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Chalmers: "As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameter

Chalmers: "As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too."

skissane 6y ago
I think consciousness is something dynamic – constantly learning from and reacting to your environment, constantly changing your environment and being changed by it in turn. And that's what biological neural networks do. By contrast, systems like GPT-3 still have a hard boundary between two different modes of operation – learning and application of that learning – which makes them much more static. And that makes me doubt their consciousness. I think, if some future system could get rid of the boundary between training and runtime, so that training happened continuously – then it would be closer to consciousness in my view. (It would also mean that different instances of the system would begin to diverge and become unique individuals, because even if the initial training was identical, the ongoing operation would be different, and the networks would diverge over time.)
- WClayFerguson 6y ago
  Your definition of consciousness drags in a lot that is not required. You are conflating it with intelligence too much. Consciousness is what it feels like to have a thought, an emotion, an idea, in that exact moment while you are feeling it. It can happen in a brain at a moment, during a single second of time, and doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with learning, reacting to environments, or any of that other stuff the normally goes along with life. Consciousness itself is the actual experience itself. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is why we think anything with a brain has some kind of consciousness. If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have.
  - nickelpro 6y ago
    Your royal "we" is casting a pretty wide net here, Chalmer's openness to animal consciousness is by no means a universal opinion.
  - Stupulous 6y ago
    It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.
    - WClayFerguson 6y ago
      I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
    - amarte 6y ago
      I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
  - skissane 6y ago
    Is some degree of intelligence necessary for consciousness? We don't know. Some philosophers (of a pan-psychic bent) would say that consciousness doesn't require any intelligence, so even something completely unintelligent (like a pebble, or an individual proton) could be conscious. Others think that consciousness requires some minimal degree of intelligence, a standard which (non-human) animals may or may not meet, but a pebble certainly can't. We don't know who is right here. We don't have any agreed upon objective standards to determine what is conscious and what is not. But, if it were true that some minimal degree of intelligence is required for consciousness, then it may well be that primitive animals have that degree of intelligence yet GPT-3 lacks it. While GPT-3 can perform at seemingly human level on some tasks, there are other tasks on which even quite primitive animal intelligences vastly outperform it. Maybe, if intelligence is necessary for consciousness, the kind of intelligence underlying the later tasks may be more essential to consciousness than the kind underlying the former. > If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have. The idea that consciousness is some kind of special quantum phenomena is highly speculative. Sure, some philosophers and physicists think it may be true, but others think the whole idea is baloney. When you say "likely", that's just your own opinion of what is more likely, there is no hard evidence to support that probability judgement.
    - WClayFerguson 6y ago
      I agree with everything you just said. What I mean about quantum mechanics comes from the fact that neuroscience has never been able to locate "where" in the brain any memory is stored. I think consciousness and memory are interdependent, and that consciousness is essentially memory. You can invent new thoughts and ideas, but they are always built from existing ones, as their building blocks. I think the answer to the question 'where/how' is memory 'stored' in the brain is: "It's not". I believe the brain is quantum mechanically connected to all prior states of itself (like all matter is), and so what we call 'memory' is actually a 'direct connection' thru spacetime to the actual event. Needless to say it would take a book to describe this theory in detail, so maybe I'll write up all my thoughts at some point, but it explains lots of mysteries of intelligences once you accept this interconnection model. Everything from savantism, to instinct behaviors, to fungal intelligences falls into place. Once you accept that all complex patterns in nature that 'evolve' are always still 'connected directly to' all prior copies of themselves, and able to exchange wave potentials, it makes many things that used to seem 'paranormal' or 'magical' suddenly have a more scientific explanation.
- roywiggins 6y ago
  If you woke up tomorrow as a brain in a vat with no sensory input, you'd expect to be conscious, at least for a while.
  - skissane 6y ago
