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If OpenAI's code is conscious then it's definitely insane which should make people wonder about what exactly they're saying when they say things like "Neural ne

If OpenAI's code is conscious then it's definitely insane which should make people wonder about what exactly they're saying when they say things like "Neural networks are conscious". AI researchers constantly use words without defining them and then wonder why they're confused about what counts as intelligence and, more generally, consciousness. In fields like AI there really is no room for confused language like that, it's a mathematical field so no one should be confused about function approximators being conscious or not.

sdgsdfgs3 5y ago
"If OpenAI's code is conscious then it's definitely insane.." As a kid, I spend some time in my aunt's house, close to psychiatric clinic. They have there a lot of "insane" people, most of them not dangerous at all, so, many could walk out, most ended talking with neighbors around the clinic. This experience opened my mind about that what humans say aloud could be a thousand years aways from rational thinking, if self-consciusness could be scientifically defined I think you could diagnose many people as not self-conscious. That said, what we currently can read written by NLP models looks for me a lot like the "psychiatric talking" I listened a lot time ago. I always wondered if that people from the psychiatric clinic was really self-conscious, maybe they were "part-time self-conscious", and sometimes they just did "crazy talk", because they were not in "self-conscious mode". Now I wonder if the advanced NLP models could have some conscious thing just popping up there in the words they push out of their internal stuff, in the flow of the equations running the calculations. Somewhere, currently out of reach of the state of the art science.
- cosheaf 5y ago
  Consciousness is not reducible to symbol shuffling is my point. Computers at the moment can only perform mathematical operations, i.e. they can only shuffle abstract symbols. Neither intelligence nor consciousness can be defined purely in terms of symbol shuffling unless we vacuously define intelligence and consciousness to be abstract symbol shuffling.

sdgsdfgs3 5y ago

"If OpenAI's code is conscious then it's definitely insane.." As a kid, I spend some time in my aunt's house, close to psychiatric clinic. They have there a lot of "insane" people, most of them not dangerous at all, so, many could walk out, most ended talking with neighbors around the clinic. This experience opened my mind about that what humans say aloud could be a thousand years aways from rational thinking, if self-consciusness could be scientifically defined I think you could diagnose many people as not self-conscious. That said, what we currently can read written by NLP models looks for me a lot like the "psychiatric talking" I listened a lot time ago. I always wondered if that people from the psychiatric clinic was really self-conscious, maybe they were "part-time self-conscious", and sometimes they just did "crazy talk", because they were not in "self-conscious mode". Now I wonder if the advanced NLP models could have some conscious thing just popping up there in the words they push out of their internal stuff, in the flow of the equations running the calculations. Somewhere, currently out of reach of the state of the art science.

cosheaf 5y ago
Consciousness is not reducible to symbol shuffling is my point. Computers at the moment can only perform mathematical operations, i.e. they can only shuffle abstract symbols. Neither intelligence nor consciousness can be defined purely in terms of symbol shuffling unless we vacuously define intelligence and consciousness to be abstract symbol shuffling.