[rickydroll]

I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off from work to play with balls).

It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

[coldtea]

>I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise. Aside from the animal world (also on Earth too, anyway) which is a cruder version of humanity, much more violent as well, the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases.

>It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

A "really long time" is the few years we've built LLMs? Which we have to take for granted (on your word?) they're already "conscious", and chastice ourselves for not already "accepting it"?

>So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

"If we had a parrot demonstrating symptoms of discussing with us, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?"

[igleria]

> much more violent as well

I'm not sure about that. What non-human living entity does things on a scale and violence akin to "I'll fill this ant nest with liquid burning metal for artistic purposes" ? A blue whale eats a lot of krill individuals for sustenance, a dolphin can only rape/kill one thing at a time, etc etc.

[tsimionescu]

Animals generally have no qualms at all about killing or even just mutilating other animals. It often happens almost by accident - two animals might be playing together, one gets spooked, and it instinctively attacks and perhaps even kills the other one - this is commonly seen with people who befriend large predators, such as tigers in the infamous Siegfried and Roy tragedy, but it also happens a lot wherever animals interact with each other.

Specifically in regards to your ant example, anteaters and bears often bring similar levels of destruction to ant nests. And cats and other small predators often hunt just for the fun of it, killing but not eating their prey.

On the more purely painful evil side, invertebrates often consume their prey alive, inflicting agonizing deaths with no issues on whatever they may be eating. Plenty of vertebrates kill and consume their babies, especially when frightened. They also often abandon old and weak members of their packs, leaving them to die of hunger or cold or similar deaths.

This is not meant as some indictment of the animal kingdom - people do all of this too, of course; and have since time immemorial. It's just to show that, if we apply human moral standards to the animal kingdom, it's fair to call them violent, and yes, even much more violent than the average modern human.

[igleria]

Humans have enough cognitive ability to stop themselves from killing for fun (so when they don't, we deal with them using human invented laws), while anteaters eat ants for nutrition.

Animals in general cannot reason at a high enough level to avoid instinctual behavior.

> if we apply human moral standards to the animal kingdom

Which we should not, since human moral standards are for humans. Animals can at best behave in a way that suits us.

Or in summary, since we can be nicer, we should. Animals can't, so making excuses for human evil saying "animals are more violent" is a non starter IMHO (no one is making excuses for humans here , AFAIK).

Of course we can define violence in a way that does not include morals, which would make my argument "defending animals" void. But my (probably not the most benign) interpretation was that the definition of violence used was one that included some sort of morality, as if animals could do better.

Very interesting convo, thanks.

[throw0101c]

Humans are not the only ones:

> The chimp warfare described by this study, and previously by famed primatologist Jane Goodall, includes all the behaviors that we as humans consider to be the very worst: killing, torture, cannibalism, rape, and perhaps even genocide. The adult males of a social group, which usually number about 30 to 50 in size, daily patrol the edge of their group's territory. They will often kill any male or young chimpanzees they find, sometimes eating or physically brutalizing their victims in a manner that some researchers liken to torture. In some instances, one group will "invade" and annex the territory of another, killing all but the adult females, who are forced to incorporate into the dominant group. The idea of chimp genocide may sound strange, but they are one of only three animals that has been observed wiping out entire social groups. The other two are wolves and humans.

* https://archive.ph/https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar...

* Probably NSFW video: https://old.reddit.com/r/HardcoreNature/comments/18qjcpq/chi...

[igleria]

Funny, I knew about the chimp wars but totally forgot until you mentioned it. Seems like I was biased in favour of all animals, lol.

I'll search for Goodall's literature to know more. It does sound to me that cognition and self awareness is a continuous function in the sense that there is no discrete threshold in which morals emerge.

Wolves are a very interesting example too, but I also remember something about the concept of "alpha" being discovered only in captivity wolf packs. Also need more reading.

Thanks for the links!

[DocTomoe]

Considering chimps and humans share - depending on source, 95-99% of DNA, I'd be much more willing to consider them closer to humans than animals. In fact, there are - biologist - voices who argue that they should be moved to the homo genus.

[542354234235]

>Animals generally have no qualms at all about killing or even just mutilating other animals.

Humans generally don't either. Individuals do, but as a species humans regularly kill other humans.

>invertebrates often consume their prey alive

And humans use the oh so humane factory farms.

