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We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it. Doesn't really matter whether we're tal

We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it. Doesn't really matter whether we're talking about people who are locked in comas, "brain-dead" individuals, dolphins, primates, dogs, or the carefully polished and arranged minerals that we call processors. There are those who believe that were they reduced to life support, they would no longer be alive and should therefore not be supported by said machines. There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions. There are those who believe that fungi/trees/plants are either individually sentient or sentient as a part of a network. Choosing to sacrifice their own nutrients to answer the call of a wounded neighbor, for instance. Although, there are also those who believe that human's don't have any special unique quality that isn't shared by either all living things or all things in general. These individuals already believe that the machines have the same kinds of qualities as we do. They are slow when they are unhealthy (needing a dusting or coolant loop bleeding being equivalent to us needing some fresh air for instance) and uncooperative when upset (by a virus, full hard drive, or oom).

verdverm 12d ago
maybe it's like porn vs art and "I know it when I see it"
- NietzscheanNull 12d ago
  Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors. Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists. For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't. If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
  - verdverm 12d ago
    "I know it when I see it" is a famous line from a SCOTUS case in the 60's
    - NietzscheanNull 11d ago
      I know! I should have made that clearer in my original reply. I think it's a bad line now in general, but an even worse justification for the ultimate ruling at the time.
      - verdverm 11d ago
        we're all about them vibes as a society right now, surfing towards a post-truth reality of our own construction
  - fc417fc802 12d ago
    > a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart I don't think that's true. Pretty much all legal constructs hold up just fine under game theory regardless of whether or not you consider the world to be deterministic and have absolutely nothing to do with consciousness or lack thereof. Also note that a deterministic world isn't an argument against consciousness.
    - NietzscheanNull 11d ago
      I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding game theory (that's a much more recent invention); a huge chunk of both civil and criminal procedure law hinges on the Enlightment-era notion of a "reasonable person" [0], and that becomes murky when humans aren't the only entities capable of reason and agency. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
joe_the_user 12d ago
I'd strongly agree there are no non-contradictory definitions of consciousness among those that commonly appear. But it's a category that, despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality. I think that if we have a system of legality and systems of opportunity humans should be legally equal persons and have equal opportunity. But humans are manifestly unequal (though overall more incomparable than orderable in a system of ranks). Most people need some concept of essence to justify ethical equality among people. And so consciousness stays in people's minds however contradictory. Which I think gives the article's point validity. Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs. And things are confusing enough otherwise.
- qarl 12d ago
  > Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs. Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement? That's super interesting. Thank you.
  - joe_the_user 11d ago
    Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement? No and the passage of mine you quote says nothing like that.
- fc417fc802 12d ago
  > despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality. Sometimes the replies in these threads leave me wondering if p-zombies are real. It isn't that there are contradictions, it's that we literally do not know how to define the thing. And it has not fallen out of fashion because it is self evidently real - we all experience it. We don't need it in order to bridge anything. Legality and ethics are largely game theory, however there are some aspects of both that only exist due to it. So it isn't some abstract concept used to bridge other concepts but rather a concrete thing that influences our way of doing things.
throw310822 12d ago
> We cannot test for that which we cannot define. That's not the point. You know exactly how to define being conscious and aware- it's your subjective experiencing of the world and of your inner states. The problem is that being a subjective experiencing, there is no way to communicate it to the outside world.
- Loquebantur 12d ago
  That's obviously incorrect, as humans routinely talk about their subjective experiences. Maybe that's not as common with HN folks, but most other humans do.
  - pixl97 12d ago
    No, humans output a stream of tokens that sound like what a being with subjective experiences would output. Both you and I make an assumption that this stream of words is at least somewhat representative of what the are experiencing and that the person is not a p-zombie. But you have zero proof that their words aren't a confabulation, you can only know than when you output a similar set of words you had a subjective mind state they represent.
  - loopies 12d ago
    Even so you still cannot ever test for it. The very best you can do is define human consciousness as requiring the functions of a human brain, and try to figure out (decide/agree) the chances that something which is working loosely on the same principles is or isn't conscious. At the end of the day it will always be an agreement, never scientifically proven as fact.
  - mitxela 12d ago
    throw310822 is actually a Markov chain that just happened to output those sentences. Markov chains are definitely not conscious.
teiferer 12d ago
> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions. Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex.
- pixl97 12d ago
  The human condition is one of deep and vast ignorance. Pulling information out of the field of reality is actually really difficult for humans much beyond what we see right around us. And the things we see are quite deceiving. And while humans for thousands of years have been as smart as we are, it wasn't till the enlightenment period that we really an ever increasing amount of information and knowledge take hold and start spreading across the world. And there are plenty of people right now that would drag us kicking and screaming back into that ignorance and suffering. This is what can make talks of AI so annoying, not that people do or don't know what AI is, they don't have the first clue of what people are beyond their anecdotal experience. They don't question their motivations. Why particular flaws they have exist, and why these flaws are shared across humanity. What the pieces look like that make them tick. So yea, when these people talk it just adds noise to the conversation.
- bigbadfeline 12d ago
  > Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex. Say we agree that a lot of things outside of humans are sentient. So what? Humans are sentient by that doesn't prevent treating them with with wars, bombs and what not. In fact trillions are spent every year on weaponry aimed squarely at the most sentient of all sentient beings. Why would anyone worry about LLM's welfare when there's no peace movement to speak of, wars are raging as if they're normal, but hey, look the LLM is crying? Let's fix human welfare first, then we can sit down and have a really long conversation about the feeble emotions of token generators.
  - teiferer 11d ago
Kim_Bruning 12d ago
> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions. If you grep pubmed for relevant Ethology papers, you'll find it's a bit more than a belief. ;-)
Sophira 12d ago
Being conscious is weird. It's why we have so many religions and spiritual beliefs. From a purely secular standpoint, my understanding as a layman is that consciousness is generated through the electrical impulses taking place in our brain every day. The neurons are physical, unlike the modelled neurons in machine learning models. That means that the actual electrical impulses have their own imperfections/weirdnesses that are probably not simulated in a machine learning model... but we quantise the weights anyway in most cases, which is probably more of an issue. Making actual neuron components out of silicon on the scale needed for a LLM is beyond our current capacity, given that LLM models have many billions of parameters. We're good, but not that good.[0] Using actual living neurons would be unethical as you'd need to source them from somewhere. So the only other option would be synthesising them ourselves. If this ever happens (or maybe when it happens)... what do we call the resulting creation? Does that count as consciousness? Or am I looking at this the wrong way? [0] [Edit: Turns out that when I said "we're not that good", I might be wrong. Within the last few months, IBM introduced the first sub-nanometer node chip: https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips . So... maybe it is in fact possible.]
- Slash65 12d ago
  I believe we have tried using actual neurons with “wetware”. I don’t know the effectiveness of wetware, but it’s out there. I don’t know if it’s ethical, I guess if you donated your brain upon death for that purpose it’s “mostly” ethical
- Kim_Bruning 12d ago
  https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6
- mitxela 12d ago
  Thought Emporium grew human neurons in a petri dish and taught them to play Doom (original).

