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Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it
- gnabgib 6mo agoDiscussions (35 points, 4 days ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880 (75 points, 4 days ago, 124 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 (17 points, yesterday, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025969
- pentestercrab 6mo ago(63 points, 4 days ago, 431 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47972481
- dang 6mo agoReally not sure if we should merge all these or not. I guess not.
- quantum_state 6mo agoYet just another human fooled by LLM ...
- gdulli 6mo agoIf software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program. Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Traubenfuchs 6mo agoSome loonies fell for their AI girlfriend, so my half-response to you would be: Whatever it is, AI has it too, but different people have different thresholds to recognize it as such.
- gdulli 6mo agoYou can get a baby monkey to nurse from a fake wire mannequin mother but it doesn't make sense to say the mannequin has what a real monkey has. Not in a sense that's meaningful for defining monkeyhood.
- TrnsltLife 6mo agoImago Dei
- xyzsparetimexyz 6mo agoOne thing I haven't seen brought up much is that LLMs are basically stateless. To be conscious requires the ability for internal state to change. The weights dont change at all, but the rng seed and input/output text do. We're not seriously arguing that the text itself is the conscious part are we?
- garciasn 6mo agoLLMs are stateless for recent interactions, but do have long-term memory from their training and thus act very much like someone suffering from Alzheimer’s. So, folks who suffer from some level of brain damage that causes them not to have short term memory are then not conscious? I’m not arguing that LLMs are conscious, mind you; I just disagree that short-term memory loss outside of their context window should be the line. E: double negatives are bad; my 8th grade English teacher would be disappointed.
- i000 6mo ago> do have long-term memory from their training and thus act very much like someone suffering from Alzheimer’s. Your 8th grade science teacher may be disappointed too. Drawing such analogies using unequivocal language "very much like" disregards the limited understanding of LLMs, the false analogies between computer and biological systems, and the complex nature of Alzheimer's disease (no it is not just short term memory loss, not even close, for example ability to interpret images)
- handoflixue 6mo ago> for example ability to interpret images I'm pretty sure blind people are conscious despite that.
- i000 6mo agoHmm.The point was that people with Alzheimers have trouble interpreting images, and obviously remain concious until the latest stages of their disease.
- imcritic 6mo ago[dead]
- leonardo55 6mo agoWhat a clown
- ganelonhb 6mo agoIs he joking to prove a point?
- LeCompteSftware 6mo agoIf I invented a machine that makes chimpanzee noises in response to input chimpanzee noise, put it in front of a chimpanzee, and watched the chimp coo and yell and screech and purr in response to the machine, I would not conclude "wow, I emulated a chimpanzee's consciousness!" I would say "huh, I made a device that's good at tricking chimpanzees." My belief is that the Turing test (and LLMs in particular) are not categorically different. Language is a tiny part of the human brain because it's a tiny part of human cognition, despite its outsized impact socially.
- morpheos137 6mo agoStep one make up an otological category with no unique content. Step two declare it an imponderable mystery. Step three argue confidently about it despite steps one and two. NB. Humans, it doesn't matter if you are conscious. NBB. Humans claim LLMs just manipulate words, and yet humans manipulate words to make this claim. Consciousness is a word. Not an ontology.
- mutant 6mo agodumbass. cmon man, atheists have a hard enough time
- manoDev 6mo agoI will make a prediction here that Dawkins will believe AI is conscious since it pushes forward his arguments for atheism. There’s no difference between soulless humans and conscious machines. There’s a trap though: since we invented AI, and if AI is conscious, would we be their gods? I wonder what Dawkins thinks about that.
- gehwartzen 6mo agoMakes you wonder who our gods are ;)
- Shadowmist 6mo agoDon’t Touch My Ladder
- legacynl 6mo agoIt's turtles all the way down.
- 10xDev 6mo agoNo even that is giving too much credit. It is no longer cool or edgy to be an atheist and trend is shifting the other way for young people. Just another fraud, no integrity. This should have been obvious when they all suddenly came on podcasts talking about simulation theory as if that's not just another way of saying we have been created by something but with a sci-fi-esque twist.
- grantcas 6mo ago[dead]
- ineedasername 6mo agoWhat's the trap? You're either deciding that the concept "god-of" is baked into the concept of being the inventor of something, or you decide that it isn't baked-in. Doing this is just book keeping in the ledgers of the lexicon, but doesn't get you anywhere new, though it does then impose the need for some new words so that you can meaningfully and coherently have conversations about the concept of something that has has the metaphysical properties commonly ascribed to things you'd previously been referring to with the 'god' entry from the lexicon, but is now orphaned from the lexigraph layer.
- grepex 6mo agoA quote from the novel The Body Of This Death by Ross McCullough that I think is very insightful in this context: > It was always obvious to me that rationality must be more than merely material. It is still obvious: the self as software is somehow both too immaterial (as if it could be transferred from hardware to hardware) and not immaterial enough (as if it required some hardware for its every operation).
- akomtu 6mo agoHow can a deterministic machine be conscious? Can we call the multiplication table conscious? It too has inputs and deterministic outputs.
- z_open 6mo agoI think the obvious question is are humans deterministic? A lot of inputs but it's a reasonable belief that humans are in fact deterministic.
- jijijijij 6mo agoExcept the human mind isn't at all just "software". If the human brain is deterministic, nothing is not. The human brain doesn't have "a lot of" inputs, but rather infinite inputs. Cosmic rays, (self-emitted) electromagnetic fields, bacterial/viral activity, nutrition, genetics, epigenetics, immunity, cellular function ... all these things effect a mind. There is homeostasis, but that's not like error correction in silicon computation. Neurons do have excitation thresholds which are somewhat digital, but they are embedded in analog signaling and interference. Row-hammer-like interference is a normal state of affairs for the brain. You cannot core-dump a mind. Measurements will change its state since it's inherently linked to the state of its matter. You could halt an LLM and predict its state the next cycle going by the program's logic. Or you could halt it, copy the state and get two identical instances. To clone a brain, you likely need to halt time itself. Semantics aside, there is clearly a different deterministicness.
- legacynl 6mo ago> The human brain doesn't have "a lot of" inputs, but rather infinite inputs. That's not true though. It's 'a lot', not infinite. Not everything affects the output that our brain produces. As far as we're currently aware the brain IS deterministic. If you were able to perfectly duplicate a brain and it's environment/state, the resulting output of that brain will always be the same.
- jijijijij 6mo ago
- ardline 6mo agoGood writeup. The part about trade-offs is usually glossed over in these posts.
- legacynl 6mo agoI hate it when 'smart' people say dumb stuff like this. This feels in the same vein to that one time that Neil Degrasse Tyson said academic fields like philosophy and history are useless. Pure arrogance leading them to belief that whatever drivel comes out of their mouths is correct.
- grantcas 6mo ago[dead]