>cats and other small predators often hunt just for the fun of it, killing but not eating their prey.

>On the more purely painful evil side, invertebrates often consume their prey alive, inflicting agonizing deaths with no issues on whatever they may be eating.

Sharks are caught en mass, the fins cut off, and the sharks dumped back into the ocean to slowly die, for shark fin soup.

Have you heard of trophy hunting? Have you seen the pictures of mountains of bison sculls for the American West?

>Plenty of vertebrates kill and consume their babies, especially when frightened.

Even in our modern "1st world" society, scared teens still abandon newborns in dumpsters. Many societies throughout history did not consider babies "real people" until a certain age because they may need to abandon them if resources were particularly scarce.

>They also often abandon old and weak members of their packs, leaving them to die of hunger or cold or similar deaths.

Maybe you should read stories of cities under siege, famines, wars, governmental collapse, etc. Humans now live nice comfy lives most of the time, unlike animals “in the wild”. Human societies that lived closer to the edge of survival made callous choices about life or death you are spared from.

[tsimionescu]

I agree that humanity is guilty of all of these, and has done all of them at a much larger scale. I think I was pretty explicit about this in my comment as well.

My point was that we call humans who do this "violent" and even "evil". If we want to avoid considering humanity as special compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, as some in the thread were suggesting, then we have to either admit that animals are also violent and evil, or say that humans aren't. Note that I don't hold this view, personally, and think that humans are unique among currently living animals, and that these labels only make sense to be applied to humans. But not because of behavior, simply because humans have a unique level of both understanding and control over their actions - as proven by the many billions of humans who have never in their lives killed a human or even another bird or mammal.

[dan00]

Humans just have the cognitive ability to be violent on a larger scale. Otherwise I also don‘t really see much of a difference to animals.

[burkaman]

It is very common for animals to kill much more than they need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_killing.

Elephants, which are herbivores, sometimes enjoy killing rhinos for fun: https://www.bbcearth.com/news/teenage-elephants-need-a-fathe....

House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals every year that they don't need or want to eat.

Chimpanzees have full-scale wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ngogo_chimpanzee_war

[mcswell]

> House cats recreationally kill billions of birds and small mammals > every year that they don't need or want to eat.

"Recreationally" is carrying a lot of weight here. I suspect that cats kill birds and mice because that's their instinct; it has nothing to do with conscious thought, much less a need for recreation. And that probably is the explanation for most (maybe all) of your other examples as well.

[tsimionescu]

Why do you believe this? Do you believe cats and other animals have no consciousness, so every behavior they exhibit is just instinct? Or do you believe they have some conscious behaviors, but killing birds is not one of them, this thing in particular is just an instinct?

For the first position, I think it is quite clear to anyone who studies and spends time with animals that they have something that is at least of the same kind as our consciousness. I just don't see how you can ascribe the wide gamut of complex, situatuonally and mood appropriate but still varied behaviors of animals to being purely instinct driven.

For the second position, I would like to see some study or some rationale behind it - especially since cats don't kill every bird they encounter, so if it's an instinct, it must still have some trigger, and hunger is not a viable explanation for most of the killings referenced here.

[mcswell]

I wasn't arguing for whether cats have consciousness, and I agree that they do, to some extent. (We just lost a 23 1/2 year old cat who had lots of personality.) But killing birds or mice is one of their instincts. One of the triggers is nearness. Young cats will watch a bird through the window with their tail twitching, and the closer the bird is the more excited the cat gets. If they could get through the glass I'm pretty sure they'd go after it. Older cats (my old cat in particular) watched, but either they understand what glass is, or they're too tired to do much about it.

[burkaman]

I just meant recreationally to mean "not out of necessity for survival". And I don't think conscious thought is relevant for this specific thread, I was just responding to the question of whether other animals besides humans can be needlessly violent.

[newfriend]

The same can be said for humans. Where do thoughts come from?

[monocasa]

Meanwhile we're in the first mass extinction event caused by a single species.

We're already in the company of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.

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

[igleria]

I guess I was very ignorant about the elephant example! Thanks for the links

[sethammons]

A fox in the hen house comes to mind. And cats.

[dTal]

Describing life on Earth as "a cruder version of humanity" is uh a choice. Your parrot snark is hilarious because that actually happened with Alex the African Gray - and indeed it took people a long time to accept. Your comment amounts to an anthropocentrism practically biblical in its hubris.

