[grumbel]

> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body.

An AI system constructs the world model a little different, by all the text that gets feed into it, but that doesn't mean that there is anything fundamentally different in the world model it builds. Consciousness operates on world model, not on the world or even the body itself.

The AI's world model might be missing some information, because they weren't described in enough detail in text, but that shouldn't matter for consciousness. A blind or deaf person isn't less conscious than one that can see or hear just because some information is missing from their world model.

[felipeerias]

Your brain is part of your body, that's the point. There isn't a "you" separate from your actual, physical existence. Mind-body dualism is not real.

[grumbel]

The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important.

If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets.

Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.

[Jensson]

> The "you" isn't your physical body, it's the pattern recognition in your brain that that classifies some parts of its sensory input as "you" (see Mirror Hand illusion). That it happens to be running on meat instead of silicon is an implementation detail and not important.

It is important, if I destroy your brain and grow a new one and start running the same program on the new brain your consciousness is still dead and its a new person living.

Computer AI models don't run on a single machine, they run in a distributed manner using different machines at different times. When you ask a follow up question thats not sent to the same machine, its another machine answering. So the consciousness one of those computing machines experience would be extremely fragmented and not at all conscious about any discussion with you, since it only saw a few fragments of it.

And no consciousness doesn't expand to cover larger distributed computations, otherwise social media would have developed a consciousness by now but it hasn't. Groups of humans don't start to share consciousness, it doesn't happen, so you can assume groups of distributed computers wont as well.

[grumbel]

> It is important, if I destroy your brain and grow a new one and start running the same program on the new brain your consciousness is still dead and its a new person living.

If I copy a text document from one computer to another, is that the same document or a different one? It's all just information. If you copy it, you have two, it's still the same until the documents start changing and go different directions.

> Computer AI models don't run on a single machine

It doesn't matter on how many machines it runs on. It's information processing, as long as it gives the same results, it doesn't matter how you accomplish it.

Consciousness isn't some magic thing that sits on top, it's the result of that information processing. You take random sensory data, the brain transforms that into "cats, dogs, you, me", it uses uses those percepts to execute actions, gets more data back and checks how the actions changed the world state.

Keeping track of what changes in the world were causes by actions of the brain vs things that happened due to other causes is the conscious experience.

[solomonb]

Its amazing that after years of advocating for a materialist view of the mind, the tech bros are flipping to mind-body dualism now that they need to believe a concious mind can exist no body at all.

[Planktonne]

It's worse than that; it's mind-body dualism when arguing that an AI can be conscious, but still materialist when arguing that humans are simply more complex neural nets. It's not a coherent viewpoint.

[Gooblebrai]

> You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model. You are effectively a "brain in a vat", the vat just happens to be placed on top of your body

I think we give too much credit to the brain. The gut has almost as many neurons as a dog's brain and the heart has neurons too. "You" are more likely the whole ecosystem, not just your brain. There are even some hypothesis of disorders like depression being more influenced by the gut than the brain.

[sfn42]

Its a computer program. It is literally just a lot of zeroes and ones, sitting there doing nothing.

Then a request comes in, and the system does a bunch of calculations using those bits, and spits out a result. The bits are unchanged.

When your brain receives input, it is changed. It is constantly active. If it ever stops being active it's dead.

So, what exactly is the claim? Are the bits constantly conscious? Do they snap into consciousness when the computer does math with them? Or is it maybe the computer that's conscious while it's processing these bits? How about when it stops doing that and goes back to doing other stuff? Why are these particular bits special? Was the computer always conscious?

I feel like the only way anyone could believe LLMs are conscious is if they don't understand how computers work. Of course it isn't conscious, how could it possibly be conscious? Its literally just bits. It's like saying the text in a book is conscious.

[orangecat]

So, what exactly is the claim? Are the bits constantly conscious? Do they snap into consciousness when the computer does math with them? Or is it maybe the computer that's conscious while it's processing these bits? How about when it stops doing that and goes back to doing other stuff? Why are these particular bits special? Was the computer always conscious?

These are all fine questions, and they don't become any easier to answer if you replace "computers" with "brains" and "bits" with "neurons".

Of course it isn't conscious, how could it possibly be conscious? Its literally just bits.

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

[el_jay]

> These are all fine questions, and they don't become any easier to answer if you replace "computers" with "brains" and "bits" with "neurons".

What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?

> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

… what?

[orangecat]

What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?

We don't understand how combining a bunch of obviously(?) non-conscious biological components can produce a larger system that is conscious, so it's unwarranted to be certain that that can't happen with software.

[jlightfire]

Cells are living entities, can't they be conscious? I think they are. Is not that human consciousness comes out of raw materials. They are alive, not as bits or circuits. That can't be discussed.

[jsnell]

https://www.eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/UBooks/TheyMade.s...

[nprateem]

> if they don't understand how computers work

Or if they're retards. The fact this still comes up is weird. A printing press isn't conscious, so why would an LLM be.

Don't forget, some of the bros are overly excitable. Like that twat who reckoned a Google model 5 years ago was conscious.

[hn_acc1]

If you feed the same prompt to the same AI with the same random seed, you'll get the same answer every time.

If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

[Jtarii]

If I ask my friend what his favourite song is 100 times I will get the same answer back 100 times. Is my friend therefore not conscious?

[Jensson]

> If I ask my friend what his favourite song is 100 times I will get the same answer back 100 times.

Pretty sure you wont, humans vary the exact wording. They will say the same song but they wont answer the exact same way every time. Even if they say the same words two times they wont use the same tone and body language, as they don't just communicate via words and that nonverbal language is a part of what we say.

[jcattle]

If you ask him 100 times in a row I would bet that by the second, maybe third, time he will not answer with his song but with: what the fuck is wrong with you?

Nicely circling back to LLMs not being able to learn and form memories.

[grumbel]

> If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?

If you have hundred different people, they will of course do something different. Just like hundred different AI model will do something different. The question you have to ask is if the same person under the same circumstances would do the same.

Luckily, we have an answer to that: They would. Transient Global Amnesia is a condition where people temporarily lose the ability to form memories and in turn they keep repeating the same conversation again and again[1]. Their brain keeps asking the same question again and again, as it doesn't remember the answers it already got.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3fA5uzWDU8

[keeda]

Have they had the exact same experiences and influences all the way to that point in time?

[gabrieledarrigo]

> Easy, you don't have subjective experiences because you have body in the first place. You have them because some signals come in from your nerves, which your brain turns into a world model.

Bro, I think we discarded this idea from Platone and Cartesio a while ago...

Your brain is your body.

Your mind is not detached from it, and you can't feel anything, and so have a subjective experience, without it. Neither, your mind, or "soul" could survive to the physical death of your body.

So...I mean...

[grumbel]

The point is that the brain operates on information, not things. The thing you think is the external world, that's just electricity flowing through your neurons. When you see a dog, that isn't a thing in the world, but a signal in your brain. In principle we can take a knife and cut that connection at any point and replace the real signal with an electronic box that gives the same signal.

You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body. And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.

The important part of consciousness is being able to figure out what of the sensory input is correlated to your own action and which was caused by the rest of the world.

[gabrieledarrigo]

> You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body.

As I was saying, your brain is literally part of your body. It's a living organ of your body that receives those inputs, as you say, from the rest of your body.

> And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.

I completely disagree here, and that's why guessing that a bunch of matrix multiplications are coscient and have self awareness of their own experience while running in a CPU seems quite hilarious to me.

But hey, that's just my opinion.