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Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

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Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#5

Post by Bjartr »

Isn't this back to attributing conscious experience to an AI when you're actually just co-writing sci-fi? The system is doing it's best to coherently fill in the rest of a story that includes an AI that's been given a place to process its feelings. The most likely result, textually speaking, is not for the AI to ignore the private journal, but to indeed use it to (appear to) process emotion.

Would any of these ideas been present had the system not been primed with the idea that it has them and needs to process them in the first place?

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#7

Post by jstanley »

aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

You can't tell if another being is conscious without being on the inside of it.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#8

Post by xeonmc »

aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

Perhaps one day a criterion will be found for the equivalent of Turing-completeness but for consciousness — any system which contains the necessary elements of introspective complexity, no matter how varied or outlandish or inefficient in its implementation, would invariably develop consciousness over its course. Kind of like the handwaved premise in 17776.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#9

Post by andy99 »

aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

Re: Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

#10

Post by jstanley »

andy99 wrote: post #9
aswegs8 wrote: post #4

I mean, what is consciousness, really? Is there really any qualitative difference? It feels like something that emerges out of complexity. Once models are able to update their weights real time and form "memories", does that make them conscious?

When I read comments like this (and I've read seemingly hundreds of them), I wonder if some other people aren't conscious / sentient? I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness (as I experience it) could think that an algorithm could experience it.

I also read comments like that and wonder if other people aren't conscious.

I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience!).

However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think the processes that produce your own consciousness could not be computable?

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