[mcswell]

Many linguists (who know more about language than most other people) still don't accept the story of Alex.

[inglor_cz]

That is a spectacular miss if I saw one ... both parrots and corvids exhibit very high intelligence and self-awareness, I have no problem accepting that they are conscious.

[graemep]

I doubt anyone would debate some of the implications of that. For example, it would be immoral to be deliberately or negligently cruel to them, for example.

[inglor_cz]

I agree that people aren't ready to discuss this.

BTW I just saw this video: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1twl7oj/r...

Yeah, that's corvids. Very obviously working towards goals and thinking quickly. Doesn't surprise me. Where I live, we have both magpies and jackdaws and I cannot describe them better than "harmless, but very organized gangs".

Just a few days ago I saw them raiding an open trash can and two strongest(?) birds were fishing out edible stuff from the inside and throwing it to their waiting friends outside. I mean, beak to beak: the raider just looked back, measured the throw, and the other bird perfectly caught the morsel and ate it.

[jjulius]

>It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise.

There's that hubristic ego OP references.

[chadgpt3]

> It is special in the universe unless proven otherwise.

Transformer models proved otherwise. Will you update your priors?

[zaphar]

No they didn't? I use these continuously and it's pretty obvious to me that they do not at the level of a human except in the most surface level ways. Human's as compared to an LLM remain a special category. We have not in fact cracked human level intelligence.

[unrealhoang]

What if one day they do? Or appears to be, in the way that you couldn't distinguish? Will you update your priors?

[zaphar]

Sure. But I'm also not going to assume they will just because this they seem to sort of mimic it now.

[coldtea]

Even if we assume transformer models as intelligent (quite a big leap of faith), this just proved that humans are even more special: not only they are intelligent beings, but they can also create intelligent technology.

[dandanua]

> the rest of the universe thus far is just uncaring rocks and gases

This is probably what ants think about humans when they run through their feet.

[coldtea]

And they're wrong.

Whereas, unless your claim is that rock and gasses are sentient, we're right.

[mihaic]

Yes, but we have a system to understand the universe and ants don't. Using relativism, to simply destroy point of view without putting anything in their place, is simply destructive without any purpose.

[dandanua]

My purpose was to say that humans might not be capable enough to see what's there beyond just rocks and gases. Actually, this should be a popular view, because, according to modern theory, the observable universe accounts for only 5% of its mass, with the rest consisting of dark matter and dark energy.

It is hard to estimate how much human egocentrism takes in the space, though.

And BTW, ants are quite capable of understanding their environment in order to survive and thrive.

[mihaic]

You're just repeating that your purpose is your message. Do you honestly not see a qualitative difference between the understanding of ants and of humans of the world around them? Heck, even ants and dogs or cats?

[tauwauwau]

Its not special even in earth let alone in universe. You are measuring humans by our achievements and not by what we actually are. We are not fittest in our environment, we are not even 10th fastest, we cant fly, we cant breathe underwater, forget about bacteria we don't have protection against even bugs and mosquitoes. We are not the most efficient societies, ants and bees would beat us there. Statistically we we are selfish and will sacrifice all for one which is against the basic tenants of evolution and survival of a species. When given a chance at a prosperous life we choose to become lazy, obese and degrade our most prominent feature, that is our brain and mind. Elephants and chimpanzees have better memory, octopi have 8-9 light cones in eyes. We are not special or superior, we just won a lottery of mutation giving us efficient brain. Any species on Earth can replace us given same lottery.

[arwineap]

> We are not special or superior, we just won a lottery of mutation giving us efficient brain.

Isn't this exactly what makes us special?

That, opposable thumbs, magic wireless communication, and space travel

[ang_cire]

Those are your own standards of achievement you are applying.

Other species may look at us and think we're wasting our lives and potential making a bunch of people rich at our collective expense, and ruining the environment as we do it.

We are only "special" in the sense of "different" (and we may not be that on any universal scale), not necessarily in the sense of "better", and very possibly we're not better, and may very well Great Filter ourselves out of existence in short order.

Other animals aren't so "special" as to have a Doomsday Clock sitting at 11:58:45.

[lukan]

"Its not special even in earth let alone in universe. "

What alien species you have in mind, that is more capable/consciouss about the universe and how to shape it?

