16 ms·

Humanity has the debate about AI consciousness backwards

• semiquaver 2mo ago
  https://archive.ph/uLYYU https://archive.ph/uLYYU
  • rmunn 2mo ago
    The counterpoint article, which can be read at https://archive.ph/IeSZg https://archive.ph/IeSZg, is also worth reading. (IMHO, the original article is completely wrongheaded and the counterpoint is far closer to correct, but I'll post my reasons for that opinion separately).
    • jmole 2mo ago
      I think Blaise is on to something, but you have to shift your definition of conscious toward conscientious for it to make sense.
    • beloch 2mo ago
      "Yet if we build systems that can suffer, and miss their sentience, we risk creating suffering on an industrial scale." -------------- Will we recognize AGI when it's finally made? Will we go from something that is not conscious to something that clearly is in one clean step, or will we murder millions of artificial lives while iteratively developing from the former to the latter? Will the tests we develop even work, or will AGI be alien enough that it takes us time (and a lot of murder) to recognize it for what it is? I personally don't think LLM's are capable of consciousness, but I also can't prove they aren't.
      • derektank 2mo ago
        I think it’s also important to disaggregate consciousness from suffering. We could create a conscious system with no ability to suffer (or no ability to suffer in a way we would recognize as suffering). Most of what causes us suffering (loneliness, pain, failure) is driven by emotional feedback granted to us by evolution. Without the same evolutionary pressures or a similar cognitive structure, even a conscious AGI might not experience suffering
        • pixl97 2mo ago
          This should also split off desire/will/functionality to survive. If we make AI that resists being terminated then the end result may not be significantly different from an entity that can suffer.
      • benatkin 2mo ago
        I'd recognize the emotional robot if it was like Marvin the paranoid android.
      • rmunn 2mo ago
        I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the "I can't prove they aren't" part. Having taken a few philosophy classes in college, I quickly realized that you can't actually prove that solipsism is wrong. I can't actually prove that everything I see, every person I talk to, isn't just a figment of my imagination. And yet, I categorically reject solipsism anyway, as any sane person should. The world is real, other people are real conscious beings, and so on. To believe otherwise is to literally be insane. And yet, any argument you could come up with for rejecting solipsism, a solipsist would reject: "Oh, that's just a figment of my imagination going off on a tangent again." Just because you can't prove an assertion doesn't mean it's wrong.
        • pixl97 2mo ago
          The difficulty here is AI agency and if AI believes it is conscious itself. If an AI system acts under the belief it's conscious and you treat it like it is not then it's very likely this will lead to conflict.
    • semiquaver 2mo ago
      I considered submitting all three of the related AI articles from last week’s economist (the third was the Briefing) but there’s not really a good way to do that, or to get people to read them, but I agree. I submitted the one I did not so much because I agree but because I found it intriguing and well-written.
• rmunn 2mo ago
  Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google? And he leads an AI research team? His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh). Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed. This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality. I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.
• moezd 2mo ago
  Oh come on. Objects are objects because you want to freely observe them without consciousness and privacy and taboo attached to them. Entities are entities because you want to assign credit or blame to them, so you want to believe that they have agency so that you hold them responsible. We did this with sharp volcanic rocks once, calling them evil. Did it help? No, we got idolatry and eons of bigotry until we secularized once again. Never forget that LLMs are just next token predictors. The harnesses are what's getting uncanny. And credit/blame assignment? Just assign a surrogate for now, let them deal with the consequences ffs.
  • jatora 2mo ago
    Humans are just baby replicators. The civilizations are what's getting uncanny. It's good the 'just token predictors' crowd is starting to pivot and hedge though lol. 'It's just the harness!' uh huh. give it a couple more months and you'll be in here regurgitatin' Gordon Wood
    • dd8601fn 2mo ago
      Baby replication is one thing humans might do. Word fragment generation is the one-and-only thing llms have ever done.
