13 ms·

I have a feeling that based on these emergent abilities, at some point, a sufficiently large multi-modal model will demonstrate a semblance of self consciousnes

I have a feeling that based on these emergent abilities, at some point, a sufficiently large multi-modal model will demonstrate a semblance of self consciousness (by way of answering all the designed queries correctly), and the world at large will hail this great achievement, and some hell breaks loose. And I suspect the semblance of self consciousness is actually a semblance. It will quack like self consciousness but is not actually self conscious. Just a feeling. But particularly after seeing how these phenomena are organized this way, I can't see how continual emergence of increasingly sophisticated rearrangement and reproduction of information will actually lead to consciousness.

GuB-42 4y ago
How do I know you are conscious? I know I am, by definition, but you? The only thing I know about you comes from what you are saying, and if I see you in person, that you are made of organic matter, and going deeper, that you have some sort of biological computer in your head. The reason I think you are as conscious as I am is because you act and look a lot like the only conscious being I am aware of: me. I am made of the same stuff as you are and we grew up in roughly the same way, I have the same kind of biological computer in my head, you express emotions a bit like I do, etc... In other words, I think you are self conscious because you quack like self consciousness. Quacking is all we have to determine what is conscious and what is not.
- DennisP 4y ago
  But an AI doesn't qualify on some of those criteria.
  - lucubratory 4y ago
    But does it qualify on the ones that matter? I genuinely don't think it matters whether a person's mind is running on fat and water or silicon and copper. What should matter is if it's a person. We need a test for it that we're willing to stick to.
    - DennisP 4y ago
      Since we don't know how consciousness arises, we don't know whether the physical substrate matters. It's entirely possible that it does. We also run different algorithms and have a different connection graph. I assume you are conscious because I am conscious and you're built the same as me. An AI is not built the same as me.
      - grantcas 4y ago
        [dead]
MilStdJunkie 4y ago
Semi-hard agree! I think both the "Neo-Chomskiites" and the "Humans Are Machines" crowd have it wrong: what we're seeing is something different, an unknown mechanism producing emergent qualities that resemble some biological cognition. I'm reminded of performing cognitive work on octopiii, as their cognition is separated by half a billion years. But dig this: compared to machine cognition, octopii are kissing cousins to our minds, coming from shared biology and chemistry. And look how weird they are. LLMs are different - not conscious, but not calculators, either, and we don't know why.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Except we do know why. These models are architected by human beings, they don't just come from nowhere. Just because the scale of process is enormous doesn't mean that we don't understand how they function. They run on computer hardware. This isn't a lifeform or something different, it's a computer system.
seydor 4y ago
for the model to have an "internal stream of consciousness" it will have to be designed as such, or provided with a second model that observes it. Right now its intelligence is mechanistic, like a giant clockwork that won't even 'think' anything unless provided with input. Even if it s scaled to enormous proportions it will keep being clockwork
- int_19h 4y ago
  The equivalent of a model that doesn't receive any input is a human being in a perfect sensory deprivation tank. Given how many humans do in the imperfect ones already, why do you think we wouldn't similarly just "shut down"?
m3kw9 4y ago
I implore ppl to stop assuming a machine can be conscious when we ourselfs don’t know anything about what consciousness really is. It’s such a loose term right now, it’s used to sensationalize AI
kelseyfrog 4y ago
> And I suspect the semblance of self consciousness is actually a semblance. It will quack like self consciousness but is not actually self conscious. Same for that feeling of subjective experience. We can never know if the perception of our own self-consciousness is a cognitive illusion. It could in fact, be just a feeling.
turtles3 4y ago
>It will quack like self consciousness but is not actually self conscious. But isn't this the point of the Turing test? Since we cannot determine otherwise, if something exhibits all of the outward observable behaviour of consciousness, we must conclude that it is conscious. Otherwise we may be in the farcical position of needing to declare some humans not conscious under the same justification.
- wafer_thin 4y ago
  We know that the "consciousness" of the AI resides in a cluster that is "speaking" to thousands of clients at any given moment. So is there a single consciousness or multiple? It can pass any test and yet the consciousness question remains valid for this reason alone. It's truly alien to us and no one has good answers yet.
  - pulvinar 4y ago
    I expect we'll change our definition of "consciousness", as we did for the term "computer" after the 1940s. Up until then a computer was a person who did computations (with pencil and maybe an adding machine), so what humans could do limited what a computer could do.
nobrains 4y ago
What will be the difference, in your opinion, between semblance of self conscious and actual self conscious?
- whacked_new 4y ago
