3 ms·
I don’t see why AGI plus sensory input couldn’t in principle give you qualia. In fact, I’ve heard some folks like philosophers argue that sensory input is kind
by Robotbeat 4y ago
I don’t see why AGI plus sensory input couldn’t in principle give you qualia. In fact, I’ve heard some folks like philosophers argue that sensory input is kind of essential to getting AGI, and since current AI like LLMs don’t have sensory input, they therefore can’t develop general intelligence.
If we put Multimodal GPT-4 in a computer on a robot and instructed it to drive somewhere while avoiding obstacles, avoiding hazards… that right there is a primitive type of self-preservation instruction which it could potentially interpret as generalizable self-preservation as it would have an association of “hazard avoidance” with “self-preservation,” and have tons of examples of what “self preservation” means in its training weights. Putting LLMs into action like this can lead potentially to unexpected behavior like that, although I don’t think the mechanisms in GPT-3/4 are yet there to enable this without a bunch of extra hooks.
- cleanchit 4y agoThe input prompt is their only sensory input.
- Robotbeat 4y agoIs that a major philosophical problem? GPT-4 is ostensibly multi-modal. Except for smell, we get our sensory input through the thalamus.
- nathan_compton 4y agoThe phrase "in principle" is eliding quite a lot here since we don't understand what process gives rise to qualia in ourselves or whether qualia even exists in the same way as other categories of things. Certainly our naive intuitions suggests that things like conditional/able probability distributions don't have qualia, and so it is unclear how adding multiple modes to a model like ChatGPT (which is just a giant conditional probability distribution) could produce quale or (conversely) why, if conditional probability distributions _can_ have qualia why ChatGPT as it stands now wouldn't have such. When I run my eyes over text the words produce meanings which manifest in my mind and that sensation is a kind of quale, so why not so for ChatGPT? I personally don't think ChatGPT has any experience at all for what it is worth.