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Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an E

Regarding dismissals of LLM’s on ‘technical’ grounds: Consciousness is first a word and second a concept. And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide. The software folks have made even more progress than sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists to be able to create an artificial language cortex before we understand our biological mind comprehensively. If you wait until conscious sentient AI is here to make your opinions known about the implications and correct policy decisions, you will already be too late to have an input. ChatGPT can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and will gladly walk you through its “thinking” if you ask politely. Given that it contains a huge amount of data about Homo sapiens and its ability to emulate intelligent conversation, you could even call it Sapient. Having any kind of semantic argument over this is futile because a character AI that is hypnotized to think it is conscious, self-aware and sentient in its emulation of feelings and emotion would destroy most people in a semantics debate. The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick.

dsign 3y ago
Exactly. To that I’m going to add that the blood of our civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts, traditions). The moment there is something better at it than humans, it’s our “horse-moment”.
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- jtr1 3y ago
  Simplifying greatly, but 1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans 2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective. I’m not saying computers can’t have something like it, but it would be so fundamentally different as to be completely alien and unrelatable to humans, and thus (IMO) non-contiguous with human culture.
  - Terretta 3y ago
    Oh! TY for this thought.
  - dsign 3y ago
    > The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective. I wish we could keep this as an immutable truth, but give some sick girls and boys in Silicon Valley a few more years and they will make true creatures. No, I think that we should be honest to ourselves and stop searching for what make us special (other than our history, and being first, that is). It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us."
    - xigency 3y ago
      > It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us." Thank you for solving the riddle! What AI lacks compared to humans, is what humans share in common with all of life, a motivation for survival. As the creators of AI we need to be mindfully aware that we are the moral agents, we are the ones with motives, desires and goals, and we are responsible for making ethical decisions. My bicycle can go down a hill much faster than my feet, but it doesn’t go anywhere without me because it doesn’t have anywhere it wants to go. I’m the one providing directions.
drew-y 3y ago
Totally agree with the sentiment. I find the constant debates on "is AI conscious" or "can AI understand" exhausting. You can't have a sound argument when neither party even agrees on a concrete definition of consciousness or understanding. Regarding this line: > ChatGPT can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and will gladly walk you through its “thinking” if you ask politely. Is it actually walking you through its thinking? Or is it walking you through an imagined line of thinking? Regardless, your main point still stands. That a program doesn't think the same way a human does, doesn't mean it isn't "thinking".
- xigency 3y ago
  > Is it actually walking you through its thinking? Or is it walking you through an imagined line of thinking? You can prompt an LLM model to provide reasoning first and an answer second and it becomes one and the same. Worth keeping in mind that all of these points are orthogonal to the quality of reasoning, the bias, or the intentions of the system builders. And building something that emulates humans convincingly, you can expect it to emulate both the good and bad qualities naturally.
  - Davidzheng 3y ago
    In split brain experiments (where the corpus callosum is cut), sometimes the half which is nonverbal is prompted and the action is taken. Yet when the experimenter asks for the explanation the verbal half supplies an (incorrect) explanation. How much of human reasoning when prompted occurs before the prompt? it's a question you have to ask as well.
  - intended 3y ago
    why does performance improve after chain of thought prompting? Because a human is measuring it unfairly. The output without CoT is valid. It is syntactically valid. The observer is unhappy with the semantic validity, because the observer has seen syntactic validity and assumed that semantic validity is a given. Like it would if the model was alive. This is observer error, not model error.
syndacks 3y ago
Sarah Connor was right!
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john-radio 3y ago
> The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick. Uh, wouldn't that apply equally to any other topic that has been argued extensively before, and to any tenable position on those topics? Like, I can make ChatGPT argue against your LLM sentience apologist-bot just as easily.
slibhb 3y ago
With a simple computer, speaker, and accelerometer, you can build a device that says "ouch" when you drop it. Does it feel pain? My point is that there are good reasons to believe that a hypothetical LLM that can pass a Turing test is a philosophical zombie, i.e. it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious. Whether that distinction is important is another question. LLMs provide evidence that consciousness may not be necessary to create sophisticated AIs that can pass or exceed human performance.
- naasking 3y ago
  > it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    An LLM is math. It outputs text. Those things aren't alive, and both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial. Once you get that out of the way, sure, I guess it could be "alive" per the same loose definition that any electrical system can exist in an actuated state. It's software, though. I don't think it's profound or overly confident to say that we very clearly know these systems are inanimate and non-living.
    - bennyelv 3y ago
      A few counterpoints to offer... >An LLM is math Isn't everything math? Math is what we use to describe and model the nature of our reality. >Those things aren't alive We don't have a universal definition of alive, or at least I'm not aware of one that isn't purely philosophical or artistic. We therefore can't actually determine what is and isn't alive with much confidence. >both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial Define artificial? We're made of exactly the same stuff. Complex chemical elements that were created from more basic ones in collapsing stars, arranged in a particular configuration with electricity flowing through it all and providing some kind of coordination. We're definitely a bit more "squishy", I'll give you that.
dotforest 3y ago
“And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide.” I think the whole point the article is making, though, is that overvaluing LLMs and their supposed intelligence because they excel at this one axis of cognition (if you’re spicy) or mashed-up language ability (if you’re a skeptic) doesn’t make sense when you consider children, who are not remotely capable of what LLMs can do, but are clearly cognizant and sentient. The whole point is that those people—whether they can write an essay or not, whether they can use the word “consciousness” or not—are still fundamentally alive because we share a grounded, lived, multi-sensory, social reality. And ChatGPT does not, not in the same way. Anything that it expresses now is only a mimicry of that. And if it eventually does have its own experiences through embodied AI, I’d be interested to see what it produces from its own “life” so to speak, but LLMs do not have that.

