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> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can d

> We think we’re intelligent, know we’re conscious, and so assume the two go together. Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not. We can't even prove that other fellow humans are? But we treat them like they are. We, I at least, feel sad when a tree is cut down. But I don't feel the same for a bunch of rocks that are being blown up? Actually I do, when a sacred or beautiful rock is cut in half (like the one that was suspended on a small cliff). What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. I think what you are afraid of here is agency, which is something that might be dangerous to endow a super intelligent being with.

Der_Einzige 3y ago
The cogito is lazy and wrong. You don't "know you exist" just because you "appear" to think. Appearance of thought is not the same as thought. P zombies would also proudly exclaim that they think therefore they are...
- kajaktum 3y ago
  Thinking does not matter. It only require "awareness" or the fact that "there is" is enough. Thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and all qualia are something that are seen. The seer is the consciousness. In fact, this can becomes recursive, because the seer can see the seer is seen so that is not consciousness either.
  - PrimeMcFly 3y ago
    > In fact, this can becomes recursive, because the seer can see the seer is seen so that is not consciousness either. That is just nonsensical.
- afastow 3y ago
  I don't think you understand what it's saying. They absolutely do know they exist, because they're actively experiencing it. Non-existent beings don't have experiences. The fact that no one can "prove" it to you or anyone else is irrelevant for their own absolute certainty.
bowsamic 3y ago
> Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. You should really read some Hegel
- jprete 3y ago
  I'd be interested in a more direct reference if you have one.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - bowsamic 3y ago
    The easiest place to start is probably his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical sciences
layer8 3y ago
The problem goes deeper in that we don’t even have a good grasp on what we actually mean by “consciousness”, and that there are wildly different opinions on what significance it has.
- scrubs 3y ago
  Well exactly. If we did we'd be on or a hell of a lot closer to describing the math, entropy, network or some other formal model of it which would pay major dividends to talking about AI. Right now it's like we didn't learn anything from Wittgenstein who said most philosophy was just argument about language and definitions ... which is a lot plus anecdotes of what we read here
nemosaltat 3y ago
is solipsism wrong, or is it just me?
- kajaktum 3y ago
  I am really curious to know why? And don't invoke "what about your kids, mothers, fathers?". "Solipsism" (first time I have heard of this, so thank you) does not make me feel any less worse when something happens to them.
  - breckinloggins 3y ago
    The parent was making a joke, but one way to answer your question might be: You feel bad because you assume they - like you - feel something when you mistreat them, and you assume this at a very deep level that might not, itself, feel like anything to you.
    - nemosaltat 3y ago
      While some humour was intended, I do actually grapple with this question. The answer that rings truest for me, especially as a newly minted father, is Vonnegut’s: “A purpose of life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
- mjklin 3y ago
  Solipsism just isn’t true for me…
ordu 3y ago
> All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. It does matter, I can agree, but it doesn't the all that matter. People can be mistaken, and they can disagree sometimes. Suppose, you cared for a particular AI and I didn't, should we cut the power from the machine running an AI? I can complicate it a little if you wish, adding a painful death of a kitten which would happen if we didn't turn power down. We need some objective means to measure what is conscious. We have a heuristic for people: "human life is sacred, full stop". There are some corner cases when it doesn't work well (like euthanasia), but we are used to it. There are other heuristics we are generally agree of, like we care more about kittens than of grass, and more of grass than of amoeba. With AI we'll face more of that and we have no idea where to place it among our heuristics. People did bad already, like treating black people as non-human. It would be a shame to repeat those mistakes without making an attempt to do better this time. > I think what you are afraid of here is agency, which is something that might be dangerous to endow a super intelligent being with. I cannot vouch for others, but I do not particularly afraid of that. I do not fear much of losing it all to a super intelligent and a conscious being, it would be a great achievement for a humanity, which would fit nicely with all this evolution business. It is a paperclip scenario I do not like much.
- AnthonyMouse 3y ago
  One of the fundamental differences between human life and silicon-based AI is that biological organisms can't recover from a system shutdown. If you suffer heart failure or go without air for an hour or starve to death, bacteria start to eat your brain and you're irreversibly destroyed. If you cut power to an AI and then come back in a year, it's all still there. It's not a death, it's sleep mode. It also doesn't meaningfully age or feel pain. If you expose a human to trauma, that's a permanent scar. If you do the equivalent to a computer program and the result is undesirable, it can roll back to a previous snapshot. Most of what causes us to have sympathy for living things or treat them with compassion just doesn't apply.
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    If in the future we developed technology that enabled effective "backup&restore" for human (and animal) minds, would that change your reasoning for this argument?
laratied 3y ago
[dead]
cubefox 3y ago