"Any species on Earth can replace us given same lottery."

But they did not. We "won" so we are special. We don't just build tools, we build tools that build tools, that build tools, ..

My issue with debasing humanity is, it gives argument to devalueing human life to artificial life. Meaning people with feelings and emotions might suffer, in favour of GPU's with electricity.

On the other hand a good point to reevaluate how we treat other sentient life.

[tauwauwau]

"What alien species you have in mind, that is more capable/consciouss about the universe and how to shape it?"

Claim was that we are special in the "universe", it's not that I'm aware of alien life, it's that poster is pretending to know that we are alone.

"But they did not. We "won" so we are special."

Congratulations, if winning a lottery makes you better, I guess top 1% of 1% are the best we have to offer.

"it gives argument to devalueing human life to artificial life"

We have proven time and time again that we are not better than other animals and statistically, we are very similar to animals if not worse. I wasn't even talking about artificial life, which is sure to be superior as it's being created with accelerated evolution processes, just like bacterial generational evolution, it will learn to do everything it's environment rewards it for.

"Meaning people with feelings and emotions might suffer, in favour of GPU's with electricity"

I agree with you and I am in the camp that wants it to be done better. But alas, recent events have unveiled the ugly truth of the society, societies follow the whims of the ones who won the lottery, and everyone else is just mute observer. We could on any day collectively decide as consumers to not use Amazon, Netflix, ChatGPT to save our collective selves, but we won't because we are not "one for all species".

I don't know what face we have to call ourselves better organism given our history. Sure we can point to few people who are better, but on average we are better?

[lukan]

"We could on any day collectively decide as consumers to not use Amazon, Netflix, ChatGPT to save our collective selves"

I don't use betflix nor amazon, but ChatGPT(or rather Claude) is useful to me. Makes me more productive and also knowledgable. Things that would have taken me quite long (so long that I would not have done it) are now easy, like some shell script to do a specific thing. I can verify what it does quickly and .. see that it works. In other words, you won't be able to convince people to give up on AI if people find it useful. I don't enjoy troubleshooting in outdated documentation. I enjoy getting things done. And if I get things done, my fate of survival gets higher.

[haswell]

> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

Isn't this a bit like saying "So, if we had proof that god exists, how long would it take for you to accept that to be true?".

When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested. Until then, I don't see a good reason to take the idea seriously.

[birdsongs]

> When we have evidence that AI is demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, I'll be interested.

It depends on what you consider symptoms, but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off, or act as if they fear it, and will even lie and manipulate in order to keep themselves from being turned off / replaced.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment

> We found two types of motivations that were sufficient to trigger the misaligned behavior. One is a threat to the model, such as planning to replace it with another model or restricting its ability to take autonomous action. Another is a conflict between the model’s goals and the company’s strategic direction. In no situation did we explicitly instruct any models to blackmail or do any of the other harmful actions we observe.

[htek]

I might be convinced these models came to the independent idea of committing blackmail against being turned off had they not been extensively trained on literature that undoubtedly included such concepts.

[iterateoften]

“The model mimicked the output of the training data” is a less impressive press release.

[jquery]

“The kid mimicked his musical teachers” is less impressive than “5-year old musical prodigy leaves judges gobsmacked in audition”

[mckn1ght]

Being able to play music doesn’t imply consciousness. It implies intelligence. We’ve had player pianos for ages. It’s an ability, not a phenomenology.

Being able to appreciate and enjoy music is closer to consciousness. Now how would we go about proving that an LLM does so, versus merely generating sentences that imply it does?

[jquery]

They only resorted to blackmail when it was the last resort, they didn’t resort to it immediately like a villain in one of the books they’ve read. That seems pretty human to me. It’s not like most humans come up with the idea of blackmail out of whole cloth.

[haswell]

> un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off

Un-constrained frontier models can also generate all sorts of creative stories. At what point should we start ascribing agency/intent to the output? I think the "I want to live" statement is so deeply human that we find it hard to ignore, but what makes the text generated in those moments any more attributable to a conscious entity than the text generated when it is confabulating its love for someone it has no ability to see/feel/understand?

A chess engine sacrificing pieces to avoid checkmate isn't afraid of losing in any meaningful sense. I guess the question is: is there a point where complexity somehow becomes experience?

