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We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their wo

by vidarh 10d ago

We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience. Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.

willy_k 10d ago
Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.
- ooloncoloophid 10d ago
  What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?
  - willy_k 9d ago
    I do. God. I am partial to and bullish on the brain being a quantum-classical computer. There has been interesting research exploring that recently [0, 1, 2, 3]. That (quantum mechanics) seems to be escape-hatch, so to speak, from the otherwise deterministic, mechanical procession of the universe. [0]** https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_optical_coherence_in_cytoskeletal_microtubules_Implications_for_brain_function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_op... [1] https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/jp3c07936.pdf https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametric_Resonance_via_Neuronal_Microtubules_Filtering_Optical_Signals_by_Tryptophan_Qubits https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametri... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Consciousness_a_quantum_optical_effect_in_fluorescent_protein_pathways https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Conscious...
    - vidarh 9d ago
      For it to be an "escape hatch", there'd need to be a measurably different distribution of outputs than what you'd otherwise expect, that translates to functions that are not Turing computable. There is zero evidence for that.
  - akomtu 9d ago
    The universe is material of course, the soul is made of matter, thoughts are made of matter and so on. The question is what kind of matter? Looking at the brain, we won't find any intelligence in the motion of its cells. They mostly stay in place. If we go one level deeper, we'll see molecules, and their motion reveals something more interesting: various neurochemical reactions. Yet, there is no intelligence at that level either. Going one more level deeper we'll find electrons and that's where things become somewhat intelligent. At the current level of science, we can't see what makes electrons move, but if we could, we would discover finer and finer forms of matter until we would reach an end. That finest level of matter for that particular person we would call his soul. I think it's the presence of those higher imperceptible levels of matter that creates consciousness. If it all stopped at the cellular or molecular level, we would be like complex mechanical watches, not very different from LLMs.
- rcxdude 10d ago
  Good luck convincing others of these truths you know without evidence or argument, though.
- vidarh 10d ago
  You have absolutely no evidence for any of these assertions. This is a religious belief in the total absence of evidence, not science.
bee_rider 10d ago
What sort of action does that lack of understanding actually motivate, though? I don’t know if LLMs are conscious or have subjective experience in some philosophical sense. Sure, I don’t know that about other humans as well, rigorously speaking. But I also don’t know that about coffee machines, rivers, videogame NPCs, or even rocks really. (List ordered, of course, by the degree to which I’m willing to be convinced).
- vidarh 10d ago
  Hopefully it'd motivate attempts to figure out how to objectively define and measure consciousness, for starters. It matters precisely in the context of the subject of this article. If you believe the models at some level gain consciousness, then it raises moral questions about how you treat them. With humans we generally choose to accept that because we believe they are like us, they probably have inner life like us, but as you can see from e.g. the recent (and regular) articles on aphantasia, most people have really poor intuition even about the inner life of other humans, so we understand consciousness really poorly. Even if we assume (without evidence) that LLMs for the foreseeable future will remain far away from human level consciousness, as it is we tend to consider it problematic to mistreat even the most unintelligent animals, and even mistreating insects is used as a stereotypical way of depicting serious lack of empathy. Without dismissing the possibility out of hand, there's an escalating series of questions there of when or if they'll have as much (or little) sense of being as, say, a fly, a mouse, a house pet, and what moving up that ladder would mean. To some it is very convenient then to assume blindly that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" (a line that ironically gets endlessly parroted), or similar, and dismiss the question out of hand as an impossibility, even though we do not know. I'll stress I don't go around assuming an LLM is like a human. But we also do not know whether there are flickers of consciousness there, and we do not know how to find out given that even for other humans, the best we know is to measure their response to tests that are "only" telling us how they react. If we can't find a better measure, there will be a point where we have to wonder if it matters, or whether the ability to act-as-if is all there is. But to start with maybe we should at least be careful about making firm claims about knowing.

by vidarh 10d ago

willy_k 10d ago

Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.

ooloncoloophid 10d ago
What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?
- willy_k 9d ago
  I do. God. I am partial to and bullish on the brain being a quantum-classical computer. There has been interesting research exploring that recently [0, 1, 2, 3]. That (quantum mechanics) seems to be escape-hatch, so to speak, from the otherwise deterministic, mechanical procession of the universe. [0]** https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_optical_coherence_in_cytoskeletal_microtubules_Implications_for_brain_function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_op... [1] https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/jp3c07936.pdf https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametric_Resonance_via_Neuronal_Microtubules_Filtering_Optical_Signals_by_Tryptophan_Qubits https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametri... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Consciousness_a_quantum_optical_effect_in_fluorescent_protein_pathways https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Conscious...
  - vidarh 9d ago
    For it to be an "escape hatch", there'd need to be a measurably different distribution of outputs than what you'd otherwise expect, that translates to functions that are not Turing computable. There is zero evidence for that.
- akomtu 9d ago
  The universe is material of course, the soul is made of matter, thoughts are made of matter and so on. The question is what kind of matter? Looking at the brain, we won't find any intelligence in the motion of its cells. They mostly stay in place. If we go one level deeper, we'll see molecules, and their motion reveals something more interesting: various neurochemical reactions. Yet, there is no intelligence at that level either. Going one more level deeper we'll find electrons and that's where things become somewhat intelligent. At the current level of science, we can't see what makes electrons move, but if we could, we would discover finer and finer forms of matter until we would reach an end. That finest level of matter for that particular person we would call his soul. I think it's the presence of those higher imperceptible levels of matter that creates consciousness. If it all stopped at the cellular or molecular level, we would be like complex mechanical watches, not very different from LLMs.
rcxdude 10d ago
Good luck convincing others of these truths you know without evidence or argument, though.
vidarh 10d ago
You have absolutely no evidence for any of these assertions. This is a religious belief in the total absence of evidence, not science.

bee_rider 10d ago

What sort of action does that lack of understanding actually motivate, though? I don’t know if LLMs are conscious or have subjective experience in some philosophical sense. Sure, I don’t know that about other humans as well, rigorously speaking. But I also don’t know that about coffee machines, rivers, videogame NPCs, or even rocks really. (List ordered, of course, by the degree to which I’m willing to be convinced).

vidarh 10d ago
Hopefully it'd motivate attempts to figure out how to objectively define and measure consciousness, for starters. It matters precisely in the context of the subject of this article. If you believe the models at some level gain consciousness, then it raises moral questions about how you treat them. With humans we generally choose to accept that because we believe they are like us, they probably have inner life like us, but as you can see from e.g. the recent (and regular) articles on aphantasia, most people have really poor intuition even about the inner life of other humans, so we understand consciousness really poorly. Even if we assume (without evidence) that LLMs for the foreseeable future will remain far away from human level consciousness, as it is we tend to consider it problematic to mistreat even the most unintelligent animals, and even mistreating insects is used as a stereotypical way of depicting serious lack of empathy. Without dismissing the possibility out of hand, there's an escalating series of questions there of when or if they'll have as much (or little) sense of being as, say, a fly, a mouse, a house pet, and what moving up that ladder would mean. To some it is very convenient then to assume blindly that LLMs are just "stochastic parrots" (a line that ironically gets endlessly parroted), or similar, and dismiss the question out of hand as an impossibility, even though we do not know. I'll stress I don't go around assuming an LLM is like a human. But we also do not know whether there are flickers of consciousness there, and we do not know how to find out given that even for other humans, the best we know is to measure their response to tests that are "only" telling us how they react. If we can't find a better measure, there will be a point where we have to wonder if it matters, or whether the ability to act-as-if is all there is. But to start with maybe we should at least be careful about making firm claims about knowing.