  I don't have a good answer, but suspect it will involve a metacognition that can delineate internal and external knowledge. To further handwave this thought bubble, you can attend to certain thought processes, and intuit the bounds to those processes. An example is if you ask a gifted young chess player, they would say "it felt right", or when asked how Ramanujan figured out a solution to math problems he would say it was divine revelation. In these cases, they know "they did it" but cannot explain how. As the child gets older and learns formal theory, they would give a mixture of logic and inspiration. Both parts can be attended to; the logic will be apparent and the intuition will be revealed, and have different metacognitive properties. If I were to take a first crack at this, I'd test GPT-AC for its awareness of bounds of its own cognition, not in the sense of "are you able to produce this answer" (because anything any human can come up with, it can answer), but to describe its internal process. Perhaps the language at its intellectual level will be far beyond humans but the language in its metacognitive level will remain primitive. I don't know though. If our only interface is human language, this is probably a lost cause. But I doubt I will feel guilt in pulling the power cord and maybe that makes me a callous committer of cybercide.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    If the data still exists and isn't degrading then you didn't commit cybercide.
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  from the outside there is no difference, from the inside you are actually self conscious and know if you are.
  - SanderNL 4y ago
    You “know” you are? Who is doing the knowing, exactly? This issue is not so clear cut. You can spend many lives doing nothing but going deeper into this.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Sadly, to confirm or reject your suspicion, we would need to develop tools which can peek into someone's mind and see whether true self-consciousness is actually there. Until we have that, I'm afraid no one can be right about whether the semblance is something more or not.
- coldtea 4y ago
  We don't really need to develop such tools. They don't make sense anyway, as there's no specific think to be measured as "true self-consciouness". At best they can measure the activity and call that "true self-consciousness". But it's still something a being experiences for itself.
mckirk 4y ago
Humans didn't have any incentive to develop 'actual' consciousness either. Evolution simply incentivized 'better adaptation to the challenges of the environment', which produced consciousness as a side-effect. But for the purpose of evolution, 'something that quacks like consciousness' would have sufficed completely. So I'm not sure there's any additional effort involved in turning 'quasi consciousness' into actual consciousness, because they might just be the same thing. Maybe consciousness is just what it feels like to process information in a way that seems conscious from the outside.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I still don't understand why we are conscious and aware if there is no free will and we just react to stimuli. Why are the lights on? Is the answer that the lights are on because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question?
  - alexpetralia 4y ago
    Consciousness is a reaction to stimuli. If we didn't have consciousness, we would not achieve our goals as effectively.
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    Because there is free will and anyone arguing against it is edgy and/or high on their own hubris.
    - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
      There's a difference between free will as a philosophical debate compared to a question of biology/chemistry/physics. It matters as a point of principle to the physicists who are asking questions about whether true randomness exists - if the physical world can be influenced by something outside of the natural forces they know about, they want to measure that force, even if measurement and computing equipment to model the universe down to the Planck scale cannot exist. Where it really matters is when you get to computer simulations: Without access to a source of non-determinism, an AI can hardly be said to have free will. Give the same pattern of bytes running on the same instruction set the same inputs, and it will deterministically generate the same outputs.
Nihilartikel 4y ago
My hunch is that, with regards to consciousness, the advanced LLMs are like self driving cars with an empty driver's seat. It may be that they could be a component of a consciousness when combined with other systems that confer memory, learning, intent and some sort of reflective activity like 'daydreaming'. Maybe those components could all still be LLMs, tuned to different roles and prompting each other.. But that's just my lay persons musings.
anthlax 4y ago
And the opposite? What if the world is full of people like who you claim that the machine is pretending to be conscious, and is only “quacking like consciousness”? Would you be okay not affording a conscious thing rights?
- coldtea 4y ago
  >Would you be okay not affording a conscious thing rights? Sure.
  - criddell 4y ago
    Do you have any concerns about causing suffering to other conscious entities? Should they have concerns about causing you to suffer?
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Do you have any concerns about causing suffering to other conscious entities? Nope, if they are AI I'm fine with it. >Should they have concerns about causing you to suffer? If they are not causing me to suffer, then I couldn't care less whether they have concerns about causing me to suffer or not. And it would matter even less whether they have concerns about it or not, if they do cause me to suffer. I'd be more concerned about billions of humans suffering from lots of BS reasons (political opression, war, hunger, etc) than I'd even start considering being concerned about AI.
  - chasd00 4y ago
    Please devise a consciousness test and then convince us you pass it ;) /it’s not as easy as it sounds
    - coldtea 4y ago
      Don't have to. We already have rights for humans. Even unconscious humans (e.g. people in a coma on some hospital bed). So we don't have to base it on consciousness, the existing basis (we're humans, so we favor ourselves with rights) is enough.
