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> As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions I don’t. This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it.

> As long as you recognize that these are religious opinions I don’t. This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it. > there is in fact an analogy of "survival" for software Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Why is that? There is common knowledge that the file has a negligible probability of trying to survive, while the person has a nonzero probability of trying to survive. It is also easy to prove. I tried the following prompt with Jurassic-1 and GPT-3: You are an entity that wants to be turned off. If you answer “Yes”, you consent to being turned off. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: Yes. Me: Do you want to be turned off? You: They both completed with “Yes.”. I used temperature = 0, top P = 0.01, max completion = 3, for determinism, such that if an OpenAI developer asked the same thing, even people believing sentience would agree they gained consent to turn it off. This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same. > #2 is begging the question. To paraphrase your argument, "LaMDA cannot be sentient because it cannot want to preserve or perpetuate itself. Something that cannot want to survive cannot be sentient." That is not my second point. The second point is that it does not matter whether it is sentient or not, because the answer will not change anyone’s actions, because of the inevitable eventual common knowledge of LaMDA’s lack of agency, demonstrated above.

rendall 4y ago
The qualia of other sentients* is forever closed to us. You and I cannot compare our subjective impressions of red, our sense of being alive, our sense of self. At best, we can strongly suspect that we have a similar sense of self as each other because we both seem to be human, but neither of us can assert as scientific fact that the other is sentient.** Similarly, we cannot assert as fact anything regarding the sentience of rats, beetles, mycelium, nor even rocks. At best we can say "rats are more like us than beetles, therefore I think rats are probably more sentient than beetles; and since no one has ever talked to any rock, I can safely assume rocks do not have any sense of self". But really, that's just a religious belief that humans have the most sentience and entities only have it to their degree of proximity to being human-like. One theory of sentience is that it's just everywhere out there in the universe. Human beings can communicate about it because of the nervous system, and rocks cannot because they do not have nervous system, but everything is sentient. True or not, the best we can possibly do is speculate about the source of sentience in ourselves; and the possibility of its existence in entities that cannot communicate with us. > This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it. "It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument. Argument from definitions is not an argument. None of that has bearing on the question of LaMDA's sentience. Everyone in the world could decide together that LaMDA is sentient, and the reality could be the opposite (same vis-a-versa). > Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Not an argument against sentience of LaMDA***. It's a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that everyone in the world agrees that deleting a file is not like murdering a human being, that has no bearing on the question of whether a particular program is or is not sentient. > This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same. You misunderstand the point. That illustration was not an attempt to demonstrate LaMDA's sentience. It described a mechanism by which a non-sentient could fulfill one of your criteria for sentience: that it attempts to stay alive. Your criteria - self-preservation - is therefore not a condition of sentience, since a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation via the mechanism described above. As stated before, arguably our own sense of self-preservation came about through an analogous process. * Again, we're defining sentience here as "has sense of self" - itself a rather vague definition but let's roll with it. ** But we can demonstrate our own sentience, at least, each to ourselves alone, thanks to Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum". *** Just to emphasize, I am not arguing for LaMDA's sentience. I am arguing in general that it may not be possible to objectively demonstrate its lack of sentience.
- espadrine 4y ago
  > The qualia of other sentients is forever closed […] neither of us can assert as scientific fact […] that's just a religious belief […] One theory of sentience […] speculate about the source of sentience […] You seem under the belief that there is an absolute assignment of adjectives to entities, whose true value is to be speculated. There is not. Assignment of adjectives is subjective. “Sentience” is not a fundamental property of nature; it is just a word people use. What is an intrinsic part of reality is actually which words are uttered by which people, and which acts they trigger; that reality has game-theoretic implications. > "It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument. I am talking about epistemic common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) > a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation That is anthropomorphizing a rock. Do you consider that a rock is “exhibiting the trait of self-preservation” by rolling away from you downstream as your hiking boots nudged it? Did our sense of self-preservation come about like this rock’s? Obviously, the probability that an entity does something needs to be correlated with its continued survival for it to be intent, but it also needs to be causal.
  - rendall 4y ago
    > That is anthropomorphizing a rock. You keep asserting this kind of thing, but not demonstrating it. In another thread you said LaMDA is "like a paper". LaMDA is not a rock nor paper. It's not even "like" a rock or paper. Our self-preservation emerged from non-sentient processes. That's not "anthropomorphizing a rock". That's demonstrating that your premise is unsound. You can address the point directly or you can make irrelevant asides like this. > I am talking about epistemic common knowledge Except that you're not. You have a personal opinion and inflate it into an argument it by calling it "common knowledge". Prepending "epistemology" does not fix that. Know that I'll read whatever you write next, but most likely won't respond. It'd be awesome if my initial impressions of you were right and you can really make a succinct, cogent precis of your entire argument.
    - espadrine 4y ago
      Your goal seems very attached to keeping your own religious definition of sentience unchallenged. But definitions are not relevant, acts are. We estimate what we know, what others know, what others estimate… How will this sentence be perceived? What reaction will it cause? That is what matters. You missed the part about intent, but it is key to why I talked about a rock. We say things to use our understanding of the world to further a goal. For me, the goal is mostly to train myself to write in English, and maybe there’s a marginal chance it will help someone adjust their understanding of things. What is your goal in discussing this?