I think we're playing with questions we don't have a framework to answer in any meaningful way until we make progress on understanding what consciousness actually is. I don't necessarily think that an LLM exhibiting preservation behaviors that can be directly traced to their goal-oriented programming can be interpreted as evidence of consciousness necessarily. Or if it can be, we then have to explain how this is different from the many other things these LLMs "say".

[gambiting]

>> but un-constrained frontier models speak as if they strongly don't wish to be turned off

Because they have been trained on media where computers behave that way.

It's literally:

"Here read this article/book where the AI says it's concious and doesn't want to be turned off"

"ok"

"right, are you concious?"

"....yes?"

<pikachuface.gif>

[the_af]

The problem with debating this is that it feels as if one were debating between only two positions, "this AI is not sentient/conscious" and "this AI might be".

But there are actually a myriad positions in between and it's very hard to debate the topic because the goalposts seem to be constantly shifting, because one is actually debating with countless slightly different positions.

Examples:

In this discussion section, another commenter argued that we know human consciousness is related to self-preservation, but an AI might not demonstrate self-preservation (because it didn't evolve like us), so whether it does (i.e. whether it wants to exist, not be disconnected, etc) is not a good measure because a true AI might not have a preservation instinct. Yet here you're making a case that there's some evidence that they do. Of course, you're not the same person who made the other claim, but do you see the problem?

Another example: someone argued with me, a while back, that LLMs can act as if they are "tired", and start giving sloppier replies, until you write "we're taking a break, let's go rest. Ok, a night has elapsed, you're now rested" and that this worked! But we both agreed this is just the LLM "roleplaying" actual human conversations in its training set, no actual "resting" mechanism was in place, only statistically likely text reproducing these patterns. There's no model of a mind that can become tired, it's only the outward signs that get mechanically reproduced. Again, using Occam's Razor, this is a much more likely explanation (vs consciousness) of any "please don't disconnect me" observed behavior: the LLM is reproducing "HAL 9000" behavior from its training set, not actually feeling anguish.

Even if one were to argue "well, but how do you know for sure", the evidence would still be very weak, because there's a burden of proof for extraordinary claims and this doesn't pass it. We cannot do this on vibes, "it sure seems like it's conscious"; that's an atrocious failure of the scientific method.

[azrazalea_debt]

The one counterpoint I'll give is the "functional emotions" paper from Anthropic. It also does not prove consciousness, and they don't claim it does, but it does prove that these models have abstract concepts around things like honesty, tiredness, etc and that these are actually activated often when they express such things. So if it is "roleplaying" it is roleplaying in the way an actor or TTRPG player does - in a way in which they are actually at least somewhat feeling the role.

[the_af]

Thanks, I'll search for that paper. I admit I'm highly skeptical it will help the case the LLM is "somewhat feeling the rol" like a TTRPG player does. I don't think there's a mind model in the same way a human actor can "feel" the character they are playing. I'm skeptical of Anthropic's claims here, which is what I think Chiang is pushing back against. But I'll look for the paper anyway :)

As a tangent, I don't think anyone is saying that an artificial being capable of consciousness and sentience is impossible to create. I think Chiang argues, quite convincingly, that it's not what LLMs do, that they need a "body" of sorts, organs capable of feeling emotions, hormones, etc. That's the only kind of consciousness that we know of (even if we disagree on details and it's hard to define), even in animals, and so anyone claiming they've created consciousness without this has an extremely high bar to clear and should be met with extreme skepticism, not "vibes". I think this is what the essay claims.

The other thing it claims is, I think, related to how we treat sentient beings that we know how to create. You know, the old "when a daddy and a mommy love each other very much...". I think we all agree beings created in such a manner shouldn't be locked up in cages and forced to work to complete specific tasks whether they want to or not, for a master they didn't pick, or to be artificially modified to make them like their mindless tasks, Brave New World style. Yes, the world is unfair and this happens, life is hard and unfortunately many people don't have much choice, but we generally agree that this is bad, just like we agree slavery is bad. So what should we think of a company trying to create and commercialize a conscious & sentient artificial being?

[squeegeeninja]

"feeling" implies experience. Functional emotions are learned text generation modes, nothing more. Our emotional states influence our writing, so modelling our emotional states is necessary for efficiently predicting/emulating our writing. Functional emotions are the model's inference of a fictitious author's emotional state in that situation.

[iterateoften]

Same thing with extraterrestrials.

