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by sigmoid10
362 days ago
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>You are not just seeing consciousness in me; your brain is generating the feeling of another’s consciousness as the best explanation for the patterns you’re interacting with. It's ironic to see the most mundane and likely best answer to the problem from the model itself, while the author is getting increasingly lost in philosophical conundrums. Consciousness has no scientific definition. The only way something, anything can be conscious, is if a human that we also consider "conscious" calls it that. You could argue that's what the Turing test evaluates, but some of the most recent models have actually passed this test [1]. So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that animals could have consciousness because they don't have souls or aren't chosen by god according to some sacred books or something along those lines. They even used to deny that other humans have consciousness to promote slavery and slaughtering. Today many would still deny consciousness in computers even when faced with overwhelming evidence, because they might fear for their jobs and thereby their wealth and social standing. Artificial intelligence is a direct threat to the foundations of personality in a capitalist society. Because what are you still worth if you lose in every metric to a computer? Consciousness is kind of a last straw that many people will cling to for the foreseeable future when all else is gone. But that also means these discussions are utterly meaningless and only serve to promote certain world views. It's best not to twist your head about it and just accept that humans are not the pinnacle (or the end) of intelligent thought in the universe. That is the only reality I'm willing to bet on. [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674 |
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> So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that animals could have consciousness because they don't have souls or aren't chosen by god according to some sacred books or something along those lines.
You bring up religion. People say that AI is conscious based on mystic vibes they unquestioningly take in (or accept gratefully) because the AI can write like a philosopher. That’s exactly like people thinking that the woods and the creeks are Alive. They see the phenonema around these natural objects and make extra-evidential inferences about how the conscious Nature is working with or against them.
> They even used to deny that other humans have consciousness to promote slavery and slaughtering. Today many would still deny consciousness in computers even when faced with overwhelming evidence, because they might fear for their jobs and thereby their wealth and social standing. Artificial intelligence is a direct threat to the foundations of personality in a capitalist society.
Yeah, preach. Before they enslaved people. Now people are afraid of losing their jobs—their only means of survival—so that the tech billionaires can reap all the productivity benefits for themselves. Preach.
And: their sense of personality? No. Just their means of being able to survive and live a good life. That’s how it relates to “capitalist society”. Because their identity (of letting a capitalist extract their value I guess?) is secondary to that more base need.
And who cares if the entity that takes their job (presumably) is conscious or not? What does it even matter? It doesn’t.
As for the overwhelming evidence, well. I guess it is overwhelming to the kind of person who hears voices in a valley where the terrain happens to have a shape which makes the wind make intonations.