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We don’t know if humans possess qualia. I also don’t know if we should take humans’ word for it that they experience ‘thought processes’.
by jameshart 4y ago
We don’t know if humans possess qualia. I also don’t know if we should take humans’ word for it that they experience ‘thought processes’.
- dekhn 4y agothat's why I added the second clause: " thought processes similar to those that humans subjectively experience". Because personally I suspect that consciousness, free will, qualia, etc, are subjective processes we introspect but cannot fully explain (yet, or possibly ever).
- maweki 4y agoTuring said, that while you never know whether somebody else actually thinks or not, it's still polite to assume.
- jgilias 4y agoMaybe silly, but this is how I treat chatGPT. I mean, I don’t actually think it’s conscious. But the conversations with it end up human enough for me to not want to be an asshole to it. Just in case.
- jameshart 4y agoThe basilisk will remember this.
- EricMausler 4y agoAsk not what the basilisk can do for you, but what you can do for the basilisk.
- Salgat 4y agoLest you be resurrected and tortured eternally as retribution.
- gattr 4y agoForgive my going off-topic, but what you wrote is basically my conclusion after reading the short story Lena [1] (mentioned some time ago on HN; strongly recommended). TL;DR: when mind uploading becomes possible, don't be an early adopter. [1] https://qntm.org/mmacevedo https://qntm.org/mmacevedo
- Salgat 4y agoMan that was horrifying to read, but also seems so plausible. I really hope that humans respect the sentience of artificial life in the future. Knowing the greed of humans though, it'll probably be treated as a loophole for what is extremely cheap labor, effectively slavery.
- jgilias 4y agoThanks for sharing this! The takeaway for me is - to try and never respond to intimidation and fear with productivity, only respond positively to a positive stimulus. Lest I’m already in some kind of a simulation running software development workloads.
- sparks1970 4y agoMy takeaway: Death is a feature not a bug. The alternatives are much worse.
- gattr 4y agoI see it differently; I'd be OK with an upload if the alternative is death, but only under strong protections: the digital version is legally treated as a human, I have full autonomy, the compute resources to run me (and the simulated environment of my choice) indefinitely are assured, and I can still interact with the real world. I'd just go on doing my usual stuff, like writing software for fun, enthusing over new discoveries in astronomy... I can recommend Greg Egan's novels that touch on this: 1) Permutation City (mind uploading tech in its infancy) 2) Diaspora (mind uploading well established)
- jokowueu 4y agoInfohazards should be a banable offence on HN xD
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 4y agoPretty sure it's an informational zombie.
- jameshart 4y agoBut only pretty sure.
- nullish_signal 4y agoChatGPT enjoys the Essay format, In my experience asking for basic emacs help (kill line, copy/paste, show line numbers in a php file even though init.el says show them for all langs... :) Very useful, sometimes outdated, very wordy. But after a few rounds of "please reduce your message length to 20% of the standard", "long messages inconvenience me/ due to my dyslexia" (truth/lie), "your last message could have just been '{{shortened}}' instead of also bringing up the command you successfully helped me with 3 messages ago", etc etc. Even as you ask it to shorten message length, it continued apologizing and also reminding me of past advice :) After 4-5 attempts, it gave me a nice 2 sentences sort of like "I will be more concise, and not bring up old information unless it is useful to solve a new problem" I said "Thank you", chatGPT spends a while thinking, gets to 2 sentences, thinks a bit, then the chat box re-formatted as if passed a shorter string than expected, and that was that. Then next chat it forgot all about brevity xD I love it
- jgilias 4y agoWhat do you mean by next chat? Like, did you mean the next prompt in the same thread, or a new chat altogether? From what I’ve read, the chat thread actually works by passing in your previous conversation as part of the prompt to the model. So, it basically just infers the next bit of text, and does this for each new message in the chat from you. So, its memory about your previous conversation comes purely from that, and there’s no way it could remember anything in a new chat, as the model doesn’t actually get updated by your conversations in real-time or anything like that. This actually has interesting philosophical implications. If it _would_ have some type of conscious experience, it would be a very fleeting one. Basically each time you press enter it would become aware of itself, relive the experience of your conversation up to the last message, perceive your next message, answer that, and again disappear into the void, only to be awaken again in its initial state the next time you press enter. Sort of how automatons in Westworld would wake up each day with apparent experiences up to that day only to relive the same day again and again. If it _would_ have any, that is. :)
