3 ms·

Its software. Software is not conscious.

vixen99 6mo ago
I do appreciate how AI has been taught to spell properly as in the difference between its and it's. Here, initially I thought you'd left out the apostrophe in its, but then I realized you might be saying 'the reason it is not conscious is because of -its- software - the latter not being conscious. Context and interpretation are rather critical. (I know - a truism!)
thebruce87m 6mo ago
If your brain is hardware then what are your thoughts? Is a sperm conscious? Or an egg? When they come together the eventual brain is not conscious immediately.
- gehsty 6mo ago
  LLMs are word prediction engines. They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.
  - zwischenzug 6mo ago
    How do we know that that isn't essentially how our minds work?
    - gehsty 6mo ago
      It probably is, but the difference is that the signals are happening in a persons and not a gpu.
  - charlie90 6mo ago
    The human brain is an electrical signal prediction machine. Anything that looks like intelligence will look like a prediction machine because the alternative is logic being hardcoded apriori.
  - thebruce87m 6mo ago
    > They clearly are not conscious Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing. > LLMs are word prediction engines Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.
    - gehsty 6mo ago
      I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.
      - thebruce87m 6mo ago
        Life can be “switched off” - death is the ultimate off. Some life can be frozen and unfrozen with no ill effects. And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
        gehsty 6mo ago
        I don’t know what you are saying here? That a program running on a GPU in a data center is alive because it can predict what words to say next? I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.
        thebruce87m 6mo ago
        I don’t think you are having the same conversation as the rest of us here. Think on what the definition of consciousness is and how we will prove that a machine has it or not. I do not think that the current versions of AI are conscious but that doesn’t mean we will never achieve this and face the same questions of how to prove it. Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.

I do appreciate how AI has been taught to spell properly as in the difference between its and it's. Here, initially I thought you'd left out the apostrophe in its, but then I realized you might be saying 'the reason it is not conscious is because of -its- software - the latter not being conscious. Context and interpretation are rather critical. (I know - a truism!)

thebruce87m 6mo ago

If your brain is hardware then what are your thoughts? Is a sperm conscious? Or an egg? When they come together the eventual brain is not conscious immediately.

gehsty 6mo ago
LLMs are word prediction engines. They clearly are not conscious, they are just guessing what words should come next.
- zwischenzug 6mo ago
  How do we know that that isn't essentially how our minds work?
  - gehsty 6mo ago
    It probably is, but the difference is that the signals are happening in a persons and not a gpu.
- charlie90 6mo ago
  The human brain is an electrical signal prediction machine. Anything that looks like intelligence will look like a prediction machine because the alternative is logic being hardcoded apriori.
- thebruce87m 6mo ago
  > They clearly are not conscious Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing. > LLMs are word prediction engines Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.
  - gehsty 6mo ago
    I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.
    - thebruce87m 6mo ago
      Life can be “switched off” - death is the ultimate off. Some life can be frozen and unfrozen with no ill effects. And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?
      - gehsty 6mo ago
        I don’t know what you are saying here? That a program running on a GPU in a data center is alive because it can predict what words to say next? I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.
        thebruce87m 6mo ago
        I don’t think you are having the same conversation as the rest of us here. Think on what the definition of consciousness is and how we will prove that a machine has it or not. I do not think that the current versions of AI are conscious but that doesn’t mean we will never achieve this and face the same questions of how to prove it. Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.