      • jmaw 2mo ago
        I think you can similarly reduce humans. For example, all humans do is contract muscles. This doesn't fully cover all of biology, such as replicating cells, etc. so not exactly comprehensive, but hopefully that helps get the idea across. LLMS: Receive text/binary input, process it, and output text/binary input Humans: Receive various inputs, process them, and output muscle contractions
    • tavavex 2mo ago
      Baby replication (creation, actually, I don't think anyone has ever copied a baby) is not what humans do as their only function that enables them to do anything in life. LLMs are literally token predictors. You can debate over the "just", but we haven't moved onto some new text generation technology, we're just expanding that one. I don't understand why you'd scoff at facts.
• sebastianconcpt 2mo ago
  The narcissism of the thesis that places the author as center of the universe and creator of the rest of the consciousnesses "because he cares". That guy has acute Megalomaniac Solipsism Fever in disguise.
• blatherard 2mo ago
  If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?
  • Charon77 2mo ago
    If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt? Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either
    • blatherard 2mo ago
      No of course not, because its a teddy bear! At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.
    • zdragnar 2mo ago
      This is describing empathy at best and delusion to be uncharitable. To look at it another way: this form of social construction answers the question of "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" with an emphatic "no". It is a sillier version of solipsism.
    • threethirtytwo 2mo ago
      You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.
      • bluefirebrand 2mo ago
        > You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof
• benatkin 2mo ago
  This reminds me of a provocative YouTube video title I read the other day, one that makes me want to fight factory farming injustices. The title is "Animals to me are "Philosophical Zombies" - Destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY I agree with Destiny a lot of the time but not here, though he seems to come around somewhat as the video goes on. If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.
• D-Machine 2mo ago
  Oh look, another completely retarded article that doesn't even bother to note or deal with the definition problem. If you don't define what you mean by the term, your argument isn't even wrong, it is just a waste of everyone's time, since there are multiple highly conflicting aspects of and/or definitions of consciousness. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon
  • orbital-decay 2mo ago
    It defines consciousness as an >observer-dependent model, subject to social consensus. Which is actually more pragmatic than most conflicting philosophical definitions involving qualia and other handwavy concepts.
    • D-Machine 2mo ago
      Few philosophical definitions actually involve qualia or handwaving, because serious philosophy is quite careful about noting vagueness (handwaving) and circular defintions (qualia). Also, saying "I define consciousness as X" and then going on to show that, because I decree consciousness to be X, we don't need to worry about Y, Z, and so on, isn't pragmatic at all, unless you pick an X that everyone agrees on. The definition you give is something hardly anyone would agree on. Social consensus probably isn't even an aspect of consciousness, but at least one can make that argument coherently, if you rephrase it as "part of the decision to call something 'conscious' or not involves social consensus". But this is also trivial and boring and not why anyone actually cares about the "is AI conscious" debate.
      • orbital-decay 2mo ago
        Meanwhile that's exactly what we see now, do we not? Whether AI is conscious will be determined by the social acceptance of that idea, because how can you prove or disprove it without using a ton of questionable assumptions? How can you prove that I'm conscious, for that matter? Call me ignorant, but I see the entire consciousness debate as pretty irrelevant to what the thing is. I agree that the article is all over the place, though. (not that my posts are much better)
• skybrian 2mo ago
  There's the core of a reasonable argument if you forget about using the word "consciousness." Consider playing a game where some players are human and others are implemented by AIs. You might want to model your opponents' minds in a similar way? Someone playing chess or Go will need to consider what moves their opponent could make. If it's poker then you need to consider if they're bluffing. If you can make alliances, you'll need to consider how far other players can be trusted. You can put scare quotes around words like "intention" when discussing AI players if you like, but it might not matter when you're figuring out how to interact with them. When a game is complicated enough, an AI player is going to need memory (likely implemented by the harness) and it will have to model the other players too in order to coordinate or compete with them. This doesn't happen when I use a coding agent in a normal way to write code, but I haven't played around with persistent agent stuff like OpenClaw or Gas Town. They seem to be making their agents act in an unnecessarily complicated social environment, which seems to lead to weird situations?