    In your scenario, although I wouldn't at that moment be having the experience of two-way interaction with my environment, I would have had it in the past. And, since I temporarily lack that interaction when I dream, it is clear that one can be conscious without having that interaction right now. But just because I can have consciousness without having that right now, it doesn't necessarily follow that I can have consciousness having never had that. And that's a fundamental difference between conscious biological life and GPT-3. Conscious biological life experiences a two-way interaction with its environment, in which organism and environment act on each other simultaneously. GPT-3's experience of that is very limited. It has experienced the environment act on it (training), and it has experienced itself act on the environment (runtime), but those two experiences are largely siloed off from each other. (It effectively does have some runtime memory, so to a very limited degree it can dynamically react to the environment, but it can't actually learn anything at runtime.) Now is that experience, which humans and animals have, but which GPT-3 lacks, essential to consciousness? Who really knows. The fact is, we don't really know what consciousness is, or what are the conditions for its existence. Maybe at least some history of that kind of two-way interaction is essential for consciousness, in which case GPT-3 can't have it (but some future successor system might). Maybe not. Nobody really knows.
- tgv 6y ago
  I believe it was Minsky who said, somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s: consciousness is simply a feedback loop. It's of course much too simple, but I too am convinced consciousness can't exist without it.
- visarga 6y ago
  GPT-3 was dynamic and learning constantly during the training phase. Now it is in its afterlife, speaking with us but not learning anymore.
throwaw4y-plate 6y ago
That is some straight up magical thinking
bdamm 6y ago
I still cling to the belief that there is something we don't understand about biological processes that is allowing our unified sense of self and sense of consciousness that a machine simply cannot ever have. Unless of course we find out what that is and engineer a machine to have it. But it might end up being something deep within us, like particle spin within our DNA, for example.
haecceity 6y ago
It's OK to be open to that idea as long as you are open to various definitions of consciousness.
golergka 6y ago
I'm still not convinced that consciousness is something that actually exists.
- tgv 6y ago
  That path leads to a world of hurt: what does "actually exist" mean? Isn't it enough that we can perceive consciousness or its absence in ourselves and others? Isn't it enough to define it (my words, not very carefully thought out) as something that at least entails the capability to think about a situation, real or hypothetical, including your own state and thoughts and communications, understanding some of the consequences of action in such a state, choosing an action, accepting responsibility, etc., up to philosophy, meta-cognition and beyond? The fact that it's hard to define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
  - mdemare 6y ago
    We can perceive the absence of consciousness in others?
    - tgv 6y ago
      Well, rocks aren't conscious, and I can't see it in a nematode either. But consciousness isn't on or off. If you've met e.g. Alzheimer patients, you can see it fade away. Scans of such patients show lack of activity associated with consciousness, but it's no proof.
IshKebab 6y ago
It sounds like he is a victim of most people's love of labels and inability to deal with continuums. Consciousness is clearly a continuum (think about when you've been really drunk or half awake) and a worm is clearly so barely on the scale it would be silly to say it is conscious.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Chalmers is an important figure in the recent study of consciousness, in particular illuminating the distinction between consciousness and cognition. You should consider familiarising yourself with the ideas before dismissing then as silly.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    As far as I know we still have literally no idea what consciousness is. History has shown that when we have no evidence about something, philosophers like to just make stuff up that they thing sounds compelling and consistent. Nobody can prove them wrong so they can write entire volumes on their idea! Forgive me for not wasting time familiarising myself with his made up distinction between consciousness and cognition.
    - mellosouls 6y ago
      If you have such contempt for philosophers and refuse to open your mind to their ideas (even if just to critique them) - perhaps best not to comment on them at all.
      - IshKebab 6y ago
        I could say the same thing about Flat Earthers, QAnon, and so on. Do you read the blogs? Of course not. Does that mean you can't criticise them?
    - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
      Although your wording is pretty rough, I agree with the idea in general. With no way to really evaluate an idea beyond "it sounds good" or "lots of people agree with it", most philosophers are just very wordy circlejerkers.