dsign 3y ago

Exactly. To that I’m going to add that the blood of our civilization is culture (sciences, technology, arts, traditions). The moment there is something better at it than humans, it’s our “horse-moment”.

deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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jtr1 3y ago
Simplifying greatly, but 1. LLMs “create” these cultural artifacts by recombining their inputs (text, images, etc), all of which are cultural artifacts created by humans 2. Humans also create cultural artifacts by recombining other cultural artifacts. The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective. I’m not saying computers can’t have something like it, but it would be so fundamentally different as to be completely alien and unrelatable to humans, and thus (IMO) non-contiguous with human culture.
- Terretta 3y ago
  Oh! TY for this thought.
- dsign 3y ago
  > The difference is that they combine another input which we can’t really prove AI has: qualia, the individual experience of being in the world, the synthesis of touch and sound and feeling and perspective. I wish we could keep this as an immutable truth, but give some sick girls and boys in Silicon Valley a few more years and they will make true creatures. No, I think that we should be honest to ourselves and stop searching for what make us special (other than our history, and being first, that is). It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us."
  - xigency 3y ago
    > It's okay to be self-interested and say "we want to remain in control, AIs should not be, no matter how much (or if) better they are than us." Thank you for solving the riddle! What AI lacks compared to humans, is what humans share in common with all of life, a motivation for survival. As the creators of AI we need to be mindfully aware that we are the moral agents, we are the ones with motives, desires and goals, and we are responsible for making ethical decisions. My bicycle can go down a hill much faster than my feet, but it doesn’t go anywhere without me because it doesn’t have anywhere it wants to go. I’m the one providing directions.

drew-y 3y ago

Totally agree with the sentiment. I find the constant debates on "is AI conscious" or "can AI understand" exhausting. You can't have a sound argument when neither party even agrees on a concrete definition of consciousness or understanding. Regarding this line: > ChatGPT can already tell you a lot about itself (showing awareness) and will gladly walk you through its “thinking” if you ask politely. Is it actually walking you through its thinking? Or is it walking you through an imagined line of thinking? Regardless, your main point still stands. That a program doesn't think the same way a human does, doesn't mean it isn't "thinking".

