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How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this cas
by eureka7 1mo ago
How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
- seethishat 1mo agoBecause it is common sense. This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.
- eureka7 1mo agoHow is this "common sense"? The question of what consciousness is, what it emerges from, etc. literally have no proved answer at the moment. Take this statement: "consciousness emerges from sufficient complexity in any system". Neither you or I can prove it right or wrong, but we can both make an assumption that if it was right, then there would be a way for an LLM to be conscious. I'm not arguing that they are, I'm saying being this confident that they are not is the exact same as being confident that they are.
- seethishat 1mo agoYes, I see your point. You could argue that humans, too, are trained to produce expected outputs (family, societal and peer pressure, etc.).
- mcmcmc 1mo agoBy social norms, not running matrix multiplication in their head ad nauseam
- wtallis 1mo agoI don't think that argument holds water, because the scope of what can be reasonably approximated by matrix multiplication is extremely broad (especially when the matrix multiplication is also paired with a source of randomness).
- 4rffs 1mo agoDude we aren't performing some nonsensical calculation in our brains. Mathematics is an invention of humans.
- rudy6912 1mo agoNot sure about "nonsensical calculation", but our brains perform computation (read: they transform information). In fact, that is what the brains are for (see: biology 101). As for mathematics, I am with Galileo: it is the language of the universe. Of course, we "invented" its silly glyphs and the like, but those are secondary. My 2 cents.
- evilfred 1mo agofor the same reason I don't think a pinball machine or ATM is conscious
- 4rffs 1mo agoI genuinely think there's a lot of deluded people on here. Which shouldnt be a surprise - most CS folks are disconnected ironically from reality.
- basilikum 1mo agoYou could just as much argue that a stone has consciousness. Some people believe that. Insane describes it quite well.
- jampekka 1mo agoWhy is it insane? We have no idea how or where consciousness arises, or even if it's a coherent concept.
- basilikum 1mo agoWe don't know a lot of things. That does not make it sensible to just make up unfounded claims about them. I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
- gqgs 1mo agoWho exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about? I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are. The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
- joshheitzman 1mo agoWhat's the difference between a computer and a stone?
- gqgs 1mo agoA lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about. Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
- felipeerias 1mo agoIn living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. You can not sit down with pen and paper, and reproduce by hand exactly what is going on inside someone’s brain. But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside? My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
- nonfamous 1mo ago>> In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought. The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?
- GPerson 1mo agoOur models of reality are incomplete. See this very nice Stephen Hawking lecture where he says as such https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-end-of-physics https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-e... People have thought they were nearly complete at least for 500 years, probably longer. When you choose a specific model to represent the brain you are asserting you’ve accounted for everything that generates consciousness (=the lights are on, experiences qualia). This means you’ve solved the hard problem. The hard problem is debated constantly though. In my view there is absolutely no reason to think a description of reality can be equal to reality. There are probably (in my view that is) aspects of reality, like first person internal experience, that fundamentally can not be described with third party linguistic / symbolic / representational devices.