The fact that other humans are so similar to me (all humans are similar in virtue of being human organisms) allows for an analogical inference: You guys are similar to me, I am conscious, therefore you are probably also conscious. And whether or not something is conscious matters a lot ethically. If something is conscious, it may suffer. Conscious and unconscious objects have to be treated in a completely different way. We assume rocks aren't conscious and don't suffer from being broken apart, but we assume animals are conscious. That's why we treat them differently. We can't know for certain whether something is or isn't conscious, but we have to try to make a best guess.
- jnwatson 3y ago
  While assuming that other human-looking things are conscious is a reasonable starting point, it certainly isn’t a given. There seems to be a wide variety of thinking processes. Some folks don’t have internal monologues. Some folks can’t visualize images at all, and the ones that do, do it will varying amount of detail. Isn’t it also reasonable that other humans have different degrees of consciousness, including perhaps not having one?
  - Xenomto 3y ago
    What if consciousness doesn't exist?
  - jrv 3y ago
    I think the best argument for that might be that some people don't seem to understand what "consciousness" (in the sense that you are talking about) even means, and how it's different from something that can be explained as an emergent phenomenon of known physics. I then sometimes wonder whether those people are not actually conscious, or whether they just don't get it.
    - monktastic1 3y ago
      Indeed. Nagel famously clarified that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism." Many found this enlightening. I find it extremely perplexing that this wasn't immediately obvious to everyone. On the other hand, in Tibetan Buddhism there is something called a "pointing-out instruction," where your enlightened nature is pointed out to you. Afterward, you wonder how you could have ever missed it. Perhaps I should treat Nagel's paper as analogous. Like "oh, duh, the lights are on. Thanks for the reminder."
Sosh101 3y ago
> I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not Exactly. Ethically important, we don't want to cause suffering. But danger? What special risk does consciousness bring to the table?
Buttons840 3y ago
We can objectively observe that there is "stuff" happening in your brain, and we can objectively observe that GTP does a lot of "stuff" during its forward pass and then stops and does nothing--nothing is happening outside those forward passes. If we hook GTP into an infinite loop and stuff resembling intelligence comes out, then we're really going to have to start questioning what consciousness is. It's coming.
nobodyandproud 3y ago
Good old Descartes. At least for myself, some things hint (though not prove irrefutably) that there are or were consciousnesses other than my own. There are some ideas, some questions, and some solutions that I would never think of. Yet the information is there if I so choose to explore.
- Maursault 3y ago
  > Good old Descartes. Descartes stood on the shoulders of Moses.[1] [1] Exodus 3:14
xjwm 3y ago
>What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.
- kajaktum 3y ago
  Tell me how to falsify the claim that other people are also conscious?
  - xjwm 3y ago
    The quote above is from the book 1984. I felt it fit.
larryfreeman 3y ago
I am baffled when smart people say something like this. Without consciousness, without a stake in the game, the behavior is pure statistics. Statistics is limited by probabilities and logical gates. Nothing else. Consciousness is about being aware which means insights about context and harm. People are limited in ways that a statistical engine is not and that makes all the difference in the world.
- larryfreeman 3y ago
  To be clear, I was refering to this statement: > What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. My point was that it does matter if the subject is actually conscious. Human beings are easily fooled and it does matter if people mistakenly think it is conscious when it is not.
- kajaktum 3y ago
  You are mistaking consciousness with free will.
  - larryfreeman 3y ago
    Sentience and knowledge is what I am talking about. Free will is what you do with that knowledge.
  - gyrovagueGeist 3y ago
    All of these terms are vague. You are possibly mistaking free will with being an agent that has a (possibly deterministic) method of updating priors in response to new (unknown to the agent, and possibly deterministic) input.
    - larryfreeman 3y ago
      I apologize for not being more clear. I find it very challenging to distinguish between details about LLP and "consciousness". My key point is that "human consciousness" is very different than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is statistically processing content already created and "appearing" to be conscious. Human beings have characteristics that ChatGPT does not share (sentience and context). We are often mistaking the what is needed to generate content (human consciousness) with what is capable of processing that content in very interesting ways (ChatGPT). I do not believe that I am confusing free will and consciousness. See my comment above. Determinism versus free will is independent of knowledge available. Consider a paralyzed person incapable of any action. That person if the senses are all working still has awareness and context. A statistical engine only appears to. A LLM model is basing all actions on a complex matrices of thresholds. It is surprising and amazing how well that works. Given stimulus that takes advantage of those minute differences in thresholds, a wrong response will be returned. Human are not fooled in this way. Minute differences are typically missed or even skipped. Human beings can be fooled by optical illusions and by contradicting context (a statement like pick the "red" circle written in green ink and the person mistakenly picks the "green" circle. LLM models do not make these types of mistakes.
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
p-zombies is an interesting thought experiment, but useless in practice. We have numerous amounts of observable data, and we can test/assume other humans are conscious on the basis of the evidence we have. We would use similar evidence to try and determine if an AI is truly conscious or not.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