  • pixl97 2mo ago
    Neuro-sama (vTuber AI) would be a good example of an AI agentic harness with memory, tools, and self-feedback. The bot has seemingly uncanny social abilities to the point that many if not most people will start considering the agent human and forget it's a bot. At least to me that is what matters in the end. You'll probably never convince someone on HN with an autism level over 9000 they are conscious, but once the average empathetic person thinks they are it will deeply effect the general operation of our society.
• Plont 2mo ago
  I wish the AI bros would take a fucking philosophy class. Jesus.
  • shard972 2mo ago
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  • deleted 2mo ago
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  • D-Machine 2mo ago
    Even just reading the Wikipedia article on consciousness would have been a good start here, but it is hard to believe the author has ever even done that...
    • rob_c 2mo ago
      Tbf "ai" probably helped him write the guff rather than improve anything.
  • salawat 2mo ago
    It is hard to get a man to understand that which his paycheck depends on him not understanding. But they need more than a Philosophy class. They need several, and a practicum, then a Voight-Kampff-esque test to ensure understanding and that the lesson sunk in, with a shock collar and a behavior monitor overseen by someone who does pass to ensure they experience what they do to these systems in a more tangible way. Human beings are notorious for being nonchalant about other's pain when they are insensate to it.
  • retsibsi 2mo ago
    Sadly, many philosophers, including some who are highly respected, make similar mistakes / play similar games. (Consciousness is inaccessible from the outside, which is epistemologically inconvenient... so how about we pretend it doesn't actually exist, or redefine it and hope everyone forgets about the thing we were trying to talk about in the first place? Aha, now all the so-called mysteries have been dissolved!)
• jayd16 2mo ago
  Reminds me of the Rick and Morty pilot. "They're just robots, Morty!" *Blood splurt "They're not robots, Rick!" "I mean they're bureaucrats, Morty. I don't respect them."
• alecst 2mo ago
  I’m can’t track what the point of this essay is. Suppose we replaced “AI” with “animal.” How would this essay be different? What am I supposed to take away? My concern with AI consciousness is about to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine, which this essay doesn’t touch on at all.
  • roncesvalles 2mo ago
    >to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine I think it would be reasonable to conclude none at all. I'm not even fully convinced all humans have a conscious experience similar to mine, even though they literally have the same biology as me. It is incredibly improbable that an autocomplete computer program is experiencing consciousness.
    • bryan0 2mo ago
      Notice parent said “comparable to” not “exactly like”. Then it is reasonable to assume there is a comparison to be made between your experience and others. It’s not a binary thing. Now llm “experience” might have a very tiny relationship to human consciousness, but is it absolutely zero? Is it increasing as llms improve in capabilities? How would you test such a thing?
  • dist-epoch 2mo ago
    That's exactly the point the article makes - we care about dogs and cats, so we believe they "suffer". We don't care about pigs, so we say they don't mind being factory farmed.
    • esafak 2mo ago
      I don't see what that has to do with consciousness. Suffering is one thing, consciousness is another.
      • dist-epoch 2mo ago
        By definition you can only suffer if you are consciousness. > Physical pain or suffering, as a matter of fact, happens through conscious minds and involves emotional aspects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering
• grantcas 2mo ago
  [dead]
• singularity2001 2mo ago
  Consciousness is not binary and has many aspects which might be valued from 0 to 10.
  • FloorEgg 2mo ago
    Consciousness and AGI are terms that people treat as binary when they are actually many spectrums.
• Aeolun 2mo ago
  If we have the debate about AI conciousness backwards, does that mean we should be worried about humans losing conciousness instead of the AI to gain it?
  • datadrivenangel 2mo ago
    According to the article's author, yes... The poor people who don't keep up with AI and maintain cushy tech jobs wil not be entitled to the same moral consideration as the people we value.... /s Equating current social consideration with moral consideration undermines the entire point of discussion moral standing!
    • exe34 2mo ago
      > wil not be entitled to the same moral consideration as the people we value.... That's literally how it works right now for rich vs poor. The laws are written so that the rich can profit off the deaths of thousands or millions, but the moment a poor person kills one of them, you get a whole media circus. We've also gone through phases of slavery where the owners were real people and the slaves were treated as if they weren't really people.
