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That's a straw man. I'm not insisting there's anything magical or spiritual or metaphysically special about consciousness. I am merely insisting that consciousn

That's a straw man. I'm not insisting there's anything magical or spiritual or metaphysically special about consciousness. I am merely insisting that consciousness is a particularly complex recursive metaprocess that is utterly absent from what GPT is doing. Not that it couldn't theoretically be replicated by a very large and complex neural network model. Just that it is abundantly clear that the sort of thing GPT is doing and the sort of thing we do are simply not the same. It does not have meaning or intentionality and it does not have consciousness. You just need to spend a little time actually looking at the utter drivel that it produces when you ask it things or tell it to output things to realize that not only is it highly formulaic, but it does not have any underlying understanding of the concepts or principles or facts or intention of what it is doing, it is merely producing an assemblage of words that it has been trained to deem fairly convincing. The stochastic parrot model that GPT follows is not even remotely a convincing theory of consciousness, whatsoever, and it has certainly not let us reproduce consciousness. I can hardly even believe you are saying that it has. That's like saying traditional computer game graphics rendering prior to raytracing becoming mainstream is a "compelling theory" of how physical light actually works because some game looks almost photo realistic. In this analogy, I'm the one that's pointing out that what physical light does in the real world is extremely different from what traditional computer game graphics does and even if you can get it to be superficially close it will never be as powerful as the real thing, and to do that we would need a much more computationally expensive ray tracing model. I'm not saying there's anything inherently unique about human brains or that you can't model Consciousness with the computer I'm saying we haven't gotten there yet.

jart 3y ago
But it is though. You could learn a lot about physics by reading video game source code. I'm not saying that understanding a thing well enough to emulate it implies mastery over the thing itself. For example my Blink emulator that I wrote does a pretty good job passing as an x86-64 Linux computer, and I think that makes it x86-64-linux enough, even though I don't necessarily understand how Intel's foundries work. I'm not saying video games and GPT are a theory of everything, but if it acts consciously enough to fool us into thinking that it's conscious, then I think that makes it conscious enough, which would mean that the ideas which went into building it reflect the deepest understanding of consciousness we've got.
- logicprog 3y ago
  It doesn't act conscious enough to fool us though. It doesn't seem remotely conscious even at first blush, and seems less so the more you interact with it. And I think the stochastic parrot "model" of consciousness is very obviously not a good model for understanding the processes going on in the human brain, because it leaves out so many aspects: the fact that self-awareness and metacognition are a key component of consciousness, the fact that humans are trained as they grow up by experimenting with an environment that rewards understanding consistent principles and concepts, instead of just being rewarded for stringing together vaguely convincing-sounding sentences, among others. Like, just because it can create something vaguely superficially similar doesn't mean it's a good model for understanding consciousness at all. That's not how this works.
  - jart 3y ago
    Are you saying the Turing test wasn't passed? If you think you understand machine learning well enough to dismiss it as a science because you know a buzzword from a feminist critique that also came out of Google Brain, then I'd say their inclusivity initiative certainly did its job. The reason it passes the Turing test is because the rest of us can't tell it apart from people like you.
    - logicprog 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - logicprog 3y ago
        TLDR: just because one person or even a group of them are gullible enough to be fooled by something doesn't mean that that thing is actually indistinguishable enough from consciousness to count as conscious for all intents and purposes, which is the idea behind the Turing Test. Humans tend to anthropomorphize, be trusting and gullible, and the Turing test is a short, limited scenario, with no real larger context in play. To actually figure out if something was indistinguishable enough from a conscious being to count as conscious, you'd have to have a lot of very in depth interacts with it over a long period of time, to really get a sense for how it thinks and operates. And just because something superficially looks conscious doesn't mean it will actually be able to do all the things conscious beings can — i.e., that it will actually be conscious. Nor does it mean that the processes going on under the hood will be the same as what goes on for conscious beings. Nor should bringing up philosophy of mind make you think I'm an LLM, and if it does, that probably means that you can't tell the difference between bullshit and abstraction, which says more about your intelligence than mine.

jart 3y ago

But it is though. You could learn a lot about physics by reading video game source code. I'm not saying that understanding a thing well enough to emulate it implies mastery over the thing itself. For example my Blink emulator that I wrote does a pretty good job passing as an x86-64 Linux computer, and I think that makes it x86-64-linux enough, even though I don't necessarily understand how Intel's foundries work. I'm not saying video games and GPT are a theory of everything, but if it acts consciously enough to fool us into thinking that it's conscious, then I think that makes it conscious enough, which would mean that the ideas which went into building it reflect the deepest understanding of consciousness we've got.

logicprog 3y ago
It doesn't act conscious enough to fool us though. It doesn't seem remotely conscious even at first blush, and seems less so the more you interact with it. And I think the stochastic parrot "model" of consciousness is very obviously not a good model for understanding the processes going on in the human brain, because it leaves out so many aspects: the fact that self-awareness and metacognition are a key component of consciousness, the fact that humans are trained as they grow up by experimenting with an environment that rewards understanding consistent principles and concepts, instead of just being rewarded for stringing together vaguely convincing-sounding sentences, among others. Like, just because it can create something vaguely superficially similar doesn't mean it's a good model for understanding consciousness at all. That's not how this works.
- jart 3y ago
  Are you saying the Turing test wasn't passed? If you think you understand machine learning well enough to dismiss it as a science because you know a buzzword from a feminist critique that also came out of Google Brain, then I'd say their inclusivity initiative certainly did its job. The reason it passes the Turing test is because the rest of us can't tell it apart from people like you.
  - logicprog 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - logicprog 3y ago
      TLDR: just because one person or even a group of them are gullible enough to be fooled by something doesn't mean that that thing is actually indistinguishable enough from consciousness to count as conscious for all intents and purposes, which is the idea behind the Turing Test. Humans tend to anthropomorphize, be trusting and gullible, and the Turing test is a short, limited scenario, with no real larger context in play. To actually figure out if something was indistinguishable enough from a conscious being to count as conscious, you'd have to have a lot of very in depth interacts with it over a long period of time, to really get a sense for how it thinks and operates. And just because something superficially looks conscious doesn't mean it will actually be able to do all the things conscious beings can — i.e., that it will actually be conscious. Nor does it mean that the processes going on under the hood will be the same as what goes on for conscious beings. Nor should bringing up philosophy of mind make you think I'm an LLM, and if it does, that probably means that you can't tell the difference between bullshit and abstraction, which says more about your intelligence than mine.