The cogito is lazy and wrong. You don't "know you exist" just because you "appear" to think. Appearance of thought is not the same as thought. P zombies would also proudly exclaim that they think therefore they are...

kajaktum 3y ago
Thinking does not matter. It only require "awareness" or the fact that "there is" is enough. Thoughts, emotions, feelings, sensations and all qualia are something that are seen. The seer is the consciousness. In fact, this can becomes recursive, because the seer can see the seer is seen so that is not consciousness either.
- PrimeMcFly 3y ago
  > In fact, this can becomes recursive, because the seer can see the seer is seen so that is not consciousness either. That is just nonsensical.
afastow 3y ago
I don't think you understand what it's saying. They absolutely do know they exist, because they're actively experiencing it. Non-existent beings don't have experiences. The fact that no one can "prove" it to you or anyone else is irrelevant for their own absolute certainty.

bowsamic 3y ago

> Excuse me, I know _I_ am conscious. There is literally nothing you can do to proof that there's anything outside of what I am conscious of. The world could be a very stable illusion, a dream, a simulation and it would all be the same. You should really read some Hegel

jprete 3y ago
I'd be interested in a more direct reference if you have one.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- bowsamic 3y ago
  The easiest place to start is probably his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical sciences

layer8 3y ago

The problem goes deeper in that we don’t even have a good grasp on what we actually mean by “consciousness”, and that there are wildly different opinions on what significance it has.

scrubs 3y ago
Well exactly. If we did we'd be on or a hell of a lot closer to describing the math, entropy, network or some other formal model of it which would pay major dividends to talking about AI. Right now it's like we didn't learn anything from Wittgenstein who said most philosophy was just argument about language and definitions ... which is a lot plus anecdotes of what we read here

nemosaltat 3y ago

is solipsism wrong, or is it just me?

kajaktum 3y ago
I am really curious to know why? And don't invoke "what about your kids, mothers, fathers?". "Solipsism" (first time I have heard of this, so thank you) does not make me feel any less worse when something happens to them.
- breckinloggins 3y ago
  The parent was making a joke, but one way to answer your question might be: You feel bad because you assume they - like you - feel something when you mistreat them, and you assume this at a very deep level that might not, itself, feel like anything to you.
  - nemosaltat 3y ago
    While some humour was intended, I do actually grapple with this question. The answer that rings truest for me, especially as a newly minted father, is Vonnegut’s: “A purpose of life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”
mjklin 3y ago
Solipsism just isn’t true for me…

ordu 3y ago

> All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. It does matter, I can agree, but it doesn't the all that matter. People can be mistaken, and they can disagree sometimes. Suppose, you cared for a particular AI and I didn't, should we cut the power from the machine running an AI? I can complicate it a little if you wish, adding a painful death of a kitten which would happen if we didn't turn power down. We need some objective means to measure what is conscious. We have a heuristic for people: "human life is sacred, full stop". There are some corner cases when it doesn't work well (like euthanasia), but we are used to it. There are other heuristics we are generally agree of, like we care more about kittens than of grass, and more of grass than of amoeba. With AI we'll face more of that and we have no idea where to place it among our heuristics. People did bad already, like treating black people as non-human. It would be a shame to repeat those mistakes without making an attempt to do better this time. > I think what you are afraid of here is agency, which is something that might be dangerous to endow a super intelligent being with. I cannot vouch for others, but I do not particularly afraid of that. I do not fear much of losing it all to a super intelligent and a conscious being, it would be a great achievement for a humanity, which would fit nicely with all this evolution business. It is a paperclip scenario I do not like much.

AnthonyMouse 3y ago
One of the fundamental differences between human life and silicon-based AI is that biological organisms can't recover from a system shutdown. If you suffer heart failure or go without air for an hour or starve to death, bacteria start to eat your brain and you're irreversibly destroyed. If you cut power to an AI and then come back in a year, it's all still there. It's not a death, it's sleep mode. It also doesn't meaningfully age or feel pain. If you expose a human to trauma, that's a permanent scar. If you do the equivalent to a computer program and the result is undesirable, it can roll back to a previous snapshot. Most of what causes us to have sympathy for living things or treat them with compassion just doesn't apply.
- PeterisP 3y ago
  If in the future we developed technology that enabled effective "backup&restore" for human (and animal) minds, would that change your reasoning for this argument?

laratied 3y ago

[dead]

cubefox 3y ago

The fact that other humans are so similar to me (all humans are similar in virtue of being human organisms) allows for an analogical inference: You guys are similar to me, I am conscious, therefore you are probably also conscious. And whether or not something is conscious matters a lot ethically. If something is conscious, it may suffer. Conscious and unconscious objects have to be treated in a completely different way. We assume rocks aren't conscious and don't suffer from being broken apart, but we assume animals are conscious. That's why we treat them differently. We can't know for certain whether something is or isn't conscious, but we have to try to make a best guess.