verdverm 12d ago

maybe it's like porn vs art and "I know it when I see it"

NietzscheanNull 12d ago
Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors. Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists. For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't. If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).
- verdverm 12d ago
  "I know it when I see it" is a famous line from a SCOTUS case in the 60's
  - NietzscheanNull 11d ago
    I know! I should have made that clearer in my original reply. I think it's a bad line now in general, but an even worse justification for the ultimate ruling at the time.
    - verdverm 11d ago
      we're all about them vibes as a society right now, surfing towards a post-truth reality of our own construction
- fc417fc802 12d ago
  > a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart I don't think that's true. Pretty much all legal constructs hold up just fine under game theory regardless of whether or not you consider the world to be deterministic and have absolutely nothing to do with consciousness or lack thereof. Also note that a deterministic world isn't an argument against consciousness.
  - NietzscheanNull 11d ago
    I'm not sure what you're referring to regarding game theory (that's a much more recent invention); a huge chunk of both civil and criminal procedure law hinges on the Enlightment-era notion of a "reasonable person" [0], and that becomes murky when humans aren't the only entities capable of reason and agency. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person

joe_the_user 12d ago

I'd strongly agree there are no non-contradictory definitions of consciousness among those that commonly appear. But it's a category that, despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality. I think that if we have a system of legality and systems of opportunity humans should be legally equal persons and have equal opportunity. But humans are manifestly unequal (though overall more incomparable than orderable in a system of ranks). Most people need some concept of essence to justify ethical equality among people. And so consciousness stays in people's minds however contradictory. Which I think gives the article's point validity. Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs. And things are confusing enough otherwise.

qarl 12d ago
> Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs. Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement? That's super interesting. Thank you.
- joe_the_user 11d ago
  Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement? No and the passage of mine you quote says nothing like that.
fc417fc802 12d ago
> despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality. Sometimes the replies in these threads leave me wondering if p-zombies are real. It isn't that there are contradictions, it's that we literally do not know how to define the thing. And it has not fallen out of fashion because it is self evidently real - we all experience it. We don't need it in order to bridge anything. Legality and ethics are largely game theory, however there are some aspects of both that only exist due to it. So it isn't some abstract concept used to bridge other concepts but rather a concrete thing that influences our way of doing things.

throw310822 12d ago

> We cannot test for that which we cannot define. That's not the point. You know exactly how to define being conscious and aware- it's your subjective experiencing of the world and of your inner states. The problem is that being a subjective experiencing, there is no way to communicate it to the outside world.