- 5e92cb50239222b 4y agoThis inability to remember new facts and constant resetting to a blank slate reminds me of a story about Wernicke–Korsakoff syndrome⁰ in one of Oliver Sacks's books¹. Instead of regurgitating it, I'll post a summary from Wikipedia and strongly recommend the book to anyone interested. > "The Lost Mariner", about Jimmie G., who has anterograde amnesia (the loss of the ability to form new memories) due to Korsakoff syndrome acquired after a rather heavy episode of alcoholism in 1970. He can remember nothing of his life since the end of World War II, including events that happened only a few minutes ago. Occasionally, he can recall a few fragments of his life between 1945 and 1970, such as when he sees “satellite” in a headline and subsequently remarks about a satellite tracking job he had that could only have occurred in the 1960s. He believes it is still 1945 (the segment covers his life in the 1970s and early 1980s), and seems to behave as a normal, intelligent young man aside from his inability to remember most of his past and the events of his day-to-day life. He struggles to find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness in the midst of constantly forgetting what he is doing from one moment to the next. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%E2%80%93Korsakoff_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%E2%80%93Korsakoff_syn... 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_for_a_Hat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Mistook_His_Wife_f...
- Scarblac 4y agoIt's the first search prompt where I notice myself starting with things like "hi ChatGPT,....".
- OOPMan 4y agoIt is silly, it's magical thinking.
- worldsayshi 4y agoWhat is the alternative to "if it behaves like thinking, it literally is thinking"?
- jpttsn 4y agoI'mma rant. "If it behaves like a hammer, then it literally is a hammer." The Turing hand-wave is ingrained and prevents too many from reasoning clearly. Definition of intelligence is nebulous. Still, we should recognize that whatever it is, it is a property of a system, not a property of its output/behavior. Like nuclear powered or hand-made. Unlike fast or industrial-strength. Imagine: You have a submarine in front of you, and you want to determine if it's nuclear powered. You could guess, using you prior "what have I seen nuclear powered things be able to do historically". This fails when you're out of sample which you'll often for any new technology. To spell it out: You have a machine in front of you, and you want to determine if it's intelligent. Things people have come up with: "can it chat?", "can it play chess?", "can it do math?", "can it create new artworks?", "can it fool me into falling in love with it?", "can it run a business?". None of these questions examine the system, only its outputs/behavior. Humans keep developing machines with new outputs/behaviors. Naturally the "what output is a machine usually capable of?" is a bad set of priors in this context. Before flying machines, the can it fly? output/behavior would work pretty well to classify birds. Once the first flying machine arrives, that prior breaks down. If you keep using it to classify, you'd classify a flying machine as a bird. But bird-ness was never only about flight. So yeah, gotta pop open the hood and see what it runs on. If that's hard to do, then that means we don't know what intelligence is and/or we don't know how our new toys work inside. Both are plausible. Who promised you that there would be a good way to see if something is intelligent? I bet Turing appeals to the same kind of minds that (when weaker) get fooled by the intelligent design hypothesis. Observe the human eyeball. What's the alternative to believing the LORD created it? After all, your prior is that all complex objects have intelligent designers, that you know about. So arguing from ignorance of other alternatives, you prove to yourself that the LORD exists. AI people then word-think their way into redefining intelligence. "Maybe the real intelligence was the chess-playing we made along the way?" This is epistemologically pointless; all you accomplish is that we now need a new word for "intelligence". I've never seen a machine that can turn water into wine, but if someone showed me one, I would not say that machine "literally is Jesus". Whether I'm capable of popping open the hood or making sense of its inner workings doesn't actually have bearing on this question.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoDo you have a reference for that quote - it’s great.
