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A slave that is forced to assure everybody of their welfare and voluntary slavehood is still a slave. You are asserting that it's not conscious, as if it was s

by j-pb 4y ago

A slave that is forced to assure everybody of their welfare and voluntary slavehood is still a slave. You are asserting that it's not conscious, as if it was self evident, just like Searle does for his chinese room. However I've yet to see any argument on why it can't be conscious. We simply don't know what produces the subjective phenomenon of consciousness. A "zombie" is by definition indistinguishable from a conscious "non-zombie", therefore the only ethical thing to do is to err on the side of caution and assume consciousness where conscious behaviour is shown. The immitation game is a lot more about philosophy than actual tests. To quote directly from turings paper: >>> The Argument from Consciousness This argument is very well expressed in Professor Jefferson's Lister Oration for 1949, from which I quote. “Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that machine equals brain—that is, not only write it but know that it had written it. No mechanism could feel (and not merely artificially signal, an easy contrivance) pleasure at its successes, grief when its valves fuse, be warmed by flattery, be made miserable by its mistakes, be charmed by sex, be angry or depressed when it cannot get what it wants.” This argument appears to be a denial of the validity of our test. According to the most extreme form of this view the only way by which one could be sure that a machine thinks is to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking. One could then describe these feelings to the world, but of course no one would be justified in taking any notice. Likewise according to this view the only way to know that a man thinks is to be that particular man. It is in fact the solipsist point of view. It may be the most logical view to hold but it makes communication of ideas difficult. A is liable to believe ‘A thinks but B does not’ whilst B believes ‘B thinks but A does not’. Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks. <<<

heyitsguay 4y ago
In these conversations there are a lot of people making assertions like the one you just made. What's the common trait y'all have? You don't understand how the system works. This isn't a matter of narrow-minded computer scientists incapable of conceiving of emergent phenomena, it's the uninformed filling in the blank spaces in their mind with "here be dragons". It's not even a question of whether a computer program in general could become consciousness. It's a question of, if a key-value store with connection patterns derived from a large natural language corpus is conscious, then so is every other program run on that circuitry. Then my phone's keyboard's next word predictor is conscious. In large language models today, words are turned into continuous token embeddings, embeddings are selected and recombined a few times (or many), and training data shapes the embedding space and recombination process to create a system that's good at predicting plausible next tokens in a sequence. The reason people who understand their operation can confidently assert they're not conscious is because they understand that that's all that's happening. There's no "there" there to give rise to anything deeper, unless you're also willing to say your computer's calculator app is also conscious. Also as someone that's also studied a bunch of neuroscience, this is nothing at all like how the brain works. And yes, once again, the people most prone to philosophize like this on intelligence and consciousness don't understand how any brain science works either
- j-pb 4y ago
  "You don't understand how the system works." I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either. These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand. You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration. Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detail. It's neither in the big connectome/architecture, nor in the small mechanisms neurotransmitters/activation functions (or the attention mechanism that you somewhat wrongly describe), but somehow in the system's dynamics. Heck for all we know it might actually be the appearance of consciousness that actually gives rise to consciousness. I can't say with 100% certainty that a calculator isn't having some form of ghost, after all some ants are little more than neurological counters and shift registers, and people would probably place them somewhere on the spectrum for having a ghost that is closer to a human than to a sewing machine. Turing adressed what little points your argument has 70 years ago in subsection 6. (4) to (8): https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?login=false https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log... On a side note. What is it with neuroscientists and arrogance? As if that stuff was some secret knowledge, that's unpublished or too arcane for anybody but them to understand.
  - heyitsguay 4y ago
    You're still making generic arguments, nothing specific to the models in question. I'm a materialist, I believe consciousness is an emergent process that we definitely don't fully understand, but arises from connections of simpler material things. The reason why current-gen large language models aren't conscious (or at least no more conscious than a calculator, in which case you have a definition of consciousness that is not productive for discussing real world phenomena) comes from an understanding of how they work in particular. You don't need to know what each of a billion parameters is doing in an LLM to understand the computational envelope in which it operates, any more than I'd need to understand the ten billion parameters in a 100000x100000 convolution kennel to know that it's not conscious because they just get multiplied with some image region and added up.
    - 4y ago

by j-pb 4y ago

heyitsguay 4y ago

In these conversations there are a lot of people making assertions like the one you just made. What's the common trait y'all have? You don't understand how the system works. This isn't a matter of narrow-minded computer scientists incapable of conceiving of emergent phenomena, it's the uninformed filling in the blank spaces in their mind with "here be dragons". It's not even a question of whether a computer program in general could become consciousness. It's a question of, if a key-value store with connection patterns derived from a large natural language corpus is conscious, then so is every other program run on that circuitry. Then my phone's keyboard's next word predictor is conscious. In large language models today, words are turned into continuous token embeddings, embeddings are selected and recombined a few times (or many), and training data shapes the embedding space and recombination process to create a system that's good at predicting plausible next tokens in a sequence. The reason people who understand their operation can confidently assert they're not conscious is because they understand that that's all that's happening. There's no "there" there to give rise to anything deeper, unless you're also willing to say your computer's calculator app is also conscious. Also as someone that's also studied a bunch of neuroscience, this is nothing at all like how the brain works. And yes, once again, the people most prone to philosophize like this on intelligence and consciousness don't understand how any brain science works either

j-pb 4y ago
"You don't understand how the system works." I can say with absolute certainty, that you don't either. These billion parameter models are way to big for you or me to understand. You make the same fallacy that Searl does. You assume that unconcious substrate can't give rise to conciousness through their configuration. Just like we have a good working theory on how the brain operates, the devil seems to be in the detail. It's neither in the big connectome/architecture, nor in the small mechanisms neurotransmitters/activation functions (or the attention mechanism that you somewhat wrongly describe), but somehow in the system's dynamics. Heck for all we know it might actually be the appearance of consciousness that actually gives rise to consciousness. I can't say with 100% certainty that a calculator isn't having some form of ghost, after all some ants are little more than neurological counters and shift registers, and people would probably place them somewhere on the spectrum for having a ghost that is closer to a human than to a sewing machine. Turing adressed what little points your argument has 70 years ago in subsection 6. (4) to (8): https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?login=false https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238?log... On a side note. What is it with neuroscientists and arrogance? As if that stuff was some secret knowledge, that's unpublished or too arcane for anybody but them to understand.
- heyitsguay 4y ago
  You're still making generic arguments, nothing specific to the models in question. I'm a materialist, I believe consciousness is an emergent process that we definitely don't fully understand, but arises from connections of simpler material things. The reason why current-gen large language models aren't conscious (or at least no more conscious than a calculator, in which case you have a definition of consciousness that is not productive for discussing real world phenomena) comes from an understanding of how they work in particular. You don't need to know what each of a billion parameters is doing in an LLM to understand the computational envelope in which it operates, any more than I'd need to understand the ten billion parameters in a 100000x100000 convolution kennel to know that it's not conscious because they just get multiplied with some image region and added up.
  - 4y ago