[throwyawayyyy]

Current LLMs prove that the Turing Test was insufficient all along. But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness. One can, after all, be conscious without a thought in one's head. We certainly have ongoing work in identifying the neural correlates of consciousness in animals, none of which is going to be remotely applicable to machines. We're genuinely blind to the question of whether a sufficiently large neural net can exhibit flashes of subjective experience.

[dpark]

> But they also prove that intelligence != consciousness.

They prove no such thing. We can't even prove consciousness in other humans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_other_minds

[Jtarii]

The most convincing argument is that if other humans were not experiencing consciousness then they probably wouldn't waste large parts of their lives arguing about it.

[psychoslave]

On that regard, arguing with thermometer is not a thing generally, but people arguing with LLMs is certainly common enough now to not be considered a completely marginal case. Given some people fall in love or move to suicide after interacting with these models, they are certainly different from even the most beloved dialectical rubber duck.

[api]

That was one of my thoughts years ago after playing with early ChatGPT and local llama1: this proves that intelligence and consciousness do not necessitate one another and may not even be directly related.

I’ve kind of thought this for many years though. A bacterium and a tree are probably conscious. I think it’s a property of life rather than brains. Our brains are conscious because they are alive. They are also intelligent.

The consciousness of a bacterium or a tree might be radically unlike ours. It might not have a sense of self in the same way we do, or experience time the same way, but it probably has some form of experience of existing.

[digitaltrees]

But why? A roomba has senses, and can access them when it has power and respond to stimulation. When it runs out of power it no longer experiences this sensation and no longer responds to stimulus.

How is that different than a cell?

[dpark]

You simply defined consciousness as life, which seems like an unusual but also not very useful definition.

[jbstack]

> an unusual ... definition

I don't think it's that unusual. It seems to me just to be a narrower version of panpsychism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

[collyw]

Someone that has recently dies has pretty much the same biology as when they were alive. The conciseness is the main difference, I would say.

[throwyawayyyy]

I think this gets to the conflation we naturally have with consciousness and a sense of self. Does a tree have a sense of self? I imagine probably not, a tree acts more like a clonal colony than a single organism.

[Earw0rm]

It may be helpful here to think about, at what point does a sense of self, of varying degrees, become evolutionarily advantageous?

An animal that doesn't have some kind of pair bond or social arrangement, and doesn't raise its young, has a lot less need for some of this emotional hardware than we do.

Whereas K-selected species that raise their kids have broadly the same need for it as humans.

That doesn't categorically mean it evolved with the first pair-bonding K-reproducer, or that birds have parallel-evolved emotional hardware like ours, but there's plenty of behavioural evidence there - the last common ancestor of birds and humans was small-brained and primitive, but investing in individual children probably evolved around the time of amniote eggs, just because they were so much more biologically expensive to produce than amphibian or fish eggs.

[kortex]

Is someone tripped out on mushrooms experience ego death and total disruption of sense of self still conscious? They may even contend they are more conscious than normal life, what with all the communing with the universe and whatnot.

Trees react to the world around them in many ways.

[qsera]

They are not intelligent. And they won't pass turing tests if it cannot count or some simple thing like that..

[IshKebab]

They clearly are intelligent to some extent. But I agree they still wouldn't quite pass the Turing test if you have a competent examiner.

[qsera]

>They clearly are intelligent to some extent

May be they appear intelligent to us because we are primitive and new to such an entity. Imagine some laymen from like a thousand years back could experience Google and Stack overflow. Having no idea of the internet or computers, wouldn't they consider it to be intelligent to some extent?

And just like those ancient people had not have an understanding of the concept of an internet and massive capacity to store and retrive data, we does not have a widespread understanding of how LLMs map concepts in a way that can do fuzzy searches. Once we understand it, may be they will look like a regular search...

[abc123abc123]

The turing test is alive and well. All it takes to "win" is to just sit there. Ask for a Nazi joke, ask for a longer explanation etc. It's incredibly easy, in a Turing test scenario to sort out who is human and who is LLM.

[mock-possum]

Except that I have never interacted with an LLM and been struck by uncertainty whether I am communicating with a human. It’s still lamentably trivial to tell whether it’s a chat bot or a real person on the other end. Nothing has passed the Turing test in my book.

[dd8601fn]

At this point they would have to intentionally hobble them to make them pass as human.

[mock-possum]

Hobble implies worse, I’m not talking about better or worse, I’m talking about different. Uncanny valley, inhuman alien. It does not feel the same as interacting with a living emotional human being.

[brookst]

Obligatory Blightsight recommendation for intelligence != consciousness.

[marshray]

That book is badass on so many levels. I'd just started it again yesterday.

[exe34]

that book messes with my head every time I read it, it's like I go through life in a detached way for several weeks. I need to read it again!

[ninalanyon]

I read it once, was immensely impressed, can't bear to read it again. In fact I find most of what I have read from Peter Watts to be brilliant but disconcerting and uncomfortable.

[dreamcompiler]

Blindsight

[brookst]

argh, and too late to edit. But thank you for the correction!

[digitaltrees]

Wrong based on what criteria? Or are we just moving the goal post because we are uncomfortable with the idea that neural networks might be conscious?

If a single cell organism moves towards light and away from a rock, we say it’s aware. When a roomba vacuum does the same we try to create alternate explanations. Why? Based on the criteria applied to one it’s aware. If there is some other criteria, say we find out the roomba doesn’t sense the wall but has a map of the room and is using GPS and a programmed route, then the criteria of “no fixed programs that relate to data outside of the system, would justify saying the roomba isn’t “aware”.

[throwyawayyyy]

I'm mainly saying it's impossible to know, at least without a theory of consciousness that doesn't exist. Do we consider bacteria to be conscious though, is there something like to be a single cell? I can easily believe there is something like to be an insect.

[digitaltrees]

I’d argue it’s a spectrum with awareness being simple response to stimuli at one and self awareness of and reflection on a subjective experience across time on the other.