3 ms·

I'm a big fan of Connor Leahy, but his reaction feels a bit over-the-top, there. Noticing anomalies or inferring why an anomaly might be present doesn't imply s

I'm a big fan of Connor Leahy, but his reaction feels a bit over-the-top, there. Noticing anomalies or inferring why an anomaly might be present doesn't imply self-awareness.

IshKebab 3y ago
I agree. I'm firmly against the delusional people that think AI can never be self-aware or sentient because (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here). But this definitely isn't it. ChatGPT already points out things it notices that it wasn't specifically asked about. This is exactly the same.
- emptysongglass 3y ago
  > (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here). Neither of these arguments are nonsense. If you want to argue against these arguments do so, but do so convincingly without resorting to trivial attacks. The burden of proof is on those with extraordinary claims and the claim that AGI is already evinced by any number of models or that current implementations will lead to AGI are very extraordinary indeed.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    a proposition does not need to be proved nor falsified. It can exist as a hypothesis. I think that is what the parent commenter points to. I the current environment it is dangerous to be fixed in your opinion, at least until there are proper proofs of anything.
  - zingelshuher 3y ago
    If I may, what is 'AGI' you are talking about? And how can we set up a test which will show that 'thing' isn't GI while humans are. I'm asking because there are different opinions, some believe AGI should reproduce itself, have self-preservation instincts, have a body. To me even long term memory isn't obviously required. This is 'creature' feature. Which is irrelevant to GI. (actually it's more complicated)
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. I agree that it is an extraordinary claim that existing models demonstrate anything like AGI or sentience. I said it was delusional that AI can never be sentient or self-aware. That is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and nobody has any. People usually mention stochastic parrots and the Chinese room, but their arguments are very obviously flawed: 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot. 2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not.
    - emptysongglass 3y ago
      > You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. No you didn't, and that's why I didn't limit my rebuttal to existing models alone. > 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot. There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot. We have a large body of research to indicate emotion and thought are interdependent [1]. Cognition is not a simple, discrete quantity. > 2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not. It sounds like you are confusing things. The Chinese room argument is arguing intentionality, that it is a necessary prerequisite to real human cognition. We have zero evidence of any display of intention by these models. The rest of your argument here I honestly can't follow. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366118/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366118/
      - 3y ago
  - OrderlyTiamat 3y ago
    I've seen plenty of badly argued Chinese room debates- there is certainly a lot of bad arguments in those styles. You seem to interpret them as saying all of those arguments are bad, which is a fair interpretation, but I think their point stands if it refers to the nonsense versions of those arguments, which are everywhere on social media (hn, reddit, X, etc). By the way, I think referring to the burden of proof in discussions like this is likely never to improve the debate. All sides will simply claim the burden is on others for one reason or another, most of those reasons will be flawed- requiring discussions on those flaws and now we're even further from the actual points we want to discuss. I've just never seen it produce a fruitful discussion.
    - emptysongglass 3y ago
      If I say the sky is falling, the burden of proof is surely on me to provide evidence. I don't have time or the energy to make counter-claims to flat-earthers with no evidence. This is why we say the burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims. I'm happy to debate with those who provide sufficient evidence but it's not fair to expect I put effort into rebuttals of claims of "nonsense" with no evidence.
      - ben_w 3y ago
        I have seen only one falsifiable test for if a mind actually has subjective conscious experience rather than just saying it does, and even that wasn't one which we can apply to humans or other animals, only AI, which means it will still be an open question if that test ever passes. Saying "it is" or "it isn't" at this point is like early sci-fi speculations about the inhabitants of the Moon, Mars, and Venus — we know our own experience of qualia, but we don't understand how and why we got it, so we don't know what to look for in animals, let alone AI.
Kinrany 3y ago
Self-awareness is not a very interesting property: a server that knows the domain name it is hosted on is arguably as self-aware as anything, qualitatively speaking
- rthrfrd 3y ago
  I think it's useful to distinguish between self-awareness as mutable or immutable. In which sense I agree that both your server and this LLM have an immutable self-awareness which is indeed not very interesting. I'll only start taking any talk of self-awareness seriously once online learning is happening.
- MattPalmer1086 3y ago
  Then you have not understood what the term self awareness refers to. What is the self that is aware? Do you believe that the server is aware of its own existence?
  - Kinrany 3y ago
    In what sense would it not be aware of its own existence if it was telling users what to say to itself to retrieve a file?
    - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
      In what sense would it be?
      - Kinrany 3y ago
        It is capable of addressing and describing itself from the outside, of talking to itself while knowing that that is what it is doing, and of intentionally doing things that involve other entities being aware of it.
        MattPalmer1086 3y ago
        I think we have a very different definition of knowing, awareness and intention. But sure, if you define self awareness to mean such a small thing, then I guess there is no problem for you. Which in my view is a shame, because I think you are missing out on some bigger concepts.
glimshe 3y ago
How are we going to detect the border between self-awareness and non self-awareness? Let's say, animal-like self awareness?
- rthrfrd 3y ago
  I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Although that would be really useful in some ways, I'm not sure[0] how that distinction helps with self-awareness in particular? [0] from reading a summary on the topic rather than watching the videos, I don't have time for 2.25 hours of video right now
    - rthrfrd 3y ago
      Fair, I post it as a starting point to establish ones own interpretation of self-awareness, so as not to wade into the philosophical rabbit hole of bringing my own definition. The reason I think it can be useful as that, is because I see competency and comprehension as requiring 2 very different levels of "self".
- taberiand 3y ago
  Given we know the AI isn't self-aware, if our current definition doesn't suffice we'll just have to keep refining the definition each time the model surpasses it until neither artificial nor human intelligence can.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    > Given we know the AI isn't self-aware That's presuming the conclusion. Part of the US culture war right now is whether or not embryos and foetuses count as people. I think it's obvious they don't, but am I right? And in the opposite direction, 160 years ago in the USA, or in my lifetime(!) in South Africa, you'd see people making those kinds of claims about people with too much melanin in their skin.
wongarsu 3y ago
Noticing anomalies isn't self-awareness, but sentences like "I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention" are indicators of self awareness. Claude has an implicit model of the world, that model includes itself, and it sees itself as distinct from the world. That's all that self awareness is. If it had a physical form it might even recognize itself in a mirror I'm on board with claiming that self awareness doesn't mean something is alive, and only implies very basic reasoning. I certainly don't think Claude is a person or even an animal. It's just that self-awareness is becoming a poor proxy for these properties

