4 ms·

Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to so

Yeah, it reads so bizarrely to me... How are we confusing biological human (or other animal) sentience in some embodied creature with queries as a service to some model instance. I cannot see anything that remotely makes these two contexts architecturally, practically, or ethically similar, except in the narrow sense of query responses that might have been mistakenly thought of as defining sentience in earlier decades.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago
It's a function of the people who hang out here. If you like reading and text in general, you are both more likely to comment here and additionally regard language as the most important part of sentience/consciousness. This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.
- FrustratedMonky 4y ago
  Maybe its degrees. Sure, GPT does not have a body, does not have all the senses. But that doesn't mean we aren't on the leading edge of developing a consciousness. Maybe next year someone will add camera visual inputs, and someone will add sound. Eventually, we'll have all the sense, and someone will put it in a body. So GPT, is rudimentary and we can still argue it isn't conscious, because when compared to a human that can run and play, it still has limitations. But it is amazing enough to start thinking those things will be possible. So why not discuss it, do you just want to dismiss it out of hand all the way until the end, what amazing thing would it take to have people admit it looks pretty lively.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    I think everybody agrees it looks lively. And that discussion about it is good. That is why we ARE discussing it.
- caddemon 4y ago
  As someone very language-focused, it has actually done the opposite for me: challenged some of my beliefs about how language enables intelligence. It's obviously skilled at language use, but most of its outputs where it has to make any sort of arguments or inferences read as incredibly stupid to me (even the ones that "tricked" people early on, some of them tricked me but in a way where I was about to write a response because I was annoyed at how bad the reasoning was). Of course that's not a criticism of the ML achievement, except that everyone and their mother has started making some extreme arguments about the thing.
  - jrsdav 4y ago
    Are you familiar with Pinker’s research presented in book The Language Instinct? > language enables intelligence In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language. To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present before we developed languages. Does this align with how your views were reshaped post LLMs?
    - aastronaut 4y ago
      i think > language enables intelligence was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
- arolihas 4y ago
  There is a huge difference between a human saying they like ice cream and an LLM saying they like ice cream, but that seems to get completely disregarded in these types of discussions. Which leads to people making very wild declarations that we are close to AGI or solving consciousness.
  - loandbehold 4y ago
    What's the difference? Why is it significant?
MrScruff 4y ago
I think you're missing the point. It's not that GPT4 is sentient, not that successor LLMs will be. It may be we never create something that's sentient, by our definition. My argument is just that: - Sentience is variable. We might regard primitive organisms as biological machines. As some of these machines have slowly evolved to become more complex, sentience/consciousness has emerged, effectively by 'redesigning' and scaling the same hardware. It is an emergent property. At the same time this has been happening, other aspects of what we call intelligence have been developing. - Artificial networks being scaled, are also displaying emergent behaviours, some of which overlap with aspects of intelligence. This does not imply they are sentient, but it does strongly support some previous assumptions that sentience, like intelligence, is emergent and hence there will be no better answer coming.
- fouc 4y ago
  There's no need to move goal posts. There's very clear definitions for sentience & sapience. The only confusion is that laypeople tend to conflate sentience & sapience. A sentient AI is not necessarily a sapient one, by definition.
  - galaxyLogic 4y ago
    Which definitions of "sentience" and "sapience" might you be referring to, in particular? This is important thanks for bringing it up.

disgruntledphd2 4y ago

It's a function of the people who hang out here. If you like reading and text in general, you are both more likely to comment here and additionally regard language as the most important part of sentience/consciousness. This leads to believing that GPT has solved many of these issues.

FrustratedMonky 4y ago
Maybe its degrees. Sure, GPT does not have a body, does not have all the senses. But that doesn't mean we aren't on the leading edge of developing a consciousness. Maybe next year someone will add camera visual inputs, and someone will add sound. Eventually, we'll have all the sense, and someone will put it in a body. So GPT, is rudimentary and we can still argue it isn't conscious, because when compared to a human that can run and play, it still has limitations. But it is amazing enough to start thinking those things will be possible. So why not discuss it, do you just want to dismiss it out of hand all the way until the end, what amazing thing would it take to have people admit it looks pretty lively.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  I think everybody agrees it looks lively. And that discussion about it is good. That is why we ARE discussing it.
caddemon 4y ago
As someone very language-focused, it has actually done the opposite for me: challenged some of my beliefs about how language enables intelligence. It's obviously skilled at language use, but most of its outputs where it has to make any sort of arguments or inferences read as incredibly stupid to me (even the ones that "tricked" people early on, some of them tricked me but in a way where I was about to write a response because I was annoyed at how bad the reasoning was). Of course that's not a criticism of the ML achievement, except that everyone and their mother has started making some extreme arguments about the thing.
- jrsdav 4y ago
  Are you familiar with Pinker’s research presented in book The Language Instinct? > language enables intelligence In his research, he argues that it’s the other way around; we have an innate intelligence for acquiring language. To put it another way, language has made us more knowledgeable (because it’s a great mechanism for building and transferring context), but intelligence or aptitude for language was present before we developed languages. Does this align with how your views were reshaped post LLMs?
  - aastronaut 4y ago
    i think > language enables intelligence was just a poor choice of words here. i understood GP as "the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language"[0] [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
arolihas 4y ago
There is a huge difference between a human saying they like ice cream and an LLM saying they like ice cream, but that seems to get completely disregarded in these types of discussions. Which leads to people making very wild declarations that we are close to AGI or solving consciousness.
- loandbehold 4y ago
  What's the difference? Why is it significant?

MrScruff 4y ago

I think you're missing the point. It's not that GPT4 is sentient, not that successor LLMs will be. It may be we never create something that's sentient, by our definition. My argument is just that: - Sentience is variable. We might regard primitive organisms as biological machines. As some of these machines have slowly evolved to become more complex, sentience/consciousness has emerged, effectively by 'redesigning' and scaling the same hardware. It is an emergent property. At the same time this has been happening, other aspects of what we call intelligence have been developing. - Artificial networks being scaled, are also displaying emergent behaviours, some of which overlap with aspects of intelligence. This does not imply they are sentient, but it does strongly support some previous assumptions that sentience, like intelligence, is emergent and hence there will be no better answer coming.

fouc 4y ago
There's no need to move goal posts. There's very clear definitions for sentience & sapience. The only confusion is that laypeople tend to conflate sentience & sapience. A sentient AI is not necessarily a sapient one, by definition.
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  Which definitions of "sentience" and "sapience" might you be referring to, in particular? This is important thanks for bringing it up.