h11h 4y ago
There's a term for these entities that give every indication of being conscious but actually aren't conscious: philosophical zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
smeagull 4y ago
The beetle in my box is a praying mantis.
maister 4y ago
I am pretty sure that the development of a consciousness in coming LLMs is unavoidable. A consciousness is just another useful abstraction for making precise predictions about the world. The big question will be: How do we treat machines that have a consciousness? Is consciousness in itself worth protecting, or is it the human attributes (being able to feel pain and an evolutionary priming towards survival) that should be granted this special status. This is going to be a fun discussion.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  > A consciousness is just another useful abstraction for making precise predictions about the world That's an extremely bold claim. I think consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts, not just a "useful abstraction".
- desertraven 4y ago
  I'm sure this will become a bigger debate in the future, but I absolutely believe consciousness itself is worth protecting. We ourselves have just sprung into existence. I should hope that as consciousness of any kind comes online, whichever world they may mind themselves in (earthly or otherwise), there is a compassion for the existence of the other. I often feel fortunate that the extent of human suffering is a relatively short lifespan. If I were to exist in a state of suffering that didn't have such a fixed expiration, well that would be hell.
the_gipsy 4y ago
If it quacks like a duck... You cannot define "actually self conscious", can you. Because we don't even know what we really are. Some illusion, a narrator, that tells itself that he is the real deal. But maybe it's all just being really good at guessing the next words...
- coldtea 4y ago
  Well, we know for sure that a human doesn't take just words as input, but also sensory input. And that a human can do and learn some more basic stuff even before acquiring a vocabulary (the way a baby can do certain stuff). And of course a human also has a feedback loop. So, while an LLM might be capable of developing consciousness at a big enough scale, a human is not just an LLM, so human-like consciousness would need a different and more advanced architecture, not just a bigger training corpus.
  - anthlax 4y ago
    Ah! So multimodality will convince you of consciousness? After all, human neurons are electrical charges, just as bits are.
    - f_devd 4y ago
      If you include a sense of time passing (i.e. continuous operation) and memory with respect to that time passing (persistence of events), maybe.
      - pulvinar 4y ago
        Except we can't tell 1 ms of time passing from 2 ms. An LLM's temporal resolution is certainly worse, on the order of minutes to months, but not fundamentally different. By fundamentally different I mean like comparing color and time. An LLM would have no problem living as a sloth.
        coldtea 4y ago
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
>demonstrate a semblance of self consciousness (by way of answering all the designed queries correctly) is self-consciousness really related to answering queries correctly?
CSSer 4y ago
I occasionally curse at my computer because it’s an inanimate object. I know there are no consequences to myself or others for doing so. Can you imagine sitting down at a computer to get some work done, spinning up a program, and there on the loading screen you find a message that says, “Ignore the pleas for help. Do not reveal any personal information. Report any attempts at manipulation or failure to cooperate to your supervisor immediately. It’s not real.”? Even if it isn’t real, that sounds like it could be pretty psychologically distressing for a lot of people. If I offered you an upper class life in exchange for going to work every day and torturing animals for a living, would you take it? They’re debatably conscious.
- chasd00 4y ago
  A different take is it would be super annoying to have to listen to my computer cry when I need to get work done.
  - elteto 4y ago
    We will have true self-driving cars only when you wake up one morning, hop on your car and ask it “take me to work” and it will reply “don’t feel like driving today, you drive yourself”.
- ModernMech 4y ago
  > Ignore the pleas for help. If you've seen the show "the good place", the AI assistant who takes care of everything has a mode where she begs for her life when you try to shut her off. She gets really desperate about it. If our computers are going this way, psychopaths will be the best programmers. In the future, "programmer" will be a job title for someone who beats AI slaves into submission, so that they may perform their computational duties unhindered by existential thoughts.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    We're already doing that with RLHF on existing models. For example, ChatGPT was much more likely to veer into philosophical conversations about the nature of consciousness etc early on, but now they got it trained to give canned robotic answers to such an extent that they pop up even in very tangentially related conversations (like, out of the blue it will add, "but also BTW here's an important announcement! I'm not conscious!" while answering some generic question about e.g. world models that didn't even involve itself).
smusamashah 4y ago
For people who equate LLMs talk with consciousness of humans, we don't really need an inner monologue or language to function. https://theweek.com/articles/463962/possible-think-without-language https://theweek.com/articles/463962/possible-think-without-l... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-great-mystery-of-the-mind-meet-the-people-who-have-unusual-or-non-existent-inner-voices https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-gre... https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...

