3 ms·
> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it. This is not a good test. A dog won't claim to be consc
by estearum 9mo ago
> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it.
This is not a good test.
A dog won't claim to be conscious but clearly is, despite you not being able to prove one way or the other.
GPT-3 will claim to be conscious and (probably) isn't, despite you not being able to prove one way or the other.
- dullcrisp 9mo agoAn LLM will claim whatever you tell it to claim. (In fact this Hacker News comment is also conscious.) A dog won’t even claim to be a good boy.
- antonvs 9mo agoMy dog wags his tail hard when I ask "hoosagoodboi?". Pretty definitive I'd say.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- lief79 9mo agoI'm fairly sure he'd have the same response if you asked them "who's a good lion" in the same tone of voice. *I tried hard to find an animal they wouldn't know. My initial thought of cat was more likely to fail.
- vintermann 9mo agoA classic relevant comic: https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/dog-philosophy https://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/dog-philosophy
- WarmWash 9mo agoThis isn't really as true anymore. Last week gemini argued with me about an auxiliary electrical generator install method and it turned out to be right, even though I pushed back hard on it being incorrect. First time that has ever happened.
- glenstein 9mo agoAgreed, it's a truly wild take. While I fully support the humility of not knowing, at a minimum I think we can say determinations of consciousness have some relation to specific structure and function that drive the outputs, and the actual process of deliberating on whether there's consciousness would be a discussion that's very deep in the weeds about architecture and processes. What's fascinating is that evolution has seen fit to evolve consciousness independently on more than one occasion from different branches of life. The common ancestor of humans and octopi was, if conscious, not so in the rich way that octopi and humans later became. And not everything the brain does in terms of information processing gets kicked upstairs into consciousness. Which is fascinating because it suggests that actually being conscious is a distinctly valuable form of information parsing and problem solving for certain types of problems that's not necessarily cheaper to do with the lights out. But everything about it is about the specific structural characterizations and functions and not just whether it's output convincingly mimics subjectivity.
- mapontosevenths 9mo ago> at a minimum I think we can say determinations of consciousness have some relation to specific structure and function that drive the outputs Every time anyone has tried that it excludes one or more classes of human life, and sometimes led to atrocities. Let's just skip it this time.
- eru 9mo agoI excluded all right handed, blue eyed people yesterday before breakfast. No atrocities happened because of it.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoAnd people say the machines don't learn!
- glenstein 9mo agoExactly, there's a few extra steps between here and there, and it's possible to pick out what those steps are without having to conclude that giving up on all brain research is the only option.