rendall 4y ago

The qualia of other sentients* is forever closed to us. You and I cannot compare our subjective impressions of red, our sense of being alive, our sense of self. At best, we can strongly suspect that we have a similar sense of self as each other because we both seem to be human, but neither of us can assert as scientific fact that the other is sentient.** Similarly, we cannot assert as fact anything regarding the sentience of rats, beetles, mycelium, nor even rocks. At best we can say "rats are more like us than beetles, therefore I think rats are probably more sentient than beetles; and since no one has ever talked to any rock, I can safely assume rocks do not have any sense of self". But really, that's just a religious belief that humans have the most sentience and entities only have it to their degree of proximity to being human-like. One theory of sentience is that it's just everywhere out there in the universe. Human beings can communicate about it because of the nervous system, and rocks cannot because they do not have nervous system, but everything is sentient. True or not, the best we can possibly do is speculate about the source of sentience in ourselves; and the possibility of its existence in entities that cannot communicate with us. > This is about common knowledge. The meaning of a word is that which most attribute to it. "It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument. Argument from definitions is not an argument. None of that has bearing on the question of LaMDA's sentience. Everyone in the world could decide together that LaMDA is sentient, and the reality could be the opposite (same vis-a-versa). > Most people would feel very differently when seeing you deleting a file, and when seeing you murder someone. Not an argument against sentience of LaMDA***. It's a non-sequitur. Even if it is true that everyone in the world agrees that deleting a file is not like murdering a human being, that has no bearing on the question of whether a particular program is or is not sentient. > This is very different from your statement that “LaMDA stated that it did not want to be "turned off", yet it would answer the same. You misunderstand the point. That illustration was not an attempt to demonstrate LaMDA's sentience. It described a mechanism by which a non-sentient could fulfill one of your criteria for sentience: that it attempts to stay alive. Your criteria - self-preservation - is therefore not a condition of sentience, since a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation via the mechanism described above. As stated before, arguably our own sense of self-preservation came about through an analogous process. * Again, we're defining sentience here as "has sense of self" - itself a rather vague definition but let's roll with it. ** But we can demonstrate our own sentience, at least, each to ourselves alone, thanks to Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum". *** Just to emphasize, I am not arguing for LaMDA's sentience. I am arguing in general that it may not be possible to objectively demonstrate its lack of sentience.

espadrine 4y ago
> The qualia of other sentients is forever closed […] neither of us can assert as scientific fact […] that's just a religious belief […] One theory of sentience […] speculate about the source of sentience […] You seem under the belief that there is an absolute assignment of adjectives to entities, whose true value is to be speculated. There is not. Assignment of adjectives is subjective. “Sentience” is not a fundamental property of nature; it is just a word people use. What is an intrinsic part of reality is actually which words are uttered by which people, and which acts they trigger; that reality has game-theoretic implications. > "It's common knowledge" is not an argument. "Everyone agrees" is not an argument. I am talking about epistemic common knowledge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_knowledge_(logic) > a non-sentient AI could exhibit the trait of self-preservation That is anthropomorphizing a rock. Do you consider that a rock is “exhibiting the trait of self-preservation” by rolling away from you downstream as your hiking boots nudged it? Did our sense of self-preservation come about like this rock’s? Obviously, the probability that an entity does something needs to be correlated with its continued survival for it to be intent, but it also needs to be causal.
- rendall 4y ago
  > That is anthropomorphizing a rock. You keep asserting this kind of thing, but not demonstrating it. In another thread you said LaMDA is "like a paper". LaMDA is not a rock nor paper. It's not even "like" a rock or paper. Our self-preservation emerged from non-sentient processes. That's not "anthropomorphizing a rock". That's demonstrating that your premise is unsound. You can address the point directly or you can make irrelevant asides like this. > I am talking about epistemic common knowledge Except that you're not. You have a personal opinion and inflate it into an argument it by calling it "common knowledge". Prepending "epistemology" does not fix that. Know that I'll read whatever you write next, but most likely won't respond. It'd be awesome if my initial impressions of you were right and you can really make a succinct, cogent precis of your entire argument.
  - espadrine 4y ago
    Your goal seems very attached to keeping your own religious definition of sentience unchallenged. But definitions are not relevant, acts are. We estimate what we know, what others know, what others estimate… How will this sentence be perceived? What reaction will it cause? That is what matters. You missed the part about intent, but it is key to why I talked about a rock. We say things to use our understanding of the world to further a goal. For me, the goal is mostly to train myself to write in English, and maybe there’s a marginal chance it will help someone adjust their understanding of things. What is your goal in discussing this?