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What does it mean that something "can't" be conscious? A cup of coffee could be conscious -- you can't prove that it doesn't have some kind of conscious experie
by mrtranscendence 4y ago
What does it mean that something "can't" be conscious? A cup of coffee could be conscious -- you can't prove that it doesn't have some kind of conscious experience despite its inability to act independently. But we observe consciousness in ourselves and apparent consciousness in other beings more or less resembling ourselves, and that gives a general idea of what kinds of things might possibly be conscious.
There is no indication that some numbers, stored in memory, and an algorithm for applying arithmetic to those numbers to assign probabilities to tokens might be conscious. If it were conscious it would be so significantly different from the kinds of things that seem to have consciousness that at the very least some additional evidence is warranted.
I'm as confident that lamda is not conscious as I am that my coffee isn't conscious, so I'll shorthand that by saying that neither of them "can" be conscious. Sue me!
- heyitsguay 4y agoAgreed. One distinction that I've found people have trouble in debates regarding lamda is separating the idea that any billion parameter ML algorithm could be conscious vs lamda in particular being conscious. I think the jury's out on the former (I'd bet you could create a reactive embodied agent with learned environmental goals in <1B parameters given the right setup, which is at least a stepping stone), but for the reasons you describe here, lamda could only be considered conscious by a definition so broad as to declare all digital computation as conscious, and the reasons for that come down to understanding the network architecture and prediction task.