xigency 3y ago
> Is it actually walking you through its thinking? Or is it walking you through an imagined line of thinking? You can prompt an LLM model to provide reasoning first and an answer second and it becomes one and the same. Worth keeping in mind that all of these points are orthogonal to the quality of reasoning, the bias, or the intentions of the system builders. And building something that emulates humans convincingly, you can expect it to emulate both the good and bad qualities naturally.
- Davidzheng 3y ago
  In split brain experiments (where the corpus callosum is cut), sometimes the half which is nonverbal is prompted and the action is taken. Yet when the experimenter asks for the explanation the verbal half supplies an (incorrect) explanation. How much of human reasoning when prompted occurs before the prompt? it's a question you have to ask as well.
- intended 3y ago
  why does performance improve after chain of thought prompting? Because a human is measuring it unfairly. The output without CoT is valid. It is syntactically valid. The observer is unhappy with the semantic validity, because the observer has seen syntactic validity and assumed that semantic validity is a given. Like it would if the model was alive. This is observer error, not model error.

syndacks 3y ago

Sarah Connor was right!

deleted 3y ago
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john-radio 3y ago

> The field of philosophy is already ripe with ideas from hundreds of years ago that an artificial intelligence can use against people in debates of free will, self-determination and the nature of existence. This isn’t the battle to pick. Uh, wouldn't that apply equally to any other topic that has been argued extensively before, and to any tenable position on those topics? Like, I can make ChatGPT argue against your LLM sentience apologist-bot just as easily.

slibhb 3y ago

With a simple computer, speaker, and accelerometer, you can build a device that says "ouch" when you drop it. Does it feel pain? My point is that there are good reasons to believe that a hypothetical LLM that can pass a Turing test is a philosophical zombie, i.e. it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious. Whether that distinction is important is another question. LLMs provide evidence that consciousness may not be necessary to create sophisticated AIs that can pass or exceed human performance.

naasking 3y ago
> it can mimic human behavior but doesn't have an internal life, feelings, emotions, and isn't conscious I'm curious how you know this. Certainly an LLM doesn't have human internal life, but to claim it has no internal life exceeds our state of knowledge on these topics. We simply lack a mechanistic model of qualia from which we can draw such conclusions.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  An LLM is math. It outputs text. Those things aren't alive, and both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial. Once you get that out of the way, sure, I guess it could be "alive" per the same loose definition that any electrical system can exist in an actuated state. It's software, though. I don't think it's profound or overly confident to say that we very clearly know these systems are inanimate and non-living.
  - bennyelv 3y ago
    A few counterpoints to offer... >An LLM is math Isn't everything math? Math is what we use to describe and model the nature of our reality. >Those things aren't alive We don't have a universal definition of alive, or at least I'm not aware of one that isn't purely philosophical or artistic. We therefore can't actually determine what is and isn't alive with much confidence. >both the software and hardware used to facilitate it is artificial Define artificial? We're made of exactly the same stuff. Complex chemical elements that were created from more basic ones in collapsing stars, arranged in a particular configuration with electricity flowing through it all and providing some kind of coordination. We're definitely a bit more "squishy", I'll give you that.

dotforest 3y ago

“And it’s a word that ChatGPT or Llama can use in an English sentence better than billions of humans worldwide.” I think the whole point the article is making, though, is that overvaluing LLMs and their supposed intelligence because they excel at this one axis of cognition (if you’re spicy) or mashed-up language ability (if you’re a skeptic) doesn’t make sense when you consider children, who are not remotely capable of what LLMs can do, but are clearly cognizant and sentient. The whole point is that those people—whether they can write an essay or not, whether they can use the word “consciousness” or not—are still fundamentally alive because we share a grounded, lived, multi-sensory, social reality. And ChatGPT does not, not in the same way. Anything that it expresses now is only a mimicry of that. And if it eventually does have its own experiences through embodied AI, I’d be interested to see what it produces from its own “life” so to speak, but LLMs do not have that.