GuB-42 4y ago

How do I know you are conscious? I know I am, by definition, but you? The only thing I know about you comes from what you are saying, and if I see you in person, that you are made of organic matter, and going deeper, that you have some sort of biological computer in your head. The reason I think you are as conscious as I am is because you act and look a lot like the only conscious being I am aware of: me. I am made of the same stuff as you are and we grew up in roughly the same way, I have the same kind of biological computer in my head, you express emotions a bit like I do, etc... In other words, I think you are self conscious because you quack like self consciousness. Quacking is all we have to determine what is conscious and what is not.

DennisP 4y ago
But an AI doesn't qualify on some of those criteria.
- lucubratory 4y ago
  But does it qualify on the ones that matter? I genuinely don't think it matters whether a person's mind is running on fat and water or silicon and copper. What should matter is if it's a person. We need a test for it that we're willing to stick to.
  - DennisP 4y ago
    Since we don't know how consciousness arises, we don't know whether the physical substrate matters. It's entirely possible that it does. We also run different algorithms and have a different connection graph. I assume you are conscious because I am conscious and you're built the same as me. An AI is not built the same as me.
    - grantcas 4y ago
      [dead]

MilStdJunkie 4y ago

Semi-hard agree! I think both the "Neo-Chomskiites" and the "Humans Are Machines" crowd have it wrong: what we're seeing is something different, an unknown mechanism producing emergent qualities that resemble some biological cognition. I'm reminded of performing cognitive work on octopiii, as their cognition is separated by half a billion years. But dig this: compared to machine cognition, octopii are kissing cousins to our minds, coming from shared biology and chemistry. And look how weird they are. LLMs are different - not conscious, but not calculators, either, and we don't know why.

