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by diablozzq 57 days ago
Consciousness is a property of humans biology - and quite clearly not a requisite to intelligence.

I say clearly as at some point we reach proof by construction. As in, we already built intelligence because the system already completes tasks that require intelligence.

We are so far into what would have been science fiction five years ago and the goal posts have moved so far.

For anyone who disagrees, I challenge you to prove deep learning systems cannot solve <task with specific outcome humans can solve but not AI> given sufficient data and compute.

I think the strongest sign we have true intelligence already is no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve.

Yes, our current robotics lags AI, so we don’t have the equivalent of the human body to give our deep learning systems. Thus, it’s expected AI will be limited in physical scenarios.

Second, hallucinations are present in humans. We are highly biased to ignore all the misspoken words in everyday life as we have error correction built into normal conversations. How often do you have to have someone repeat or rephrase something?

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

It’s like there are people out there whose belief systems are incompatible with this tech existing.

Sure, it has limitations due to training data. It has limitations with no physical body. It cannot combine training and inference the same way a human does. But none of those are measures of intelligence or required to be intelligent.

6 comments

I only disagree with your first sentence:

> Consciousness is a property of humans biology

You're assuming consciousness is a product of biology rather than attracted to biology.

>no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve.

Sure, but people have built benchmarks that no AI constructed before the benchmark was released can solve. If I know the answer to a benchmark problem, I can construct an "AI" that can solve it on a note card.

"intelligence" is not well defined. LLMs are throwing this into high relief with how "spiky" their capability curve is. Yes, they can solve some crazy hard problems with enough compute and thinking tokens. Yes, they also fall down in the dumbest ways without an ability to self-correct... despite how "smart" they are, human supervision remains absolutely critical for any system of importance.

But I don't think the takeaway is "humans are intelligent and LLMs are not", it's that our vocabulary for talking about the intersection of language, cognition and compute is not up for the task.

Intelligence was supposedly well defined, but folks kept getting their definitions wrecked by modern LLMs so we had to move the goal posts.

No true Scottsman fallacy.

What was the “well defined” definition? I’m not aware of any other than “this particular thing a human can do that I expect would be difficult for a computer.”
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I agree with your main points but I just wanted to chime on

> Consciousness is a property of humans biology

Just because we only observed something in human biology, doesn't mean that it can't be found elsewhere.

I mean being water based is also a property of human biology. They share this property with other things like lube and chicken soup.

I cannot express concisely how deeply I disagree with all of this.

It is not just uninteresting that computer programs can be written to accomplish information tasks, it's intellectually dishonest to anthropomorphize machines and algorithms to characterize it as consciousness.

> no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve

"Be human."

no one cares if LLMs are humans. They will never be by definition.

My point still stands

The crux of my argument is Consciousness is irrelevant to any AI debates. It’s not necessary to perform tasks we previously deemed only humans could do.