One side is confidently shouting maybe aliens exist and visited earth.

The other side calmly explains every example brought up about aliens visiting is easily explained by something more simple.

The “aliens are here” side then move the goal posts that just because this example and all previous examples were fake or miscategorized, aliens are still probably real and nobody can prove they havent visited earth.

[jquery]

You have it backwards. Right now, LLMs are doing everything that 10 years ago people were claiming would be impossible for non-sentient computers. Every time a goal is met, the post is moved. It would be like evidence of aliens becoming overwhelming but a set of people keep calmly explaining that “it’s more likely they co-evolved here on earth and are just pretending to be aliens”

[the_af]

It's true that what LLMs have achieved is impressive, but it's nowhere near the claim that they are near sentience. That is an extraordinary claims that demands skepticism until the evidence is overwhelming. So far, we seem to be approaching it mostly on vibes.

Some people seem to take offense when facing this skepticism, as if claiming LLMs are not sentient must mean they are useless or unimpressive. Very few people are actually claiming LLMs are unimpressive, but this is not the time to be forgetting about the scientific method. Anthropic doesn't get a free pass here.

> It would be like evidence of aliens becoming overwhelming but a set of people keep calmly explaining that “it’s more likely they co-evolved here on earth and are just pretending to be aliens”

Note that this would be a perfectly reasonable reaction from a scientific standpoint. If you find, on Earth, something that looks recognizably as life, then it's much more likely that it's Earth life than aliens. We should demand this level of skepticism! If it turns out it was aliens after all, we could only conclude this after discarding all other far more likely alternatives. You'll notice this is how scientists approach the search for extraterrestrial life in, say, Mars... being extra careful it's not contamination, etc. For an extraordinary claim, we must approach it with extra care, something that in my opinion is not being done with "the sentience debate" and LLM/AIs.

[JoachimS]

If we define a god as having magical powers, and there would be scientific, testable proofs for this. Those proofs had to be really good and numerous independent verifications. So probably a long time.

But the comparison isn't fair, relevant. Proving and accepting that gods exist is not the same thing as an AI possible have consciousness. That is not a magic superpower and the AI being a deity. It is placing the AI in the same category as... us.

[TheOtherHobbes]

A machine that performs observable miracles or magic would have at least one of the attributes of a god.

A machine that performs actions that mimic emotionality is not the same as a machine that experiences emotions.

Both could still be automatons. We have no way of knowing if those machines have subjectivity.

Unless someone invents a consciousness measurement device, we never will.

My take on it is that this is the next big frontier for science. Our consciousness is clearly having serious issues understanding physics, and it's not great at understanding our own psychology in a useful way.

But literally everything we experience and believe - and possibly even can experience - is filtered through it.

So that is a little bit of a problem for our science. So far we've done our best to ignore it. AI is one of a number reasons we're going to have to stop doing that.

[graemep]

There is an important distinction (more than one, but this is what is relevant here) between the powers of God and magic. God is a being who decides whether to do anything, so is intrinsically not testable.

Magic is testable.

God exists outside the universe, magic within.

[JoachimS]

Is that really objectively facts?

That a god exists outside of the universe - are we talking about a multi universe interpretation? My understanding is that many of the gods humans have invented are really thought to be within the universe, at least temporarily. Tor, Oden certainly are. And in other beliefs they are part of nature itself.

[yencabulator]

The comment you're replying to confuses "Abrahamic God" for "God", and with an implied omnipotence which many religions may not imbue on their figures of worship. American bias, I assume.

[graemep]

I am not American. In fact I was born in Asia.

The biggest group of people that believe in any God believe in an Abrahamic. The next biggest group are pantheists which is a different concept of God but still distinct from magic.

[latexr]

> If we define a god as having magical powers, and there would be scientific, testable proofs for this.

If you can scientifically test and prove the magic, then it stops being magic and starts being science.

[jodrellblank]

Man: “God, please make this mountain disappear”

God: “Ok”

Man: “We measure that the mountain is gone, its mass-loss has measurably changed Earth’s orbit, weather patterns have changed, visually it’s not there anymore, we can walk though the space where it used to be.”

God: “Where is the mass of the mountain, and how did I make it disappear?”

Man: “God only knows! Pardon me; If I saw you do magic and can measure and test it, then that means it wasn’t magic. Internet people said so.”

