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There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical mea
by digitaltrees 6mo ago
There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.
- ofjcihen 6mo agoWhat you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”. LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
- vidarh 6mo agoHow do I know you have this "self"? How do you know other humans do?
- ofjcihen 6mo ago[flagged]
- vidarh 6mo agoAd hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.
- vixen99 6mo agoIn other words, you don't think it's nice at all.
- vidarh 6mo agoYes, it is rather overt sarcasm.
- amenhotep 6mo agoIt's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.
- vidarh 6mo agoIt was an ad hominem, and so is this. I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.
- svachalek 6mo agoBy the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.
- vidarh 6mo agoIndeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
- root_axis 6mo agoBased on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
- kortex 6mo agoI'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
- root_axis 6mo agoActually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.
- digitaltrees 6mo agoThe sense of self may be an emergent property of the grammatical structure of language and the operations of memory. If an LLM, by necessity, operates with the linguistics of “you” and “me” and “others”. And documents that in a memory system and can reliably identify itself as a discrete entity from you and others then on what basis would we say it doesn’t have a sense of self?
- AlecSchueler 6mo ago> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness. Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?
- mrandish 6mo ago> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others? No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-generated text samples in its training data. LLMs never experienced what their textual output is describing. It's more similar to a pocket calculator calculating symbols in relation to other symbols, except scaled up massively.
- digitaltrees 6mo agoToddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?
- digitaltrees 6mo agoHow are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?
- mrandish 6mo agoI answered your questions in two other fairly detailed responses, so I'll link to them instead of re-posting much of the same text again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48000647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48002211
- brookst 6mo agoThese LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.
- vidarh 6mo agoSensory input is nothing but data.
- root_axis 6mo agoThat's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".
- digitaltrees 6mo agoSensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
- root_axis 6mo agoThey don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.
- arcfour 6mo agoThere are robots with AI controlling them, so it doesn't hold that they don't all have bodies. They can see, they can move. (I'm still not sure that that makes them conscious, or if we can even determine that at all, but I don't think that's a fair argument.)
- 6mo ago
- root_axis 6mo agoLLMs have no self, sensory experience, or experience of any kind. The idea doesn't even really make sense. Even if it did, the closest analogy to biological "experience" for an LLM would be the training process, since training at least vaguely resembles an environment where the model is receiving stimuli and reacting to it (i.e. human lived experience) - inference is just using the freeze-dried weights as a lookup table for token statistics. It's absurd to think that such a thing is conscious.
- digitaltrees 6mo agoWhat is different about the human neural network? People have given LLMs sensors and they respond to stimuli. The sense of self can be expressed as a linguistic artifact that results in an emergent pattern recognition of distinct entities. For example, merely my saying I am sitting under the tree with a friend I have encountered the self as a pointer to me as the speaker. There is evidence from early childhood development that language acquisition correlates to awareness of the self as distinct from other. And there is evidence from anthropology indicating that language structures shape exactly what the self is perceived to be. Your best argument is that the weights are set because that means it’s not a system that can self reflect and alter the experience. But I don’t see why that is necessary to have an experience. It seems that I can sense a light and feel its warmth regardless of whether my neurons change. One experience being identical to another doesn’t mean neither was an experience.