Chalmers: "As for consciousness, I am open to the idea that a worm with 302 neurons is conscious, so I am open to the idea that GPT-3 with 175 billion parameters is conscious too."

skissane 6y ago

I think consciousness is something dynamic – constantly learning from and reacting to your environment, constantly changing your environment and being changed by it in turn. And that's what biological neural networks do. By contrast, systems like GPT-3 still have a hard boundary between two different modes of operation – learning and application of that learning – which makes them much more static. And that makes me doubt their consciousness. I think, if some future system could get rid of the boundary between training and runtime, so that training happened continuously – then it would be closer to consciousness in my view. (It would also mean that different instances of the system would begin to diverge and become unique individuals, because even if the initial training was identical, the ongoing operation would be different, and the networks would diverge over time.)

WClayFerguson 6y ago
Your definition of consciousness drags in a lot that is not required. You are conflating it with intelligence too much. Consciousness is what it feels like to have a thought, an emotion, an idea, in that exact moment while you are feeling it. It can happen in a brain at a moment, during a single second of time, and doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with learning, reacting to environments, or any of that other stuff the normally goes along with life. Consciousness itself is the actual experience itself. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is why we think anything with a brain has some kind of consciousness. If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have.
- nickelpro 6y ago
  Your royal "we" is casting a pretty wide net here, Chalmer's openness to animal consciousness is by no means a universal opinion.
- Stupulous 6y ago
  It seems unlikely to me that consciousness wouldn't be tied to intelligence. If consciousness had no direct involvement with intelligence, there would be no reason for pain to hurt or pleasure to feel good. An irrelevant consciousness could present as anything at all, but we have one that presents us with a coherent reality that at least resembles the one our bodies exist in. It must be either a side effect of intelligence or something that human intelligence uses to an end. Either consciousness is something composed of information processing, or it is something inherent to the universe that has some evolutionarily efficient use towards information processing. I favor the former. I believe this very strongly. That said, the subject matter is a personal obsession, and I would love to hear counterpoints.
  - WClayFerguson 6y ago
    I agree intelligence emerges from consciousness, but not the other way around. I define intelligence as the ability to use experiences and memories to construct useful mental models that can be used to predict the future based on the past, solve problems, discover correlations between patterns, and things like that. So intelligence uses memories as it's building blocks for recombining and recognizing patterns, but as you'll see in a nearby reply in this comment thread by me, I have a theory about memory which is that it's not "stored" but your brain accesses essentially the 'actual' event thru spacetime, and that the 'accessing' of these past events and merging those 'wave-forms' and entangling them with the present brain state, is what we call consciousness, regardless of whether any intelligent processing is happening.
  - amarte 6y ago
    I've heard consciousness described as "the felt presence of immediate experience," which I've found to be an excellent description of the experience of being embodied in the world -- of being conscious. If consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, meaning if there are atoms flying around spontaneously assembling into more and more complex forms of order until some critical point of complexity is reached and consciousness appears, what's the point of "being conscious" at all? If the assembling of particles into forms of order is what's fundamental, surely that process could just go on and on without any bit of it feeling embodied. It seems to me like the universe could be exactly the same without "the felt presence of immediate experience"/consciousness. Atoms would be whizzing around, people would be pontificating, GPT-3 would be chugging away. It would all just be kind of "empty" -- all surface no substance. I don't need to feel embodied for the world to be the way it is, yet I do, and I struggle to understand why that is.
- skissane 6y ago
  Is some degree of intelligence necessary for consciousness? We don't know. Some philosophers (of a pan-psychic bent) would say that consciousness doesn't require any intelligence, so even something completely unintelligent (like a pebble, or an individual proton) could be conscious. Others think that consciousness requires some minimal degree of intelligence, a standard which (non-human) animals may or may not meet, but a pebble certainly can't. We don't know who is right here. We don't have any agreed upon objective standards to determine what is conscious and what is not. But, if it were true that some minimal degree of intelligence is required for consciousness, then it may well be that primitive animals have that degree of intelligence yet GPT-3 lacks it. While GPT-3 can perform at seemingly human level on some tasks, there are other tasks on which even quite primitive animal intelligences vastly outperform it. Maybe, if intelligence is necessary for consciousness, the kind of intelligence underlying the later tasks may be more essential to consciousness than the kind underlying the former. > If anything it's likely more related to quantum mechanics and waves than it is to "information processing" which is the common misconception even AI experts have. The idea that consciousness is some kind of special quantum phenomena is highly speculative. Sure, some philosophers and physicists think it may be true, but others think the whole idea is baloney. When you say "likely", that's just your own opinion of what is more likely, there is no hard evidence to support that probability judgement.
  - WClayFerguson 6y ago
    I agree with everything you just said. What I mean about quantum mechanics comes from the fact that neuroscience has never been able to locate "where" in the brain any memory is stored. I think consciousness and memory are interdependent, and that consciousness is essentially memory. You can invent new thoughts and ideas, but they are always built from existing ones, as their building blocks. I think the answer to the question 'where/how' is memory 'stored' in the brain is: "It's not". I believe the brain is quantum mechanically connected to all prior states of itself (like all matter is), and so what we call 'memory' is actually a 'direct connection' thru spacetime to the actual event. Needless to say it would take a book to describe this theory in detail, so maybe I'll write up all my thoughts at some point, but it explains lots of mysteries of intelligences once you accept this interconnection model. Everything from savantism, to instinct behaviors, to fungal intelligences falls into place. Once you accept that all complex patterns in nature that 'evolve' are always still 'connected directly to' all prior copies of themselves, and able to exchange wave potentials, it makes many things that used to seem 'paranormal' or 'magical' suddenly have a more scientific explanation.
roywiggins 6y ago
If you woke up tomorrow as a brain in a vat with no sensory input, you'd expect to be conscious, at least for a while.
- skissane 6y ago
  In your scenario, although I wouldn't at that moment be having the experience of two-way interaction with my environment, I would have had it in the past. And, since I temporarily lack that interaction when I dream, it is clear that one can be conscious without having that interaction right now. But just because I can have consciousness without having that right now, it doesn't necessarily follow that I can have consciousness having never had that. And that's a fundamental difference between conscious biological life and GPT-3. Conscious biological life experiences a two-way interaction with its environment, in which organism and environment act on each other simultaneously. GPT-3's experience of that is very limited. It has experienced the environment act on it (training), and it has experienced itself act on the environment (runtime), but those two experiences are largely siloed off from each other. (It effectively does have some runtime memory, so to a very limited degree it can dynamically react to the environment, but it can't actually learn anything at runtime.) Now is that experience, which humans and animals have, but which GPT-3 lacks, essential to consciousness? Who really knows. The fact is, we don't really know what consciousness is, or what are the conditions for its existence. Maybe at least some history of that kind of two-way interaction is essential for consciousness, in which case GPT-3 can't have it (but some future successor system might). Maybe not. Nobody really knows.
tgv 6y ago
I believe it was Minsky who said, somewhere in the 1970s or 1980s: consciousness is simply a feedback loop. It's of course much too simple, but I too am convinced consciousness can't exist without it.
visarga 6y ago
GPT-3 was dynamic and learning constantly during the training phase. Now it is in its afterlife, speaking with us but not learning anymore.