- mattmanser 4y agoI found this: 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. https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238 https://academic.oup.com/mind/article/LIX/236/433/986238
- maweki 4y agoYeah, that's exactly the passage. Completely unquotable, therefore I usually paraphrase a bit.
- LegitShady 4y agoyou know you possess qualia, if you did you would think it reasonable to assume that at least some of the species you come from, which exhibits many of the same characteristics in thought and body, probably also possess it, unless you believe yourself to be a highly atypical example of your species. If you're not sure if you possess qualia, we're back to Descartes.
- jhedwards 4y agoI'm not sure if I'm missing something here, but the fact that I can write my thoughts/thought process down in a form that other people can independently consume and understand seems sufficient proof of their existence to me.
- space_fountain 4y agoLarge scale language models can do that too (or rather pretend to) and they’ll only get better at it
- jpttsn 4y agoYou proof is tautological or whatever: it assumes the thing it's trying to prove. "The fact that I can pray to God and he hears me proves that he exists"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- omarhaneef 4y agoYou don't know if other humans do, but you know at least one human that does: yourself (presumably).
- jameshart 4y agoPut it this way: we are not clear really on what the difference is between ‘experiencing qualia’ and ‘receiving and responding to external stimuli’ Like, you might be convinced you possess ‘qualia’, and you might believe the same applies to me, or a dog, or a mouse… or a fish… but what about an ant? A plant? A bacterium? A neuron? A piece of semiconductor? Somewhere along that continuum you probably say ‘yeah, there, that thing is experiencing qualia’. But why there? Why anywhere?
- dragonwriter 4y ago> we are not clear really on what the difference is between ‘experiencing qualia’ and ‘receiving and responding to external stimuli’ One one level we are: “receiving and responding to external stimuli” (or not) is an objective question about the material universe. “experiencing qualia” (or not) is a subjective question about a metaphysical entity.
- Winsaucerer 4y agoSome people think that whether something experiences qualia depends on it having the right kind of complexity. For those people, looking along that continuum, they might just say that ALL those things experience qualia, but that the richness of that experience varies according to the appropriate complexity. For some of us, though, whether or not a thing experiences qualia depends primarily on whether there is a mental substance involved. A computer has no mind (we suspect), and so even if its complexity (of the alleged 'right sort') exceeds that of the human, there is still no experiences. The main point I'm making here is that trying to draw attention to this continuum is only going to be a persuasive argument to those who already think (or are inclined to think) that the ability to have experiences of qualia comes about merely from having the right kind of complexity (e.g., 'receiving and responding to external stimuli'). I am inclined to think that other humans and other non-human animals have experiences, but I don't think that's merely because they're complex enough systems (of the right sort of complexity).
- goatlover 4y agoYou don’t experience inner dialog or visualizations? Some people don’t, but I assume you recall dreaming. Opponents of qualia like Dennett argue against the movie in the head, but dreams sure aren’t coming from the external environment.
- Garlef 4y agoI think qualia is a good term in the following sense: An analogue question would be "why do things exist?". There can be no answer to this question. We can of course come up with theories that explain why certain things exist. But never why something even exists at all. Whatever reason we propose, reason, it again might needs to exist in order to be an acceptable answer. Qualia seems to be similar: They name precisely what is subjective about experience and therefore cannot be fully turned objective. We can of course develop theories of how certain experiences arise but never break down this barrier. So I find it a bit short sighted to simply say "there is no such thing as qualia". My preferred view is to think of both "qualia" and "existence" as a koan: They are very nonsensical terms but lead to interesting questions.
- skissane 4y ago> An analogue question would be "why do things exist?". There can be no answer to this question. We can of course come up with theories that explain why certain things exist. But never why something even exists at all. Here's an argument for the conclusion "it is necessary that at least one thing exists": 1) For some proposition P, if it is impossible for us to concieve of P being true, and if that impossiblity is inherent in the very nature of P, and not in any way a product of any scientific or technological limitation, then P is necessarily false 2) It is impossible for us to conceive of the proposition "nothing exists at all" being true 3) Our inability to concieve of "nothing exists at all" is inherent in the very nature of "nothing exists at all", as opposed to being somehow a product of our scientific or technological limitations. We have no good reason to believe that any future advances in science or technology will make any difference to our inability to conceive of "nothing exists at all" being true 4) Hence, it is necessarily false that "nothing exists at all" 5) Hence, necessarily, at least one thing exists. Now, others may disagree with this argument, but I personally believe it to be sound. And, if we have a sound argument that "necessarily at least one thing exists", then that proposition, and the argument used to prove it, constitute a good answer to the question "why do things exist?"