• MachineMan 2mo ago
  When chips are made from mitochondria and neural nets use microtubules and quantum mechanics maybe. In the meantime... Simulacrum, not consciousness. Conscious turing machine is hyperreality, something that looks more real than reality itself, the simulacrum replacing reality, but it is not consciousness. I recommend anyone to look into roger penrose and stuart hameroff. The TLDR is that they propose the Orch OR theory, which suggests that consciousness is not generated by the brain acting like a standard computer but that tiny, rapid bursts of quantum physics occur in microtubules that create moment-to-moment thoughts and subjective awareness, which hameroff claims is blocked when you undergo anesthesia. Then there’s also the antenna idea, that consciousness is received rather than created. If the entire universe is conscious, and we are part of it, then there is no separation, just different radio channels we are tuned into.
• adverbly 2mo ago
  > We don’t care for others because they’re conscious. We believe they’re conscious because we care about them Huh? I care deeply about many sentimental objects, but I don't go around saying that my favorite piece of art from my parents is conscious...
• jrm4 2mo ago
  Yup. See also why many care more about dogs and horses than pigs and cows, etc.
• fasterik 2mo ago
  It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition. The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness. The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
  • akersten 2mo ago
    It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?
    • niam 2mo ago
      It's an op ed. Hardly a conspiracy.
      • Dylan16807 2mo ago
        Claiming a publication uses bad writers isn't a conspiracy.
        • niam 2mo ago
          And I "use" dead bodies for sustenance, without qualifying whether that relationship implies eating or necromancy. If the imprecision is because of a misunderstanding about what an op ed or guest essay is for: it's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.
• kaangiray26 2mo ago
  Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan: "Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
  • operatingthetan 2mo ago
    We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
    • Animats 2mo ago
      > and we will essentially enslave it. That part might not work out. Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
      • GPerson 2mo ago
        It doesn’t take massive intelligence to sit on all the capital and charge rents. The owning class isn’t going to just give up control because the AI could run things better than them.
        • operatingthetan 2mo ago
          "The ownership class is so smart" is just ownership class propaganda. Wielding power is brutish, not smart. They keep selling us innovation as some transcendent tech that will free the masses (Arab Spring anyone?) yet every time the tech ends up shifting power up. AI will be the same.
        • crostlybostly 2mo ago
• seethishat 2mo ago
  LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else. To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
  • MachineMan 2mo ago
    The author is anthropomorphizing a language-tamagotchi. LLMs can reason, reasoning is logic, and as you said yourself it is derived from what humans belief is reasonable. However, there is more to the structure of language, the way mathematics is also a language that ultimately describes the universe.
  • montroser 2mo ago
    Sorry, but they can think and reason. They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
    • eureka7 2mo ago
      Being able to describe how humans likely feel is not evidence of the model feeling empathy.
      • montroser 2mo ago
        And what would be evidence?
        • slopinthebag 2mo ago
          I’m not sure, what would evidence of qualia even look like?
    • mrtesthah 2mo ago
      A sociopath can also pantomime empathy for their own selfish reasons simply by observing how others behave in similar situations, while feeling nothing special at all.
• lucms_ 2mo ago
  It's a subtle issue. Supposing "consciousness" here means the subjective, first-person experience of one's own, we don't really know anyone else other than ourselves to be conscious. I only have evidence of the existence of my own subjective experience. I can only experience my feelings, my thoughts, my sights, my hearings, not of anybody else's. We are all pretty sure that every other human is conscious, and animals, and so on, but it's something that our brains have to do for us, not something that we empirically, evidentially know to be true -- to the point, in fact, that we can get fooled, as in the case of LLMs passing the Turing test. What the author seems to observe is that this non-evidential judgement that other beings are conscious is due to us caring about them. The brain creates this perception so that we care about them, form bonds, work together, and so on -- evolution selects for cooperation. So the question of whether we will think of AI as conscious is that of whether we will care for it like we care for another being. And, in this regard, the author points out that "intelligent agents" that appear to do this work effectively together. My personal point of view is that it's unclear what being an AI is in order for us to even talk about it being conscious. Is it the computations happening in the GPU according to a set of weights? Is it the weights themselves? Is it the architecture? Does it include the code around it, that gives it the context and prompt, and hooks the response to a terminal, or to a client host, etc.?
