”, but you can’t just hide them behind “and then” if what we are doing is claiming some particular thing is not in the list. Through training on human text, we are building implicitly in the weights a statistical model of what humans might write in response when presented with arbitrary piece…

My "and then" simply implies order of operations. When it's fully "trained" then (and only then) can it generate text.

And I will reassert that even if it "understands" the text it was trained on, that is not the same as understanding humans. I mean really, we ARE humans and we barely understand humans.

The thing LLMs model and "predict" is simply, what words in what order are statistically common given these input words in this order.

You can write (non-ai) software to model and predict things using the laws of physics. I'd wager it would do a better job than any LLM at predicting where a rocket will go through space. Does that mean the program is conscious and "understands" physics? No

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