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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

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.
  - vaidhy 4y ago
    What is material here and how far down do you go? By your admission, do you believe in electric and magnetic fields creating emergent behavior - they do not exhibit the same phenomena as something physically perceivable to humans. On the other hand, computer is made up of atoms and molecules and their emergent behavior could give rise to consciousness. End of the day, you are arguing that since you could explain away the process, it is not conscious.. but you could explain away anything. How is human brain conscious? It is just activation of neurons across a large network. We can even poke electrodes and simulate various feelings. It would be helpful if you can explain why you believe this to be true rather than what you believe to be true.
  - j-pb 4y ago
    Because there is no specific argument to be made. That's the entire point of turings immitation game paper. It does not matter if your conversation partner is made up of a giant turing machine, a huge set of prolog rules, a giant neural network with a single hidden layer, a really deep transformer, a convolutional kernel, or a bustling pile of ants drawing words into the sand. When conversing with one another we have the implicit assumption that we are not the only conscious being in existence despite it being a completely subjective phenomena. Everything else would be quite impolite. Turing extends that (im)politeness to non-human phenomena. So long as there is the appearance of intelligence and consciousness it is the polite thing to assume that there is actually consciousness.
sweetbitter 4y ago
> 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". Well first of all, an important thing to understand is that there BE dragons. The fact that anything exists at all means there be dragons, both literally and figuratively. Let me explain: In the world we have various 'symbols', whose main characteristic is that they can be told apart from one another, like the color yellow and the pitch of your voice. Now look to the very edge of existence, at no symbols- it is clearly impossible for there to be nothing, because there are obviously at least one symbol, even more than that in fact. However there is something key we can derive from this, and for an analogy look back to the laws of physics. In our universe, there is some configuration of symbols that somehow constrains the logic of configurations/interactions of symbols within this place. Without some symbols to do some local constraining of other symbols, nothing is constrained. So look to the edge of existence- at 1 symbol, what constrains its nature, what constrains the quantity of symbols, or even the arbitrary configurations of those symbols? Absolutely nothing constrains them, so it is only logical to assume that every arbitrary configuration of symbols exists right 'now', always 'has', and always will (quote marks because time only exists in our local configuration). So if(*) there is some fundamental aspect of reality, some force that performs the experiencing of these infinite phenomena, perhaps it experiences infinite, arbitrary configurations of everything- anything from receiving sensory data equivalent to the smell of a strawberry whenever the bottom 1/3rd of your toaster touches a carbon atom between 16:13 and 16:14 on a Monday, to an arbitrary I/O mapping to the configuration which we call the human brain in a totally arbitrary 'universe'. Effectively, what I am arguing is that it may not be off-base to argue that machines can be conscious. The truth may very well be the opposite, that absolutely everything to ever exist is conscious in every way that can be conceived! That is, if there is no fundamental rule that makes my configuration the only possible conscious one, but I doubt that.

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.
- vaidhy 4y ago
  What is material here and how far down do you go? By your admission, do you believe in electric and magnetic fields creating emergent behavior - they do not exhibit the same phenomena as something physically perceivable to humans. On the other hand, computer is made up of atoms and molecules and their emergent behavior could give rise to consciousness. End of the day, you are arguing that since you could explain away the process, it is not conscious.. but you could explain away anything. How is human brain conscious? It is just activation of neurons across a large network. We can even poke electrodes and simulate various feelings. It would be helpful if you can explain why you believe this to be true rather than what you believe to be true.
- j-pb 4y ago
  Because there is no specific argument to be made. That's the entire point of turings immitation game paper. It does not matter if your conversation partner is made up of a giant turing machine, a huge set of prolog rules, a giant neural network with a single hidden layer, a really deep transformer, a convolutional kernel, or a bustling pile of ants drawing words into the sand. When conversing with one another we have the implicit assumption that we are not the only conscious being in existence despite it being a completely subjective phenomena. Everything else would be quite impolite. Turing extends that (im)politeness to non-human phenomena. So long as there is the appearance of intelligence and consciousness it is the polite thing to assume that there is actually consciousness.

sweetbitter 4y ago

> 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". Well first of all, an important thing to understand is that there BE dragons. The fact that anything exists at all means there be dragons, both literally and figuratively. Let me explain: In the world we have various 'symbols', whose main characteristic is that they can be told apart from one another, like the color yellow and the pitch of your voice. Now look to the very edge of existence, at no symbols- it is clearly impossible for there to be nothing, because there are obviously at least one symbol, even more than that in fact. However there is something key we can derive from this, and for an analogy look back to the laws of physics. In our universe, there is some configuration of symbols that somehow constrains the logic of configurations/interactions of symbols within this place. Without some symbols to do some local constraining of other symbols, nothing is constrained. So look to the edge of existence- at 1 symbol, what constrains its nature, what constrains the quantity of symbols, or even the arbitrary configurations of those symbols? Absolutely nothing constrains them, so it is only logical to assume that every arbitrary configuration of symbols exists right 'now', always 'has', and always will (quote marks because time only exists in our local configuration). So if(*) there is some fundamental aspect of reality, some force that performs the experiencing of these infinite phenomena, perhaps it experiences infinite, arbitrary configurations of everything- anything from receiving sensory data equivalent to the smell of a strawberry whenever the bottom 1/3rd of your toaster touches a carbon atom between 16:13 and 16:14 on a Monday, to an arbitrary I/O mapping to the configuration which we call the human brain in a totally arbitrary 'universe'. Effectively, what I am arguing is that it may not be off-base to argue that machines can be conscious. The truth may very well be the opposite, that absolutely everything to ever exist is conscious in every way that can be conceived! That is, if there is no fundamental rule that makes my configuration the only possible conscious one, but I doubt that.