throwaw4y-plate 6y ago

That is some straight up magical thinking

bdamm 6y ago

I still cling to the belief that there is something we don't understand about biological processes that is allowing our unified sense of self and sense of consciousness that a machine simply cannot ever have. Unless of course we find out what that is and engineer a machine to have it. But it might end up being something deep within us, like particle spin within our DNA, for example.

haecceity 6y ago

It's OK to be open to that idea as long as you are open to various definitions of consciousness.

golergka 6y ago

I'm still not convinced that consciousness is something that actually exists.

tgv 6y ago
That path leads to a world of hurt: what does "actually exist" mean? Isn't it enough that we can perceive consciousness or its absence in ourselves and others? Isn't it enough to define it (my words, not very carefully thought out) as something that at least entails the capability to think about a situation, real or hypothetical, including your own state and thoughts and communications, understanding some of the consequences of action in such a state, choosing an action, accepting responsibility, etc., up to philosophy, meta-cognition and beyond? The fact that it's hard to define, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
- mdemare 6y ago
  We can perceive the absence of consciousness in others?
  - tgv 6y ago
    Well, rocks aren't conscious, and I can't see it in a nematode either. But consciousness isn't on or off. If you've met e.g. Alzheimer patients, you can see it fade away. Scans of such patients show lack of activity associated with consciousness, but it's no proof.

IshKebab 6y ago

It sounds like he is a victim of most people's love of labels and inability to deal with continuums. Consciousness is clearly a continuum (think about when you've been really drunk or half awake) and a worm is clearly so barely on the scale it would be silly to say it is conscious.

mellosouls 6y ago
Chalmers is an important figure in the recent study of consciousness, in particular illuminating the distinction between consciousness and cognition. You should consider familiarising yourself with the ideas before dismissing then as silly.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  As far as I know we still have literally no idea what consciousness is. History has shown that when we have no evidence about something, philosophers like to just make stuff up that they thing sounds compelling and consistent. Nobody can prove them wrong so they can write entire volumes on their idea! Forgive me for not wasting time familiarising myself with his made up distinction between consciousness and cognition.
  - mellosouls 6y ago
    If you have such contempt for philosophers and refuse to open your mind to their ideas (even if just to critique them) - perhaps best not to comment on them at all.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      I could say the same thing about Flat Earthers, QAnon, and so on. Do you read the blogs? Of course not. Does that mean you can't criticise them?
  - dj_mc_merlin 6y ago
    Although your wording is pretty rough, I agree with the idea in general. With no way to really evaluate an idea beyond "it sounds good" or "lots of people agree with it", most philosophers are just very wordy circlejerkers.