[byyyy]

I'm curious about the AI at Google that was claimed by a person who has since been fired to be conscious.

I mean I know everyone was attacking him but in a way I suspect it's similar to a lot of the unreasonable dismissive attitudes towards chatGPT.

We really can't say anything either way until we are able to access and play with that version of AI that Google is hiding. I believe it's called lambda?

The point is that Google may already be holding something very very similar to being conscious.

[skybrian]

We know AI chatbots aren't conscious most of the time because no program is running. There's nothing to do any thinking. [1]

We also know that they immediately forget anything they didn't write down. A chatbot has no memory of any internal calculations. If you ask it why it wrote something, it's guessing. [2]

People sometimes believe that an AI-generated character is conscious because the writing is convincing, along with some wishful thinking. But writers and characters aren't the same thing, and there's no writer waiting for your reply when you read the character's dialog. This essentially the same thing that happens when reading fiction. [3]

[1] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chats-are-turn-based-game...

[2] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/ai-chatbots-dont-know-why-th...

[3] https://skybrian.substack.com/p/the-ai-author-illusion

[byyyy]

>no program is running

Not true. This is irrational. A program runs when you input a query and it generates a response. There is nothing that says consciousness must be always running. When you ask me a question and I answer it... In that time span of processing you're query all humans are conscious. Therefore it is a possibility that LLMs are too.

What is obvious here is that the consciousness an AI exhibits because it is not always running is clearly different from human consciousness because a human is always running. That is logically the biggest possible statement against consciousness. We simply do not have enough information to say it is absolutely unconscious. Such a claim is illogical.

>We also know that they immediately forget anything they didn't write down. A chatbot has no memory of any internal calculations. If you ask it why it wrote something, it's guessing.

False. First Chatgpt has limited memory in the span of a chat session. Outside of that it forgets things.

Second. Consciousness does not require memory. There are many examples of people with retrograde amnesia or even memories that only last minutes and these people are still considered conscious. Therefore a comment about memory is orthogonal to the concept of consciousness.

>People sometimes believe that an AI-generated character is conscious because the writing is convincing, along with some wishful thinking. But writers and characters aren't the same thing, and there's no writer waiting for your reply when you read the character's dialog. This essentially the same thing that happens when reading fiction.

A convincing facade of consciousness is the first prerequisite of consciousness. That is absolutely the first step. We obviously don't consider if rocks are conscious because rocks don't put up a convincing facade. In this respect many LLMs in a certain sense fulfill to varying degrees this first prerequisite.

The second step is to understand what's going on within the neural nets. In this regard we do not fully understand what is going on and we have made little progress.

So in conclusion we cannot know if these things are conscious. We are in an state of not understanding what's going on.

A statement of saying we do know that it is absolutely unconscious is irrational and illogical at this point. Such is the nature of your reply.

[skybrian]

I think most people would say that when you don't experience time passing, you're not conscious at that time. (For example, when you're asleep and not dreaming.) It's pretty clear that a chatbot cannot experience time as we do.

Also, it actually is the case that ChatGPT API calls are stateless. This means it can't have any extra short-term memory other than what's written down in the chat session. It doesn't forget what it wrote in a few minutes, for forgets it immediately.

That means that you ask it why it wrote what it did, it's starting from scratch, the same way a different writer would.

I'm not sure what we should conclude from people who have severe memory problems? I've read about them, but I have hardly any direct experience. How about you?

[byyyy]

> I think most people would say that when you don't experience time passing, you're not conscious at that time. (For example, when you're asleep and not dreaming.) It's pretty clear that a chatbot cannot experience time as we do.

There is a time delta that occurs when LLMs processes input. The LLM does experience time in that sense in the same way you experience time when you process a query given to you by another person.

There isn't anything known to science that happens instantaneously. All processes and change go through a time delta.

>Also, it actually is the case that ChatGPT API calls are stateless. This means it can't have any extra short-term memory other than what's written down in the chat session. It doesn't forget what it wrote in a few minutes, for forgets it immediately.

If it remembers what's in the chat Session then that is in itself memory. Everyone is aware it forgets things between sessions, I never denied that. Either way, again, there are examples of humans who have shorter memories than a chat session. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia

>I'm not sure what we should conclude from people who have severe memory problems? I've read about them, but I have hardly any direct experience. How about you?

You can look up the condition and even find a video about it. These humans exist and they are considered conscious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o79p1b1SGk4

Look at the video yourself. Do you think the subject (who has Anterograde amnesia) is not conscious? I don't think so. Thus the argument of memory is orthogonal to consciousness. It has nothing to do with it.

[x86x87]

lol. no.

As a thought experiment, I am going to challenge you to define what being conscious is. Go ahead, try it.

[byyyy]

Nobody knows the exact definition of consciousness. It's a made up word with a vague definition. The catch is the vagueness of the definition is also made up so it's all bullshit anyway.

Either way when we communicate in English we have a vague feeling of what consciousness actually is. Most humans, save the most pedantic ass hole, is still able to communicate about consciousness based off of this vague and fuzzy feeling.

You are Not a pedantic ass hole, definitely not, and neither am I, so let's not get into that rabbit hole. Let's just leave it at the fact that you aren't stupid so you know what I'm talking about even when I don't get into the the fine grained details about what the definition of "consciousness" is.

[x86x87]

So your argument is that consciousness is hard to define but Google may have something that resembles a conscious machine?

It's not about being an ahole. I agree with you that communication is hard and imprecise but that should not stop us from trying to be more precise in the right context.