[kadoban]

Pick a model, a seed, a temperature and fix some floating-point annoyances and the output is a deterministic algorithm from the input.

[Lerc]

A lot of people look towards non-determanism to be a source for free will. It's often what underlies peoples thinking when they discount the ability of AI to be conscious. They want to believe they have free will and consider determinism to be incompatible with free will.

Events are either caused, or uncaused. Either can be causes. Caused events happen because of the cause. Uncaused events are by definition random. If you can detect any real pattern in an event you can infer that it was caused by something.

Relying on decision making by randomness over reasons does not seem to be a good basis of free will.

If we have free will it will be in spite of non-determinism, not because of it.

[aljarry]

That's true with any neural network or ML model. Pick a few points, use the same algorithm with the same hyperparameters and random seed, and you'll end up with the same result. Determinism doesn't mean that the "logic" or "reason" is an effect of the algorithm doing the computations.

[kadoban]

The logic or reason is emergent in the combinations of the activations of different artificial neurons, no?

[aljarry]

Yes, exactly. What I meant is: it's not the code itself that encodes this logic or reasoning.

[layble]

Maybe consciousness is just what lives in the floating-point annoyances

[kadoban]

Not really possible. The models work fine once you fix them, it's just making sure you account for batching and concurrency's effect on how floating point gives very (very) slightly different answers based on ordering and grouping and etc.