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I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it
by mckirk 4y ago
I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell.
As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it.
If you locked a human in a box and only gave it a terminal to communicate with the outside world, and contrasted that with a LLM (sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore), the only immediately obvious reason you would ascribe sentience to the human but not the LLM is because it is easier for you to empathize with the human.
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- venv 4y agoWell, not because of emphasizing, but because of there being a viable mechanism in the human case (reasoning being, one can only know that oneself has qualia, but since those likely arise in the brain, and other humans have similar brains, most likely they have similar qualia). For more reading see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness It is important to note, that neural networks and brains are very different.
- mckirk 4y agoThat is what I'd call empathizing though. You can 'put yourself in the other person's shoes', because of the expectation that your experiences are somewhat similar (thanks to similarly capable brains). But we have no idea what qualia actually _are_, seen from the outside, we only know what it feels like to experience them. That, I think, makes it difficult to argue that a 'simulation of having qualia' is fundamentally any different to having them.
- maxwell 4y agoSame with a computer. It can't "actually" see what it "is," but you can attach a webcam and microphone and show it itself, and look around the world. Thus we "are" what we experience, not what we perceive ourselves to "be": what we think of as "the universe" is actually the inside of our actual mind, while what we think of as our physical body is more like a "My Computer" icon with some limited device management. Note that this existential confusion seems tied to a concept of "being," and mostly goes away when thinking instead in E-Prime: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
- continuational 4y agoI think there's still the "consciousness" question to be figured out. Everyone else could be purely responding to stimulus for all you know, with nothing but automation going on inside, but for yourself, you know that you experience the world in a subjective manner. Why and how do we experience the world, and does this occur for any sufficiently advanced intelligence?
- rootusrootus 4y agoExactly this. I can joke all I want that I'm living in the Matrix and the rest of y'all are here merely for my own entertainment (and control, if you want to be dark). But in my head, I know that sentience is more than just the words coming out of my mouth or yours.
- luckylion 4y agoIs it more than your inner monologue? Maybe you don't need to hear the words, but are you consciously forming thoughts, or are the thoughts just popping up and are suddenly 'there'?
- TecoAndJix 4y agoI sometimes like to imagine that consciousness is like a slider that rides the line of my existence. The whole line (past, present, and future) has always (and will always) exist. The “now” is just individual awareness of the current frame. Total nonsense I’m sure, but it helps me fight existential dread !
- luckylion 4y agoThe image of a slider also works on the other dimension: at any point in time, you're somewhere between auto-pilot and highly focused awareness. AI, or maybe seemingly intelligent artificial entities, could deliver lots of great opportunities to observe the boundaries of consciousness, intelligence and individuality and maybe spark new interesting thoughts.
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- worldsayshi 4y ago>sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore So a dumb human is not sentient? /s Joke aside. I think that we will need to stop treating "human sentience" as something so unique. It's special because we are familiar with it. But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it.
- mckirk 4y ago> So a dumb human is not sentient? /s That was just my way of preempting any 'lol of course ChatGPT isn't sentient, look at the crap it produces' comments, of which there thankfully were none. > But we should understand by now that minds can take many forms. Should we understand this already? I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. > And when should we apply ethics to it? At some point well before the mind starts acting with severe belligerence when we refuse to play fair games with it. That I agree with wholeheartedly. Even just people's attempts of 'trolling' Bing Chat already leave a sour taste in my mouth.
- worldsayshi 4y ago>I'm not aware of anything else so far that's substantially different to our own brain, but would still be considered a 'mind'. I'm firstly thinking of minds of all other living things. Mammals to insects. If an ant has a mind, which I think it does, why not chatgpt? Heck, I might even go as far as saying that the super simple algorithm i wrote for a mob in a game has a mind. But maybe most would scoff at that notion. And conscious minds to me are just minds that happen to have a bunch of features that means we feel we need to properly respect them.
- tryauuum 4y agoFor a person experiencing emotions there certainly is a difference, experience of red face and water flowing from the eyes...