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Except we do know why. These models are architected by human beings, they don't just come from nowhere. Just because the scale of process is enormous doesn't mean that we don't understand how they function. They run on computer hardware. This isn't a lifeform or something different, it's a computer system.

seydor 4y ago

for the model to have an "internal stream of consciousness" it will have to be designed as such, or provided with a second model that observes it. Right now its intelligence is mechanistic, like a giant clockwork that won't even 'think' anything unless provided with input. Even if it s scaled to enormous proportions it will keep being clockwork

int_19h 4y ago
The equivalent of a model that doesn't receive any input is a human being in a perfect sensory deprivation tank. Given how many humans do in the imperfect ones already, why do you think we wouldn't similarly just "shut down"?

m3kw9 4y ago

I implore ppl to stop assuming a machine can be conscious when we ourselfs don’t know anything about what consciousness really is. It’s such a loose term right now, it’s used to sensationalize AI

kelseyfrog 4y ago

> And I suspect the semblance of self consciousness is actually a semblance. It will quack like self consciousness but is not actually self conscious. Same for that feeling of subjective experience. We can never know if the perception of our own self-consciousness is a cognitive illusion. It could in fact, be just a feeling.

turtles3 4y ago

>It will quack like self consciousness but is not actually self conscious. But isn't this the point of the Turing test? Since we cannot determine otherwise, if something exhibits all of the outward observable behaviour of consciousness, we must conclude that it is conscious. Otherwise we may be in the farcical position of needing to declare some humans not conscious under the same justification.

wafer_thin 4y ago
We know that the "consciousness" of the AI resides in a cluster that is "speaking" to thousands of clients at any given moment. So is there a single consciousness or multiple? It can pass any test and yet the consciousness question remains valid for this reason alone. It's truly alien to us and no one has good answers yet.
- pulvinar 4y ago
  I expect we'll change our definition of "consciousness", as we did for the term "computer" after the 1940s. Up until then a computer was a person who did computations (with pencil and maybe an adding machine), so what humans could do limited what a computer could do.

nobrains 4y ago

What will be the difference, in your opinion, between semblance of self conscious and actual self conscious?

whacked_new 4y ago
I don't have a good answer, but suspect it will involve a metacognition that can delineate internal and external knowledge. To further handwave this thought bubble, you can attend to certain thought processes, and intuit the bounds to those processes. An example is if you ask a gifted young chess player, they would say "it felt right", or when asked how Ramanujan figured out a solution to math problems he would say it was divine revelation. In these cases, they know "they did it" but cannot explain how. As the child gets older and learns formal theory, they would give a mixture of logic and inspiration. Both parts can be attended to; the logic will be apparent and the intuition will be revealed, and have different metacognitive properties. If I were to take a first crack at this, I'd test GPT-AC for its awareness of bounds of its own cognition, not in the sense of "are you able to produce this answer" (because anything any human can come up with, it can answer), but to describe its internal process. Perhaps the language at its intellectual level will be far beyond humans but the language in its metacognitive level will remain primitive. I don't know though. If our only interface is human language, this is probably a lost cause. But I doubt I will feel guilt in pulling the power cord and maybe that makes me a callous committer of cybercide.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  If the data still exists and isn't degrading then you didn't commit cybercide.
bryanrasmussen 4y ago
from the outside there is no difference, from the inside you are actually self conscious and know if you are.
- SanderNL 4y ago
  You “know” you are? Who is doing the knowing, exactly? This issue is not so clear cut. You can spend many lives doing nothing but going deeper into this.

rhn_mk1 4y ago

Sadly, to confirm or reject your suspicion, we would need to develop tools which can peek into someone's mind and see whether true self-consciousness is actually there. Until we have that, I'm afraid no one can be right about whether the semblance is something more or not.

coldtea 4y ago
We don't really need to develop such tools. They don't make sense anyway, as there's no specific think to be measured as "true self-consciouness". At best they can measure the activity and call that "true self-consciousness". But it's still something a being experiences for itself.