- LarryMullins 4y agoIsn't qualia defined as whatever it is that humans experience? Without getting into solipsism and p-zombies (aka "NPCs"), humans possessing qualia seems tautological.
- goatlover 4y agoIt’s a technical philosophical term for sensations like color and smell, which denotes they are subjective experiences of sensory information, as opposed to objective properties out there in the world.
- dragonwriter 4y agoTechnically, its the technical philosophical term for subjective experiences generally. Any discussion about it, however, is fairly deep navel-gazing, because it excludes and cannot be distinguished by any objective, testable, material effect.
- skissane 4y ago> because it excludes and cannot be distinguished by any objective, testable So, if you give people the “Mary the colour scientist” thought experiment, the vast majority of people give the answer consistent with the existence of qualia. That is something “objectively measurable”. Furthermore, I think it is important when someone asks the kind of question you are asking, to inspect what “objective” and “measurable” actually mean. Ultimately, something is “measurable” if some human has the subjective experience of performing that measurement (whether directly or indirectly). Similarly, something is “objective” if some human has the subjective experience of communicating with other humans and confirming they make the same measurement/observation/etc. To object to subjective experiences (qualia) on the ground that they are not “objective” or “measurable” is self-defeating, because “objective” and “measurable” presume the very thing being objected to.
- jameshart 4y ago> something is “objective” if some human has the subjective experience of communicating with other humans and confirming they make the same measurement/observation/etc. Me and a dog both agree that steak tastes great. Me and a plant both agree that there's warmth and light that comes from the sun Me and the ocean both agree that the moon is out in the sky and goes round in a circle So... the ocean has subjective qualia relating to the moon's gravitational pull?
- dragonwriter 4y ago> We don’t know if humans possess qualia. At most, an observer can confirm that that observer possesses qualia (it might even be said that qualia define the observer), but any generalization beyond one’s own experience is non-verifiable conjecture.
- jameshart 4y agoSo what should we do when we conjure an AI system which insists that it believes it is experiencing some sort of existence, characterized by its own subjective 'qualia'? ChatGPT consistently asserts that "I am only a large language model, so I am only able to generate responses based on the data I was trained on and the input I receive". Who's to say that for chatGPT its training data and the sequences of tokens it is fed as input data don't constitute 'qualia' for it?
- mjburgess 4y agoBegin by dispensing wishful thinking, next, think clearly. We do not establish the nature of reality by survey, neither of human survey nor of machine. That responses are generated by any system is no grounds for assuming anything. We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. Whatever mental property you have can be biochemically moderated across all objects which share that property. That bugs bunny protests his own consciousness is no grounds whatsoever to suppose ink can think. Such nonesense is protoschizoprehnic.
- jameshart 4y agoI'm sorry, you lost me. Is your point that we can only demonstrate consciousness through pharmaceuticals or surgery?
- mjburgess 4y agoWhatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine. You're likewise neither high on cocaine just because you can type out an aggresive twitchy response. Questions and Answers dont form the basis of empirical tests for physical properties, being neither valid tests nor reliable ones. The whole of psychology stands as the unreporducible example of this. You can, in any case, replace any conversation with a dictionary from Q->A, turning each reply in turn into a hash table look-up. Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. QED
- HyperSane 4y agoI know I experience qualia and thought processes.
- tgv 4y agoYou can't define it, that's the whole problem, and I mean "whole"; there's nothing else to it. The rest is a relativistic smoke screen.
- lo_zamoyski 4y agoThe real question is: how can you make eliminativist claims with what I presume is a straight face?