I'm a big fan of Connor Leahy, but his reaction feels a bit over-the-top, there. Noticing anomalies or inferring why an anomaly might be present doesn't imply self-awareness.

IshKebab 3y ago

I agree. I'm firmly against the delusional people that think AI can never be self-aware or sentient because (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here). But this definitely isn't it. ChatGPT already points out things it notices that it wasn't specifically asked about. This is exactly the same.

emptysongglass 3y ago
> (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here). Neither of these arguments are nonsense. If you want to argue against these arguments do so, but do so convincingly without resorting to trivial attacks. The burden of proof is on those with extraordinary claims and the claim that AGI is already evinced by any number of models or that current implementations will lead to AGI are very extraordinary indeed.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  a proposition does not need to be proved nor falsified. It can exist as a hypothesis. I think that is what the parent commenter points to. I the current environment it is dangerous to be fixed in your opinion, at least until there are proper proofs of anything.
- zingelshuher 3y ago
  If I may, what is 'AGI' you are talking about? And how can we set up a test which will show that 'thing' isn't GI while humans are. I'm asking because there are different opinions, some believe AGI should reproduce itself, have self-preservation instincts, have a body. To me even long term memory isn't obviously required. This is 'creature' feature. Which is irrelevant to GI. (actually it's more complicated)
- IshKebab 3y ago
  You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. I agree that it is an extraordinary claim that existing models demonstrate anything like AGI or sentience. I said it was delusional that AI can never be sentient or self-aware. That is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and nobody has any. People usually mention stochastic parrots and the Chinese room, but their arguments are very obviously flawed: 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot. 2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    > You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. No you didn't, and that's why I didn't limit my rebuttal to existing models alone. > 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot. There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot. We have a large body of research to indicate emotion and thought are interdependent [1]. Cognition is not a simple, discrete quantity. > 2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not. It sounds like you are confusing things. The Chinese room argument is arguing intentionality, that it is a necessary prerequisite to real human cognition. We have zero evidence of any display of intention by these models. The rest of your argument here I honestly can't follow. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366118/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366118/
    - 3y ago
- OrderlyTiamat 3y ago
  I've seen plenty of badly argued Chinese room debates- there is certainly a lot of bad arguments in those styles. You seem to interpret them as saying all of those arguments are bad, which is a fair interpretation, but I think their point stands if it refers to the nonsense versions of those arguments, which are everywhere on social media (hn, reddit, X, etc). By the way, I think referring to the burden of proof in discussions like this is likely never to improve the debate. All sides will simply claim the burden is on others for one reason or another, most of those reasons will be flawed- requiring discussions on those flaws and now we're even further from the actual points we want to discuss. I've just never seen it produce a fruitful discussion.
  - emptysongglass 3y ago
    If I say the sky is falling, the burden of proof is surely on me to provide evidence. I don't have time or the energy to make counter-claims to flat-earthers with no evidence. This is why we say the burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims. I'm happy to debate with those who provide sufficient evidence but it's not fair to expect I put effort into rebuttals of claims of "nonsense" with no evidence.
    - ben_w 3y ago
      I have seen only one falsifiable test for if a mind actually has subjective conscious experience rather than just saying it does, and even that wasn't one which we can apply to humans or other animals, only AI, which means it will still be an open question if that test ever passes. Saying "it is" or "it isn't" at this point is like early sci-fi speculations about the inhabitants of the Moon, Mars, and Venus — we know our own experience of qualia, but we don't understand how and why we got it, so we don't know what to look for in animals, let alone AI.