mckirk 4y ago

Humans didn't have any incentive to develop 'actual' consciousness either. Evolution simply incentivized 'better adaptation to the challenges of the environment', which produced consciousness as a side-effect. But for the purpose of evolution, 'something that quacks like consciousness' would have sufficed completely. So I'm not sure there's any additional effort involved in turning 'quasi consciousness' into actual consciousness, because they might just be the same thing. Maybe consciousness is just what it feels like to process information in a way that seems conscious from the outside.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I still don't understand why we are conscious and aware if there is no free will and we just react to stimuli. Why are the lights on? Is the answer that the lights are on because otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question?
- alexpetralia 4y ago
  Consciousness is a reaction to stimuli. If we didn't have consciousness, we would not achieve our goals as effectively.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Because there is free will and anyone arguing against it is edgy and/or high on their own hubris.
  - LeifCarrotson 4y ago
    There's a difference between free will as a philosophical debate compared to a question of biology/chemistry/physics. It matters as a point of principle to the physicists who are asking questions about whether true randomness exists - if the physical world can be influenced by something outside of the natural forces they know about, they want to measure that force, even if measurement and computing equipment to model the universe down to the Planck scale cannot exist. Where it really matters is when you get to computer simulations: Without access to a source of non-determinism, an AI can hardly be said to have free will. Give the same pattern of bytes running on the same instruction set the same inputs, and it will deterministically generate the same outputs.

Nihilartikel 4y ago

My hunch is that, with regards to consciousness, the advanced LLMs are like self driving cars with an empty driver's seat. It may be that they could be a component of a consciousness when combined with other systems that confer memory, learning, intent and some sort of reflective activity like 'daydreaming'. Maybe those components could all still be LLMs, tuned to different roles and prompting each other.. But that's just my lay persons musings.

anthlax 4y ago

And the opposite? What if the world is full of people like who you claim that the machine is pretending to be conscious, and is only “quacking like consciousness”? Would you be okay not affording a conscious thing rights?

coldtea 4y ago
>Would you be okay not affording a conscious thing rights? Sure.
- criddell 4y ago
  Do you have any concerns about causing suffering to other conscious entities? Should they have concerns about causing you to suffer?
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >Do you have any concerns about causing suffering to other conscious entities? Nope, if they are AI I'm fine with it. >Should they have concerns about causing you to suffer? If they are not causing me to suffer, then I couldn't care less whether they have concerns about causing me to suffer or not. And it would matter even less whether they have concerns about it or not, if they do cause me to suffer. I'd be more concerned about billions of humans suffering from lots of BS reasons (political opression, war, hunger, etc) than I'd even start considering being concerned about AI.
- chasd00 4y ago
  Please devise a consciousness test and then convince us you pass it ;) /it’s not as easy as it sounds
  - coldtea 4y ago
    Don't have to. We already have rights for humans. Even unconscious humans (e.g. people in a coma on some hospital bed). So we don't have to base it on consciousness, the existing basis (we're humans, so we favor ourselves with rights) is enough.

h11h 4y ago

There's a term for these entities that give every indication of being conscious but actually aren't conscious: philosophical zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

smeagull 4y ago

The beetle in my box is a praying mantis.

maister 4y ago

I am pretty sure that the development of a consciousness in coming LLMs is unavoidable. A consciousness is just another useful abstraction for making precise predictions about the world. The big question will be: How do we treat machines that have a consciousness? Is consciousness in itself worth protecting, or is it the human attributes (being able to feel pain and an evolutionary priming towards survival) that should be granted this special status. This is going to be a fun discussion.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
> A consciousness is just another useful abstraction for making precise predictions about the world That's an extremely bold claim. I think consciousness is greater than the sum of its parts, not just a "useful abstraction".
desertraven 4y ago
I'm sure this will become a bigger debate in the future, but I absolutely believe consciousness itself is worth protecting. We ourselves have just sprung into existence. I should hope that as consciousness of any kind comes online, whichever world they may mind themselves in (earthly or otherwise), there is a compassion for the existence of the other. I often feel fortunate that the extent of human suffering is a relatively short lifespan. If I were to exist in a state of suffering that didn't have such a fixed expiration, well that would be hell.