jnwatson 3y ago
While assuming that other human-looking things are conscious is a reasonable starting point, it certainly isn’t a given. There seems to be a wide variety of thinking processes. Some folks don’t have internal monologues. Some folks can’t visualize images at all, and the ones that do, do it will varying amount of detail. Isn’t it also reasonable that other humans have different degrees of consciousness, including perhaps not having one?
- Xenomto 3y ago
  What if consciousness doesn't exist?
- jrv 3y ago
  I think the best argument for that might be that some people don't seem to understand what "consciousness" (in the sense that you are talking about) even means, and how it's different from something that can be explained as an emergent phenomenon of known physics. I then sometimes wonder whether those people are not actually conscious, or whether they just don't get it.
  - monktastic1 3y ago
    Indeed. Nagel famously clarified that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism." Many found this enlightening. I find it extremely perplexing that this wasn't immediately obvious to everyone. On the other hand, in Tibetan Buddhism there is something called a "pointing-out instruction," where your enlightened nature is pointed out to you. Afterward, you wonder how you could have ever missed it. Perhaps I should treat Nagel's paper as analogous. Like "oh, duh, the lights are on. Thanks for the reminder."

Sosh101 3y ago

> I don't understand why people think that it matters whether AI is conscious or not Exactly. Ethically important, we don't want to cause suffering. But danger? What special risk does consciousness bring to the table?

Buttons840 3y ago

We can objectively observe that there is "stuff" happening in your brain, and we can objectively observe that GTP does a lot of "stuff" during its forward pass and then stops and does nothing--nothing is happening outside those forward passes. If we hook GTP into an infinite loop and stuff resembling intelligence comes out, then we're really going to have to start questioning what consciousness is. It's coming.

nobodyandproud 3y ago

Good old Descartes. At least for myself, some things hint (though not prove irrefutably) that there are or were consciousnesses other than my own. There are some ideas, some questions, and some solutions that I would never think of. Yet the information is there if I so choose to explore.

Maursault 3y ago
> Good old Descartes. Descartes stood on the shoulders of Moses.[1] [1] Exodus 3:14

xjwm 3y ago

>What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. The law of gravity is nonsense. No such law exists. If I think I float, and you think I float, then it happens.

kajaktum 3y ago
Tell me how to falsify the claim that other people are also conscious?
- xjwm 3y ago
  The quote above is from the book 1984. I felt it fit.

larryfreeman 3y ago

I am baffled when smart people say something like this. Without consciousness, without a stake in the game, the behavior is pure statistics. Statistics is limited by probabilities and logical gates. Nothing else. Consciousness is about being aware which means insights about context and harm. People are limited in ways that a statistical engine is not and that makes all the difference in the world.

larryfreeman 3y ago
To be clear, I was refering to this statement: > What I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter if the subject is actually conscious. All that matter is we (I), feel/think that it is conscious, or deserving of care and respect. My point was that it does matter if the subject is actually conscious. Human beings are easily fooled and it does matter if people mistakenly think it is conscious when it is not.
kajaktum 3y ago
You are mistaking consciousness with free will.
- larryfreeman 3y ago
  Sentience and knowledge is what I am talking about. Free will is what you do with that knowledge.
- gyrovagueGeist 3y ago
  All of these terms are vague. You are possibly mistaking free will with being an agent that has a (possibly deterministic) method of updating priors in response to new (unknown to the agent, and possibly deterministic) input.
  - larryfreeman 3y ago
    I apologize for not being more clear. I find it very challenging to distinguish between details about LLP and "consciousness". My key point is that "human consciousness" is very different than ChatGPT. ChatGPT is statistically processing content already created and "appearing" to be conscious. Human beings have characteristics that ChatGPT does not share (sentience and context). We are often mistaking the what is needed to generate content (human consciousness) with what is capable of processing that content in very interesting ways (ChatGPT). I do not believe that I am confusing free will and consciousness. See my comment above. Determinism versus free will is independent of knowledge available. Consider a paralyzed person incapable of any action. That person if the senses are all working still has awareness and context. A statistical engine only appears to. A LLM model is basing all actions on a complex matrices of thresholds. It is surprising and amazing how well that works. Given stimulus that takes advantage of those minute differences in thresholds, a wrong response will be returned. Human are not fooled in this way. Minute differences are typically missed or even skipped. Human beings can be fooled by optical illusions and by contradicting context (a statement like pick the "red" circle written in green ink and the person mistakenly picks the "green" circle. LLM models do not make these types of mistakes.

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

p-zombies is an interesting thought experiment, but useless in practice. We have numerous amounts of observable data, and we can test/assume other humans are conscious on the basis of the evidence we have. We would use similar evidence to try and determine if an AI is truly conscious or not.