Kinrany 3y ago

Self-awareness is not a very interesting property: a server that knows the domain name it is hosted on is arguably as self-aware as anything, qualitatively speaking

rthrfrd 3y ago
I think it's useful to distinguish between self-awareness as mutable or immutable. In which sense I agree that both your server and this LLM have an immutable self-awareness which is indeed not very interesting. I'll only start taking any talk of self-awareness seriously once online learning is happening.
MattPalmer1086 3y ago
Then you have not understood what the term self awareness refers to. What is the self that is aware? Do you believe that the server is aware of its own existence?
- Kinrany 3y ago
  In what sense would it not be aware of its own existence if it was telling users what to say to itself to retrieve a file?
  - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    In what sense would it be?
    - Kinrany 3y ago
      It is capable of addressing and describing itself from the outside, of talking to itself while knowing that that is what it is doing, and of intentionally doing things that involve other entities being aware of it.
      - MattPalmer1086 3y ago
        I think we have a very different definition of knowing, awareness and intention. But sure, if you define self awareness to mean such a small thing, then I guess there is no problem for you. Which in my view is a shame, because I think you are missing out on some bigger concepts.

glimshe 3y ago

How are we going to detect the border between self-awareness and non self-awareness? Let's say, animal-like self awareness?

rthrfrd 3y ago
I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0
- ben_w 3y ago
  Although that would be really useful in some ways, I'm not sure[0] how that distinction helps with self-awareness in particular? [0] from reading a summary on the topic rather than watching the videos, I don't have time for 2.25 hours of video right now
  - rthrfrd 3y ago
    Fair, I post it as a starting point to establish ones own interpretation of self-awareness, so as not to wade into the philosophical rabbit hole of bringing my own definition. The reason I think it can be useful as that, is because I see competency and comprehension as requiring 2 very different levels of "self".
taberiand 3y ago
Given we know the AI isn't self-aware, if our current definition doesn't suffice we'll just have to keep refining the definition each time the model surpasses it until neither artificial nor human intelligence can.
- ben_w 3y ago
  > Given we know the AI isn't self-aware That's presuming the conclusion. Part of the US culture war right now is whether or not embryos and foetuses count as people. I think it's obvious they don't, but am I right? And in the opposite direction, 160 years ago in the USA, or in my lifetime(!) in South Africa, you'd see people making those kinds of claims about people with too much melanin in their skin.

wongarsu 3y ago

Noticing anomalies isn't self-awareness, but sentences like "I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention" are indicators of self awareness. Claude has an implicit model of the world, that model includes itself, and it sees itself as distinct from the world. That's all that self awareness is. If it had a physical form it might even recognize itself in a mirror I'm on board with claiming that self awareness doesn't mean something is alive, and only implies very basic reasoning. I certainly don't think Claude is a person or even an animal. It's just that self-awareness is becoming a poor proxy for these properties