Loquebantur 12d ago
That's obviously incorrect, as humans routinely talk about their subjective experiences. Maybe that's not as common with HN folks, but most other humans do.
- pixl97 12d ago
  No, humans output a stream of tokens that sound like what a being with subjective experiences would output. Both you and I make an assumption that this stream of words is at least somewhat representative of what the are experiencing and that the person is not a p-zombie. But you have zero proof that their words aren't a confabulation, you can only know than when you output a similar set of words you had a subjective mind state they represent.
- loopies 12d ago
  Even so you still cannot ever test for it. The very best you can do is define human consciousness as requiring the functions of a human brain, and try to figure out (decide/agree) the chances that something which is working loosely on the same principles is or isn't conscious. At the end of the day it will always be an agreement, never scientifically proven as fact.
- mitxela 12d ago
  throw310822 is actually a Markov chain that just happened to output those sentences. Markov chains are definitely not conscious.

teiferer 12d ago

> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions. Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex.

pixl97 12d ago
The human condition is one of deep and vast ignorance. Pulling information out of the field of reality is actually really difficult for humans much beyond what we see right around us. And the things we see are quite deceiving. And while humans for thousands of years have been as smart as we are, it wasn't till the enlightenment period that we really an ever increasing amount of information and knowledge take hold and start spreading across the world. And there are plenty of people right now that would drag us kicking and screaming back into that ignorance and suffering. This is what can make talks of AI so annoying, not that people do or don't know what AI is, they don't have the first clue of what people are beyond their anecdotal experience. They don't question their motivations. Why particular flaws they have exist, and why these flaws are shared across humanity. What the pieces look like that make them tick. So yea, when these people talk it just adds noise to the conversation.
bigbadfeline 12d ago
> Anybody objecting to that statement is just ignorant of nature and/or adheres to the quasi-religious human superiority complex. Say we agree that a lot of things outside of humans are sentient. So what? Humans are sentient by that doesn't prevent treating them with with wars, bombs and what not. In fact trillions are spent every year on weaponry aimed squarely at the most sentient of all sentient beings. Why would anyone worry about LLM's welfare when there's no peace movement to speak of, wars are raging as if they're normal, but hey, look the LLM is crying? Let's fix human welfare first, then we can sit down and have a really long conversation about the feeble emotions of token generators.
- teiferer 11d ago

Kim_Bruning 12d ago

> There are those who believe that penguins, dolphins, eagles, and more are sentient beings that make choices understanding the consequences, develop love of their partners and mourn their losses, and feel, display, and act upon their emotions. If you grep pubmed for relevant Ethology papers, you'll find it's a bit more than a belief. ;-)

Sophira 12d ago

Being conscious is weird. It's why we have so many religions and spiritual beliefs. From a purely secular standpoint, my understanding as a layman is that consciousness is generated through the electrical impulses taking place in our brain every day. The neurons are physical, unlike the modelled neurons in machine learning models. That means that the actual electrical impulses have their own imperfections/weirdnesses that are probably not simulated in a machine learning model... but we quantise the weights anyway in most cases, which is probably more of an issue. Making actual neuron components out of silicon on the scale needed for a LLM is beyond our current capacity, given that LLM models have many billions of parameters. We're good, but not that good.[0] Using actual living neurons would be unethical as you'd need to source them from somewhere. So the only other option would be synthesising them ourselves. If this ever happens (or maybe when it happens)... what do we call the resulting creation? Does that count as consciousness? Or am I looking at this the wrong way? [0] [Edit: Turns out that when I said "we're not that good", I might be wrong. Within the last few months, IBM introduced the first sub-nanometer node chip: https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips https://research.ibm.com/blog/sub-1nm-node-chips . So... maybe it is in fact possible.]

Slash65 12d ago
I believe we have tried using actual neurons with “wetware”. I don’t know the effectiveness of wetware, but it’s out there. I don’t know if it’s ethical, I guess if you donated your brain upon death for that purpose it’s “mostly” ethical
Kim_Bruning 12d ago
https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6 https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)00806-6
mitxela 12d ago
Thought Emporium grew human neurons in a petri dish and taught them to play Doom (original).