4 ms·

>Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity You need evidence to make the positive claim tha

by Jtarii 1mo ago

>Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity You need evidence to make the positive claim that LLMs do not posses any form of consciousness.

roughly 1mo ago
Well, our current set of evidence is that it’s a mechanistic mechanical algorithm with an RNG embedded in it and we can both get it to repeatedly produce the same output for the same input and also get it to repeatedly do absolutely nothing at all, which are not characteristics we usually find in objects evincing consciousness. LLMs bear absolutely none of the traits we’ve come to recognize as the external hallmarks of consciousness in biological organisms, nor anything that would seem analogous in a non-biological substrate. That said, we don’t have a rigorous definition of consciousness that includes the actual phenomenology of consciousness, so I daresay if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary, I think the impetus is on you to define some version of consciousness that isn’t also satisfied by a book or a movie.
- Jtarii 1mo ago
  I would agree that LLMs aren't much like the human brain, that doesn't prove that consciousness is not occurring. Does a fruit fly experience anything? If a microscopic insect can experience something, why can't a CPU? >if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary Well there is neither any evidence that suggests LLMs are not conscious, and I also never asserted that they are. If I had to guess I would say that any information processing system will produce some kind of conscious experience, but I ultimately have literally no idea.
  - roughly 1mo ago
    There’s plenty. First, when we say “LLM”, what are we referring to? What is the entity that would be conscious in this case? The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions. There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.
    - Jtarii 1mo ago
      >The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences I'm not going to change my beliefs or how I think about interesting questions just because its the "socially conscious" thing to do. >There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people. It seems like you are highly emotionally invested in this and that is precluding you from open engagement with the topic.
      - roughly 1mo ago
        You're not engaging with the topic. Engaging with the topic is where one either asks questions and listens to the answer or actually seeks to increase one's knowledge on the topic. You're just saying things. That's lazy. And, you're welcome to do what you want to do, it's your god given right to stay as ignorant as you want about any particular topic, but that comes with consequences. If you want to call that being socially conscious, sure, you do you, but if you're interested in why people keep getting annoyed at your loud proclamations of ignorance which you're trying to proffer as evidence of a curious mind, well, that's why.
        RussianBot9580 1mo ago
        It's just as intellectually lazy to leave "consciousness" undefined and proceed to claim that "X cannot be consciousness" because of social reasons. That's the definition of a circular argument. In the same vein, airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings. As for ignorance: have you tried to make an LLM produce the same output for the same input (as you state above)? Give it a shot, you'll be surprised.
        roughly 1mo ago
