4 ms·

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "cons

by qarl 27d ago

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.

5eueuur 27d ago
it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird
- qarl 27d ago
  It doesn't seem self evident to me, no. I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
- SkyBelow 27d ago
  The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
  - loopies 27d ago
    >and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices. Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another. I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted. Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
    - SkyBelow 25d ago
      This isn't enough to be relevant to free will. You can construct massive impact by tying them to quantum systems, and one off things that happen occasionally given the length of a lifetime. But the quantum effects that are needed for free will need to be continuous. We can build a system where QM decides if a nerve cell fires or not, but that is very different from QM being involving in determine if every (or most, or even 1%) of nerve cells firing. (And even if QM did factor in normally, that just reduces it from determinism to random chance, "free will" still doesn't show up. That's like arguing an AI with sufficiently well implemented RNG is necessary to be conscious.)
  - pixl97 27d ago
    To a forth dimensional being humans would look almost exactly like an LLM does to us. "What do you mean they have to wait for the future to know about it, how could they possibly be conscious then". Also, I'd love to have a quantum copy machine where you just replay someones state again and again with slight changes to see out it effects the output. My assumption is we'd figure out we behave just like LLMs pretty quick. Also, don't give me unlimited power or I might make a the world a war crime simulator, so there's that.
- mitxela 26d ago
  neither has an LLM existed before, and that's quite weird
pessimizer 27d ago
Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing. I don't think it's defensible to say 1) that a transistor isn't conscious, 2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to 3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious. Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.] It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.
- qarl 27d ago
  It sounds like you disagree with determinism. But that's a well worn argument and determinism has won, albeit in an odd sort of detente.
- Kim_Bruning 27d ago
  Let's do something simpler. Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs. Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again. Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321. So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive. How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.
lelanthran 27d ago
>> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". > You'll need to explain why. Where are you going with this? I don't see a conclusion for this line of questioning. I mean, you can't explain why a machine that reliably and predictably produces the same result is "the normal kind of conscious", can you? So why expect someone else to explain why it's a "weird" kind of conscious?
- qarl 27d ago
  I ask because I truly don't understand what he's saying. Clearly we have different ideas about consciousness and I have no idea where we diverge. He seems to be saying that determinism and consciousness are incompatible. But we already have examples that break that rule (us).
  - lelanthran 27d ago
    > But we already have examples that break that rule (us). No, we don't. Where are you reading your research papers?
    - qarl 27d ago
      Please don't insult me.
      - lelanthran 26d ago
        It's not an insult. "People are deterministic" is news to me, so I'd really rather like to know which papers claimed that.
        qarl 26d ago
        Sorry friend, between this and the vague memories I have of you harassing me, I think I'm not going to answer. I'm sure you can get an LLM to explain it to you. Have a nice day.

by qarl 27d ago

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". You'll need to explain why.

5eueuur 27d ago

it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird

qarl 27d ago
It doesn't seem self evident to me, no. I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
SkyBelow 27d ago
The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
- loopies 27d ago
  >and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices. Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another. I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted. Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
  - SkyBelow 25d ago
    This isn't enough to be relevant to free will. You can construct massive impact by tying them to quantum systems, and one off things that happen occasionally given the length of a lifetime. But the quantum effects that are needed for free will need to be continuous. We can build a system where QM decides if a nerve cell fires or not, but that is very different from QM being involving in determine if every (or most, or even 1%) of nerve cells firing. (And even if QM did factor in normally, that just reduces it from determinism to random chance, "free will" still doesn't show up. That's like arguing an AI with sufficiently well implemented RNG is necessary to be conscious.)
- pixl97 27d ago
  To a forth dimensional being humans would look almost exactly like an LLM does to us. "What do you mean they have to wait for the future to know about it, how could they possibly be conscious then". Also, I'd love to have a quantum copy machine where you just replay someones state again and again with slight changes to see out it effects the output. My assumption is we'd figure out we behave just like LLMs pretty quick. Also, don't give me unlimited power or I might make a the world a war crime simulator, so there's that.
mitxela 26d ago
neither has an LLM existed before, and that's quite weird

pessimizer 27d ago

Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing. I don't think it's defensible to say 1) that a transistor isn't conscious, 2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to 3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious. Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.] It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.

qarl 27d ago
It sounds like you disagree with determinism. But that's a well worn argument and determinism has won, albeit in an odd sort of detente.
Kim_Bruning 27d ago
Let's do something simpler. Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs. Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again. Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321. So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive. How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.

lelanthran 27d ago

>> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness". > You'll need to explain why. Where are you going with this? I don't see a conclusion for this line of questioning. I mean, you can't explain why a machine that reliably and predictably produces the same result is "the normal kind of conscious", can you? So why expect someone else to explain why it's a "weird" kind of conscious?

qarl 27d ago
I ask because I truly don't understand what he's saying. Clearly we have different ideas about consciousness and I have no idea where we diverge. He seems to be saying that determinism and consciousness are incompatible. But we already have examples that break that rule (us).
- lelanthran 27d ago
  > But we already have examples that break that rule (us). No, we don't. Where are you reading your research papers?
  - qarl 27d ago
    Please don't insult me.
    - lelanthran 26d ago
      It's not an insult. "People are deterministic" is news to me, so I'd really rather like to know which papers claimed that.
      - qarl 26d ago
        Sorry friend, between this and the vague memories I have of you harassing me, I think I'm not going to answer. I'm sure you can get an LLM to explain it to you. Have a nice day.