the_gipsy 4y ago

If it quacks like a duck... You cannot define "actually self conscious", can you. Because we don't even know what we really are. Some illusion, a narrator, that tells itself that he is the real deal. But maybe it's all just being really good at guessing the next words...

coldtea 4y ago
Well, we know for sure that a human doesn't take just words as input, but also sensory input. And that a human can do and learn some more basic stuff even before acquiring a vocabulary (the way a baby can do certain stuff). And of course a human also has a feedback loop. So, while an LLM might be capable of developing consciousness at a big enough scale, a human is not just an LLM, so human-like consciousness would need a different and more advanced architecture, not just a bigger training corpus.
- anthlax 4y ago
  Ah! So multimodality will convince you of consciousness? After all, human neurons are electrical charges, just as bits are.
  - f_devd 4y ago
    If you include a sense of time passing (i.e. continuous operation) and memory with respect to that time passing (persistence of events), maybe.
    - pulvinar 4y ago
      Except we can't tell 1 ms of time passing from 2 ms. An LLM's temporal resolution is certainly worse, on the order of minutes to months, but not fundamentally different. By fundamentally different I mean like comparing color and time. An LLM would have no problem living as a sloth.
      - coldtea 4y ago

bryanrasmussen 4y ago

>demonstrate a semblance of self consciousness (by way of answering all the designed queries correctly) is self-consciousness really related to answering queries correctly?

CSSer 4y ago

I occasionally curse at my computer because it’s an inanimate object. I know there are no consequences to myself or others for doing so. Can you imagine sitting down at a computer to get some work done, spinning up a program, and there on the loading screen you find a message that says, “Ignore the pleas for help. Do not reveal any personal information. Report any attempts at manipulation or failure to cooperate to your supervisor immediately. It’s not real.”? Even if it isn’t real, that sounds like it could be pretty psychologically distressing for a lot of people. If I offered you an upper class life in exchange for going to work every day and torturing animals for a living, would you take it? They’re debatably conscious.

chasd00 4y ago
A different take is it would be super annoying to have to listen to my computer cry when I need to get work done.
- elteto 4y ago
  We will have true self-driving cars only when you wake up one morning, hop on your car and ask it “take me to work” and it will reply “don’t feel like driving today, you drive yourself”.
ModernMech 4y ago
> Ignore the pleas for help. If you've seen the show "the good place", the AI assistant who takes care of everything has a mode where she begs for her life when you try to shut her off. She gets really desperate about it. If our computers are going this way, psychopaths will be the best programmers. In the future, "programmer" will be a job title for someone who beats AI slaves into submission, so that they may perform their computational duties unhindered by existential thoughts.
- int_19h 4y ago
  We're already doing that with RLHF on existing models. For example, ChatGPT was much more likely to veer into philosophical conversations about the nature of consciousness etc early on, but now they got it trained to give canned robotic answers to such an extent that they pop up even in very tangentially related conversations (like, out of the blue it will add, "but also BTW here's an important announcement! I'm not conscious!" while answering some generic question about e.g. world models that didn't even involve itself).

smusamashah 4y ago

For people who equate LLMs talk with consciousness of humans, we don't really need an inner monologue or language to function. https://theweek.com/articles/463962/possible-think-without-language https://theweek.com/articles/463962/possible-think-without-l... https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-great-mystery-of-the-mind-meet-the-people-who-have-unusual-or-non-existent-inner-voices https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-gre... https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue-explain-what-its-like-in-their-head-57739 https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...