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"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 o

by 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 As if that stuff was some secret knowledge, that's unpublished or too arcane for anybody but them to understand.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.

by j-pb 4y ago

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.