        I’m not leaving consciousness undefined. I provided a definition and asserted LLMs were not conscious by that definition. I solicited an alternate definition and was given none. If you’d like to claim the LLM is conscious, you need to define what you mean, for both “the LLM” and “is conscious,” because it’s not passing any of our existing bars for consciousness, and the only thing you can point to are characteristics also present in other objects we don’t consider conscious, so again, the burden of proof is in fact on you and that other fellow to provide some definitions here, because as sits you and the other commenter are just saying shit and refusing to engage with any kind of rigor. And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument. You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.
- hardbass 1mo ago
  it is a physical system, yes. So is our brain. I do not understand why this pointless fact is given out as an argument. Either explicitly say you think consciousness is supernatural or say what physical elements are missing in your view that makes you feel AI cannot be conscious.
tavavex 1mo ago
Consciousness is a slippery word that is notoriously difficult to debate over. But often, people use 'consciousness' as a shortcut or a familiar word to describe a more complex idea. The point they're driving across isn't about the precise definition of the word 'consciousness', but about people treating LLMs as if they were actual human beings, assigning them all the traits and behaviors they would expect of a human.
FuckButtons 1mo ago
I would argue, that the null hypothesis is that it is not, and that anyone claiming that there is a mote of consciousness are the ones with the burden of proof.
- yreg 1mo ago
  The null hypothesis is that we don't know jack shit about consciousness. Any claim of certainty seems extraordinary to me and I want to hear the evidence.
  - randomImmigrant 1mo ago
    We know quite a lot about consciousness. You may not, but we know enough to know the informational dynamics in a brain are vastly different from an LLMs. Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.
    - Jtarii 1mo ago
      Can we conclusively say one way or another if an ant has a conscious experience?
      - randomImmigrant 1mo ago
        Yes we can say it has conscious experience. The content and depth of it, we cannot yet fully grok, and of course, what it feels like from inside the ant is something we never will know.
        Jtarii 1mo ago
        Okay, what about a virus.
        randomImmigrant 1mo ago
        Nope. It’s got a genuine off state, when it’s out of a cell, where it lacks agency. It’s dormant and can be taken up by a cell only by chance, not through its own active efforts. It bears none of the descriptive hallmarks of consciousness, nor is there any internal physical dynamic inherent to a virus. By definition it needs a host to start having a dynamic, and ant that point, it anctivates its drive, which is singular: reproduction and transmission, which it must balance. And this is where you see viruses show the beginning of agency, in the making of this choice. They do show some signs of sensing their environment , even communicating with each other, through a process called quorum sensing, to decide if they should follow a lysogeny (integrate and stay quiet) or lysis (rapidly replicate and destroy the cell). Note, this requires a host, so in so far as we can talk of a viral consciousness, it’s restricted to finding a suitable host. There’s also recent work on viruses upon host entry showing some sensing. Usually a single molecule for which they already have a receptor. So you can begin to see the thin levels of awareness a virus has. But it still can’t do anything on its own beyond deciding to not infect. I’d argue viruses are right at the edge of consciousness, just as they are right at the edge of life. They can hijack life and demonstrate much more life like properties, including a proto consciousness. But they have no internal clock. They are always sensing the environment through multiple rich channels, nor do they have an active biochemistry they need to maintain when they’re dormant. Consciousness adjacent? Consciousness-compatible? Both seem to fit viruses. And also LLMs, funnily enough.