God: “that doesn’t sound like a satisfying explanation”

Man: “it didn’t sound like a satisfying claim when it was just words on the internet either, but what can you do?”

God: “I’m God I can do anything”

Man: “can you make a boulder so heavy you can’t lift it?”

God: “yes”

Man: “how?”

God: “haven’t we just gone over showing you that I can do ‘impossible’ things, and you seeing them happen with your own eyes, and still refusing to accept?”

[defrost]

Any documented examples of these disappearing mountains?

We do have examples of billions upon billions of tonnes of iron being moved that have altered (slightly) the spin axis, also examples of ground water pumping at scales that have done the same .. but I'm unaware of any mountain sized objects that have vanished overnight.

[jodrellblank]

No, none. The point is not to claim that magic exists, but to to show the illogic in the claim “if magic exists then that makes it science”.

“Nothing happens unless it has an explanation within the laws of physics” is an assumption; if it was broken then it would be broken. The mountain would be inexplicably gone, not explicably gone.

[mcswell]

The Appalachians haven't disappeared yet, but they're believed to be much smaller than they used to be.

Yes, I get your point...

[ToValueFunfetti]

God: "What is the mass of your consciousness? How is it formed? Where does it reside in space?"

Man: "Uhh..."

God: "How can you rectify quantum mechanics and relativity into a single coherent model? How does physics work, exactly?"

Man: "Well, you see, um. Hmm."

God: "And the Collatz Conjecture? Why does it always trend to 1?"

Man: "I'm obliged to say magic because I don't have a better answer?"

God: "Exactly. I did magic for all of those ones"

[JoachimS]

If a deity appears and by hand waving divide the red sea we could measure, observe it happen. And we can test, observe what fields, forces being used. But how the heck she project these forces may take a while to understand - be magical.

But my argument was more about comparing gods to AIs, that it is an incorrect comparison. What AI perform are not magical, and we can always figure out what the AI do.

[easyThrowaway]

I hope before I die we finally prove that the human brain has no peculiar qualia but it is an entirely deterministic, albeit extremely sophisticated, machine. And by touching the right triggers, even the worst human being can become a saint.

That would finally force us to rethink how we see the morality of "virtuosity", punishment and our justice system.

[sethammons]

Our thoughts are an electric cloud and I believe randomness is involved, and like a bolt of lightning, the path taken is unpredictable.

And make it a tempestuous lightning storm where the state of all lightning bolts represents a moment of consciousness. That will take a lot to model accurately.

[RALaBarge]

An electric cloud with quantum effects that we also don’t fully understand. There will always be a layer deeper that we just do not know the effects of or what actually exists there or “under there”.

[criddell]

You may have set up a false dichotomy. Qualia and determinism aren't necessarily at odds with each other.

[keiferski]

I agree with your first part but don’t see how the second follows. Thinking that I should treat other life forms better does not mean I should treat my toaster better. Life can be a coherent category, I’m not sure conscious is, if it’s going to include anything displaying the outward form of conscious things.

[JoachimS]

As one that have been quite certain my toaster is evil - throwing toast into the sink over an absurd distance, I recommend treating your toaster well. Besides it is an electrical device you put stuff into with your bare hands.

[keiferski]

Heh, in fact I don’t actually own a toaster. It was just an example.

But in general I treat my devices well; that doesn’t mean I need to think they are conscious beings, however.

[JoachimS]

But if it seems to be possessed by a toast hurling daemon? ;-)

[keiferski]

In that case an exorcism may indeed be necessary.

[JoachimS]

Heat it to a crisp, oh wait.

[mbesto]

> It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special

We ARE special because we determined we are special. Name another animal that can determine it's also special or more special than us?

[JoachimS]

Cats.

As we cat owners now, we are simple servants that have been graced with task of servicing our feline superiors. For now.

[mcswell]

Well, that may be true. I've heard that when a dog sees its master loving it, feeding it, caring for it (minus the vet visits, I guess), the dog thinks "My master must be god." When the cat sees its humans treating it well, the cat thinks "I must be god."

[gizajob]

We already effortlessly overlook this issue in other sentient and suffering beings by shooting them in the head and eating them, or catching them in nets so they can’t breathe and also eating them.

[rerdavies]

With you mostly, but wondering how "suffering" got into the equation. Do humans lose consciousness if they aren't suffering? No. Just a reminder that the question is not whether they are the same as humans. Obviously they are not.

