4 ms·

"I’m broadly skeptical that floating-point operations can be conscious" Why?

• tomrod 17d ago
  Because it is alien to what is known. Incidentally, we should expect similar bewilderment if we ever come across aliens
  • thepasch 17d ago
    Carbon atoms being conscious seems pretty alien to what is known, too. Yet here we are. Maybe what's important isn't the individual thing that makes up a conscious actor, but the holistic whole?
    • nozzlegear 17d ago
      > Carbon atoms being conscious seems pretty alien to what is known, too. Not if you're human, who typically don't define themselves as conscious carbon atoms unless they're being deeply pedantic.
      • cwillu 17d ago
        Such pedantry is called for when the debate includes appeals to intuition about how silicon processing floating point numbers cannot possibly be conscious.
      • mitxela 17d ago
        It's the same level of pedantry as calling an LLM "floating point operations" though
        • jatora 16d ago
          exactly. such over-reduction is just intellectually dishonest and generally a sign of some coping imo.
          • nozzlegear 14d ago
            IMO using sophistry to reduce yourself to "conscious carbon atoms" just so you can equivocate on whether your software is maybe conscious too is the cope.
    • amdivia 17d ago
      But here you are assuming Carbon atoms are conscious, we do not know if humans are only carbon atoms. Whereas, we know that LLM's are only computations (you can run them on silicon, a white board, mechanical computer, etc)
  • wild_egg 17d ago
    Goes both ways. https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/ https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/
• lukifer 17d ago
  I don’t have a good answer beyond common-sense intuition. It’s precisely because I don’t have a good answer that I leave open the possibility. But to extrapolate a bit, theres a sense in which it cashes out to a difference between abstracted representation and embodiment. If GFLOPS can be conscious, does that mean a billion scribes doing those operations on paper would also have consciousness, even identical consciousness? (Relevant: Egan’s “Permutation City”; xkcd 505). Is there some intrinsic relationship perhaps with electrons / electromagnetic fields, and consciousness, such that brains and servers can act as antennas or gravity wells for a qualia fabric intrinsic to the Universe, such that LLM agents can be conscious while operating, while in the scribe scenario it would not be? Or are the IIT theorists right, and even a thermostat is a little bit aware (and would be even if executed on paper)?
  • ATMLOTTOBEER 17d ago
    I’m broadly skeptical that atoms and electricity can be conscious
    • tim333 17d ago
      I think it's more the patterns and activity in large numbers of them that have interesting properties. Like one pixel isn't much but a bunch of them can be a movie.
    • lukifer 17d ago
      There are various flavors of pan-psychism (and the "consciousness-first" idealists, who think that Mind is a substrate below Matter). There are some who claim that it goes all the way down, that even subatomic particles experience a micro-consciousness (and we can't rule it out, even as I share your skepticism). One common confusion (IMO among critics and supporters alike) is to say something like "a rock experiences rock-ness". But this suffers from a compositional dilemma: does half of the rock experience half-rock-ness? If we flipped a coin for every atom, do the heads-flip rock atoms have their own experience? If we pick two rocks at random, are they experiencing two-rock-ness? It gets silly fast. This is one thing that fascinates me about "ontology", simultaneously an inquiry into categories, and Being. It bewildered me at first, that it seemed to be doing double-duty on two distinct subjects, but I now see that the two are inseparable, that Being is in part defined negatively (apophatically), by the boundary that separates the Being from its not-Being. My intuition on the nature of consciousness, is that it's something akin to a field which permeates the Universe, and that biological systems adapted to leverage that field, acting like a gravity well that concentrates subjectivity in one place, drawing a boundary (event horizon?) around experience, in a way that a rock doesn't. My ancestors could have avoided fire with "-X utility points", and sought food with "+X utility points", but it turned out to be more efficient to adapt with "fire ouch, food yum". And in zero-sum competition (predator/prey dynamics), each organism has an incentive to avoid leaking its subjectivity into another's. It's far from a full theory, but it's the best I've got. :)
• amdivia 17d ago
  I mean it all goes back to how we define consciousness In one definition, which contains quale, then yes, computation cannot bring about experience, and by extension consciousness (given a definition of consciousness that contains the ability to experience, (e.i a p-zombie is not conscious under that definition)) also if one is to say llms are conscious, i assume they'll also accept the fact that if someone ran inference of some model's weights on a white board, somehow that will also bring about consciousness somewhere. I find such believes hard to grasp, and more akin to magic if anything