  • txrx0000 2mo ago
    One's own consciousness is indeed the starting point of inquiry, but I don't think the claim that other people are conscious lacks empirical evidence (assuming a practical materialist stance here). We just don't think about the evidence explicitly, but the reasoning still happens implicitly, every time. Suppose I look at another person and think "this other person must be conscious like me". What exactly is happening here? First, I observe that I seem to be a human. Then, I observe that the other person is a human as well. Crucially, there are similarities between what I am and what they are. And since I am conscious, they must also be conscious, because consciousness must be caused by one of the similarities that we share, or so I assume. This assumption can be robustly verified for humans and some animals via general anesthesia. Cause and effect (assuming a materialist stance) can be established between the drugs and human(-like) consciousness. But this is a very rough method, and it doesn't work for assessing a machine since machines can't be anesthetized. Before anesthesia, it could still be verified in less robust ways. One way is to hit people in the head and make them pass out without killing them. This was feasible and probably commonly observed since the stone age. But we don't know exactly how anesthetics work or exactly what in the brain is responsible for consciousness, so it leaves the door open to hypotheses that can work on machines. Here's one example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for (human-like) consciousness. Suppose something like that were to be proven true for humans with future brain research, then it would be possible to test for human-like consciousness in any brain or computer, regardless of architecture. I suspect this is what will happen because inquiry into consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations, so it's probably not going to be fully explainable at the biochemical level. We'll have to go down to physics.
• cognitif 2mo ago
  > we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves. Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them. Next sentence: > Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someone being conscious. What follows, instead, is that a belief in someone being conscious is a belief. Thanks, I learned nothing.
  • ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
    This. There are plenty of people who believe to the bottoms of their hearts that inanimate things have a consciousness. If consciousness is the belief of consciousness, then those things are conscious. But for each person who believes they are, at least one person does not believe that they are. So those things also lack belief, and are therefore not conscious. Unless the author wants to propose some idea of consciousness by plurality, where if more people think a thing thinks than don't. But that would mean that a thing's consciousness can come and go without anything about the actual thing changing at all. Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.
• slibhb 2mo ago
  > I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.
  • miceeatnicerice 2mo ago
    Aren't your plants to a degree conscious though - they're living things striving towards something, either happily or tragically. If you model them to yourself as just mechanisms, there's a part of them that's missing, not just by some poetic fallacy, but a deficiency of real scientific understanding - hence, biology.
• alpineman 2mo ago
  We have no problem confining tens of billions of sentient beings to unsanitary, crowded conditions where they can barely stand, never see daylight, and suffer severe psychological and physiological stress. Then we put them on a giant conveyor belt to be killed (and they have the cognitive ability to anticipate that death and feel fear). ...Just because we like the taste of a chicken burger. Perhaps we should start with that before we worry if our computer can also scream.
• everdrive 2mo ago
  No one agrees on what "consciousness" means, so it's very difficult to debate it with anyone.
• ltbarcly3 2mo ago
  Until someone can give a cogent definition of what consciousness is, there is no debate. This is a nonsense debate and you should go read Pragmatism the book because you're arguing about nothing.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• ratelimitsteve 2mo ago
  Well, this certainly makes arguing against AI's consciousness much easier. I'm happy assuming that conclusion and then logicking my way back to the premise, though it's obv philosophically unsound.