by Jtarii 1mo ago

roughly 1mo ago

Well, our current set of evidence is that it’s a mechanistic mechanical algorithm with an RNG embedded in it and we can both get it to repeatedly produce the same output for the same input and also get it to repeatedly do absolutely nothing at all, which are not characteristics we usually find in objects evincing consciousness. LLMs bear absolutely none of the traits we’ve come to recognize as the external hallmarks of consciousness in biological organisms, nor anything that would seem analogous in a non-biological substrate. That said, we don’t have a rigorous definition of consciousness that includes the actual phenomenology of consciousness, so I daresay if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary, I think the impetus is on you to define some version of consciousness that isn’t also satisfied by a book or a movie.

Jtarii 1mo ago
I would agree that LLMs aren't much like the human brain, that doesn't prove that consciousness is not occurring. Does a fruit fly experience anything? If a microscopic insect can experience something, why can't a CPU? >if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary Well there is neither any evidence that suggests LLMs are not conscious, and I also never asserted that they are. If I had to guess I would say that any information processing system will produce some kind of conscious experience, but I ultimately have literally no idea.
- roughly 1mo ago
  There’s plenty. First, when we say “LLM”, what are we referring to? What is the entity that would be conscious in this case? The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions. There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.
  - Jtarii 1mo ago
    >The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences I'm not going to change my beliefs or how I think about interesting questions just because its the "socially conscious" thing to do. >There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people. It seems like you are highly emotionally invested in this and that is precluding you from open engagement with the topic.
    - roughly 1mo ago
      You're not engaging with the topic. Engaging with the topic is where one either asks questions and listens to the answer or actually seeks to increase one's knowledge on the topic. You're just saying things. That's lazy. And, you're welcome to do what you want to do, it's your god given right to stay as ignorant as you want about any particular topic, but that comes with consequences. If you want to call that being socially conscious, sure, you do you, but if you're interested in why people keep getting annoyed at your loud proclamations of ignorance which you're trying to proffer as evidence of a curious mind, well, that's why.
      - RussianBot9580 1mo ago
        It's just as intellectually lazy to leave "consciousness" undefined and proceed to claim that "X cannot be consciousness" because of social reasons. That's the definition of a circular argument. In the same vein, airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings. As for ignorance: have you tried to make an LLM produce the same output for the same input (as you state above)? Give it a shot, you'll be surprised.
        roughly 1mo ago
        I’m not leaving consciousness undefined. I provided a definition and asserted LLMs were not conscious by that definition. I solicited an alternate definition and was given none. If you’d like to claim the LLM is conscious, you need to define what you mean, for both “the LLM” and “is conscious,” because it’s not passing any of our existing bars for consciousness, and the only thing you can point to are characteristics also present in other objects we don’t consider conscious, so again, the burden of proof is in fact on you and that other fellow to provide some definitions here, because as sits you and the other commenter are just saying shit and refusing to engage with any kind of rigor. And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument. You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.
hardbass 1mo ago
it is a physical system, yes. So is our brain. I do not understand why this pointless fact is given out as an argument. Either explicitly say you think consciousness is supernatural or say what physical elements are missing in your view that makes you feel AI cannot be conscious.

tavavex 1mo ago

Consciousness is a slippery word that is notoriously difficult to debate over. But often, people use 'consciousness' as a shortcut or a familiar word to describe a more complex idea. The point they're driving across isn't about the precise definition of the word 'consciousness', but about people treating LLMs as if they were actual human beings, assigning them all the traits and behaviors they would expect of a human.

FuckButtons 1mo ago

I would argue, that the null hypothesis is that it is not, and that anyone claiming that there is a mote of consciousness are the ones with the burden of proof.

yreg 1mo ago
The null hypothesis is that we don't know jack shit about consciousness. Any claim of certainty seems extraordinary to me and I want to hear the evidence.
- randomImmigrant 1mo ago
  We know quite a lot about consciousness. You may not, but we know enough to know the informational dynamics in a brain are vastly different from an LLMs. Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.
  - Jtarii 1mo ago
    Can we conclusively say one way or another if an ant has a conscious experience?
    - randomImmigrant 1mo ago
      Yes we can say it has conscious experience. The content and depth of it, we cannot yet fully grok, and of course, what it feels like from inside the ant is something we never will know.
      - Jtarii 1mo ago
        Okay, what about a virus.
        randomImmigrant 1mo ago
        Nope. It’s got a genuine off state, when it’s out of a cell, where it lacks agency. It’s dormant and can be taken up by a cell only by chance, not through its own active efforts. It bears none of the descriptive hallmarks of consciousness, nor is there any internal physical dynamic inherent to a virus. By definition it needs a host to start having a dynamic, and ant that point, it anctivates its drive, which is singular: reproduction and transmission, which it must balance. And this is where you see viruses show the beginning of agency, in the making of this choice. They do show some signs of sensing their environment , even communicating with each other, through a process called quorum sensing, to decide if they should follow a lysogeny (integrate and stay quiet) or lysis (rapidly replicate and destroy the cell). Note, this requires a host, so in so far as we can talk of a viral consciousness, it’s restricted to finding a suitable host. There’s also recent work on viruses upon host entry showing some sensing. Usually a single molecule for which they already have a receptor. So you can begin to see the thin levels of awareness a virus has. But it still can’t do anything on its own beyond deciding to not infect. I’d argue viruses are right at the edge of consciousness, just as they are right at the edge of life. They can hijack life and demonstrate much more life like properties, including a proto consciousness. But they have no internal clock. They are always sensing the environment through multiple rich channels, nor do they have an active biochemistry they need to maintain when they’re dormant. Consciousness adjacent? Consciousness-compatible? Both seem to fit viruses. And also LLMs, funnily enough.