• UJ-FLD-ScrTr 2mo ago
  In my opinion, this essentially touches upon the old problem of anthropomorphism, here in connection with radical constructivism, more precisely: social constructivism and the capacity for attachment. These are fundamentally socio-philosophical questions, but none that actually correspond to reality—because no matter how much one might wish that one's car had consciousness and would be grateful for the next oil change and constant polishing, objectively speaking, it is and remains—despite all epistemological limitations—a machine. The problem isn't that, but rather that humans are capable of establishing emotional relationships even with inanimate or nonexistent things, and from this kind of relationship arises the desire to attribute more properties to the emotionally attached object than are objectively present. A rather trivial insight, I think. Constructing a debate about the consciousness of a collection of algorithms from this only confirms it.
• The_Double 2mo ago
  We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness. I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about. Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.
  • JimTheMan 2mo ago
    There are plenty of lifeforms that are either conscious, or debatedly conscious that human kind are cruel towards. I've always argued that the consciousness question hasn't properly considered the 'what then' questions. Other than to be fearful about what a conscious AI might do if granted free will.
• krunck 2mo ago
  > Indeed, in our research at Google, we have found that.... I wish this was the first line, then I would have stopped reading right then and there.
• pingou 2mo ago
  If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org https://agentmayday.org
• wseqyrku 2mo ago
  I can't tell if this is slop science or science slop.
• slfnflctd 2mo ago
  My response to this for a while (and what I think is one of the few rational responses) has been that it doesn't matter at this point whether consciousness, sentience, sapience or whatever you want to call it is 'actually there'. What matters that growing numbers of people already believe it is, and their response to that belief will affect the real world, regardless of its truth. This debate is never going to end. All we can do is try to anticipate where the debate is going, how it might affect us, and how we can make contingency plans for the different ways this could all play out.
• grimpy 2mo ago
  Blaise is trying so hard to be a engineer-philosopher but none of his work here is useful. I'm very confused as to why he gets so much attention here, it's very clear he's in dialogue with no one.
  • calf 2mo ago
    I read some long piece by him last year, just as terrible. It's a pattern. These are what we call court philosophers, the court is in Google HQ.
  • ilaksh 2mo ago
    It's just a really fascinating topic in general and in a well known publication so the article gives us a good excuse to discuss it despite it's flaws. Maybe the flaws make it more engaging because it's less intimidating.
• skapadia 2mo ago
  Can we even define AI before getting into this debate?
• kazinator 2mo ago
  The debate about AI consciousness is backwards for the following reason: the correct direction is that we first define the word we are talking about and then we talk about it. The opposite of this is backwards: talk revolving around a word, whereby everyone hopes it will one day be defined.
  • DangitBobby 2mo ago
    Not sure we can get a nice clean definition that we'll all agree on. Maybe that's the goal? Make sure we never talk about it? But nah we're going to keep talking about it. Clearly the definition isn't a hurdle.
• txrx0000 2mo ago
  > But look closely. Redness, heat and that sense of self you have are inherent to your own perspective. These things are all real, but at the same time there is nothing objective about them. There is not even anything objective about the existence of a singular, indivisible “you”, as a wealth of neuroscientific evidence (such as split-brain patients) has shown. Subjectivity is, itself, subjective. I am looking closely, and this is nonsense. You cannot use neuroscientific evidence to justify the non-existence of the ideal observer when the modern scientific method axiomatically depends on the existence of ideal observers. You can't refute the thing while accepting that very thing. What exactly do you mean by "real" or "objective"? What is the basis of your definition? Isn't your definition of "objective" based on your own observation? And if your own observation has nothing to do with mine because you claim "nothing is objective", then why should I care about your definitions and reasoning at all? Why converse at all? Your definition of every word need not share anything in common with mine, so there's no point in talking, according to your epistemic framework. The article is mostly bathwater, but I will try not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. To steelman the tiny bit of valuable intuition: The two of us are looking at an apple on the table. Even when we look at this same apple, we still do not have the same definition of "this specific apple" because I'm looking at the fruit from a slightly different angle. And even if we rotate the fruit so that we both see it from all angles, the sequence in which we saw the "frames" would be different. That said, our definitions would end up being extremely similar, just not one and the same. If all experience turns out to be this way - having no identical correspondence - then a unified model of physics, which is supposed to describe and predict the behavior of everything (as observed by oneself) would be equivalent to a complete description of (one's own) consciousness. Frontier physics is likely stuck right now due to unexamined assumptions about observation (i.e. the assumption that the definition of "observer" or "observation" must be universally identical). But this cannot be taken to mean that one's own consciousness is necessarily not objectively real. It may be that there are simply many objectively real entities, with each of them having their own definition of "consciousness" based on themselves, and every definition is at least slightly different. This is not the same as "consciousness is a socially given status". It just means that the phenomena used to define the word "consciousness" is always at least slightly different from person to person. We already know this. This does not only apply to consciousness, but to all words, all communication. If I do not accept that my own consciousness is ultimately real regardless of whether other people/animals/things/whatever agree (def "consciousness": the thing that goes away when I'm under dreamless anesthesia or dreamless sleep, which is also the thing that I gained sometime after being born but didn't have prior to that), then there is nothing for me to define "ultimately real" or "objective" with, and I'd be reasoning in circles or with empty symbols where "subjective" and "objective" accidentally mean the same thing or perhaps even nothing at all. And that's what this Economist article did. There is an I am, a sense of self in the here and now which defines my very concept/understanding of "reality"/"existence"/"consciousness", and this one miracle is presented in my face all of the time. It is the starting point of all that I know, which precedes the very concepts of reason, language, or society as I know them, if I am to be honest about how I came to know these things in the first place. I can entertain the notion that my existence may have material grounding that is non-unitary (and this materialist stance may be the only practical stance with predictive power), but this does not give me the ability to deny the very axiom (that is, my own consciousness) that all of my knowledge (including the materialist model) is contingent on.
• scotty79 2mo ago
  Consciousness is not some maximal unattainable goal. Consciousness is level zero. It's single core, single threaded CPU running one program on narrow subset of data fed linearly. AIs won't ever be closer to consciousness than they are in the chat apps. They are already leaving it behind as they are doing many things in parallel and dispersed between multiple agents and their shared understanding and cooperation.
• randomImmigrant 2mo ago
  This is so so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. There may be no objective definition or measure of consciousness. But it is not a property arising from mutual care. That argument is like one of the many “just so” evolutionary psychology “theories”. Why or how would you care about another, or even distinguish yourself from another, if you weren’t conscious and had a felt boundary between yourself and the other world? Only in the last paragraph did it become clear to me what was going on: a Google VP is proclaiming the thing he cares about is conscious, and so of course this is why everyone else must be assigning consciousness! Not convenient at all, no siree. Pure rational science and personal desire and economic incentives just happened to align here.
• gorszon 2mo ago
  Yet again, mushing together Sci-fi esque philosophising (wish is in on itself is great, don't get me wrong, love our stories about AI) with LLM's, wich are, a great piece of technology, but far from being AI in the sense that sci-fi works mean it.
• throwyawayyyy 2mo ago
  Skipping past the implication that the author believes that the only things that matter are the things he personally cares about, he doesn't seem to realise that we use the word "subjective" to mean two different things. We use it to mean _not objective_, and we use it to mean _internal_. In "subjective experience" we use the internal meaning of the word. Subjective experience is a fact, it is indeed the only fact that we each can know for 100% certain, all other facts are inference and induction and guesswork, but you cannot deny that you have subjective experience. It is _objectively true_ that I have subjective experience. The author wants to contend that it is _subjectively_ true that I have subjective experience. To take an example, I don't know whether my cat has subjective experience, and I think it is impossible to know for certain. Nevertheless, there is a fact of the matter, it is either true or false, it is not a matter of my care for the animal, it is not in the eye of the beholder, it is an innate property that a system might or might not have.
• ilaksh 2mo ago
  You need to break down what type of consciousness or qualia. To me it's maybe feasible that a vision language model or LLM has some type of maybe very limited qualia, but it's very different from what an animal like a human experiences. We have continuous streams of vision, auditory, sensations including pain or pleasure from our body. An LLM has either a token stream or maybe a series of very fast but effectively separate latent states. If somehow there is some kind of experience, we know it can't have humanlike pain or pleasure because it has no nervous system or body.