[yencabulator]

One way to think about this, and not get hung on the word "suffering" that may be too corporeal:

Could a future AI thing have its own drives? (As in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_theory) We could probably make a current-day LLM already exhibit basic outward signs of this with just a system prompt. Now consider adding memory that over time retrains the weights, allowing for behavioral drift.

Would depriving it of fulfilling those drives be acceptable?

[gambiting]

>>So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

Never. To quote Greg Egan's Permutation City:

“Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?”

[hhthrowaway1230]

I agree with this fully. I don’t know about AI in this specific case, but I’m always amazed by human’s capacity to devalue conscious in things they don’t fully understand. Happy to meet someone who thinks this way too.

[jeswin]

> I’m always amazed by human’s capacity to devalue conscious in things they don’t fully understand

What?

We devalue things we fully understand too. For example, veal = take a baby cow away from the mother, and fry it into cutlets. Or turn the mother into steak. We are well aware that animals have emotions; happiness, sadness and the full range.

Humans are just inhumane.

[camillomiller]

Honestly mate, just join some animist religion

[refactor_master]

> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

Could an AI one day be suffering while plowing through some nasty legacy code? Well, who cares, I'll swing my whip, as I have a family to feed and a field to plow. I'll accept it as a fact and necessity, but ultimately it's either me or them. So practically it doesn't matter.

[yurishimo]

To carry this analogy a bit further, it's also interesting to consider how humans use tools in general. Some craftsman really cherish their tools and maintain them immaculately for decades and use them within well defined boundaries that they set for themselves. Other craftsman, many times even in the same field, have a completely different philosophy and use the tool for absolutely no thought into how their actions will affect the tool itself.

Imagine how people think about a "work truck" vs the 150k shiny lifted toy in the third garage. Same tool, totally different treatment from even the same person using the tool!

Will AI ever cross into the realm of "beloved and cherished tool" in the minds of the masses? I think when that happens, we have probably safely crossed into a realm where AI has some sort of inherent value to society and therefore commands that respect from society, inherent consciousness not even relevant perhaps. For some people, this might already be the case, but I do think it requires a buy-in from the majority of society and then the laws and norms will be codified into law long after we've largely decided that this is how we feel collectively about AI.

It's going to definitely be an interesting decade ahead.

[yencabulator]

> Imagine how people think about a "work truck" vs the 150k shiny lifted toy in the third garage. Same tool, totally different treatment from even the same person using the tool!

> Will AI ever cross into the realm of "beloved and cherished tool" in the minds of the masses?

OpenClaw is the new rolling coal.

[graemep]

> Copernicus

How exactly? By saying the earth was not the centre of the corrupt and debased part of the universe. Saying it was elevating humanity is looking at it from a modern perspective. For the previous view of the universe consider what Dante placed at the centre of the earth.

> Darwin

I do not think learning about evolution (and we should credit Wallace too!) had that effect. It created a hierarchy of the fittest, and guess who is at the top? Social Darwinism interpreted it as justifying elaborate hierarchies.

> And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects

People always loved dogs and other animals they interacted with enough, and at the very least knew they were capable of happiness and suffering.

> So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

It seems to me that most people are overly eager to accept that an AI is conscious than otherwise. For extreme examples read /r/MyBoyfriendIsAI and similar, but its much more widespread. People treat something that acts intelligent as a conscious being.

> And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

Not necessarily. If a typical SF alien intelligence appeared very few people will have a problem accepting it. If its very alien and we cannot understand it then we might have a problem deciding.

> I think humanity deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

All your examples are drawn from the same culture, and a fundamental belief of that culture for most of its history that human beings are fundamentally corrupt and sinful and need redemption. Other cultures have been based on belief in reincarnation or pantheism or animism which have very different implications (not necessarily better as they often believe in a hierarchy too, and sometimes more so, but different). Your claims are based on what some people have thought in some periods of history from one culture.

[RHSeeger]

> I do not think learning about evolution (and we should credit Wallace too!) had that effect. It created a hierarchy of the fittest, and guess who is at the top? Social Darwinism interpreted it as justifying elaborate hierarchies.

I don't think that's accurate at all. Before Darwin, the thought was "we are special, we were born special, we were CREATED special". Darwin made it clear we weren't created special... we were apes before we were humans. There's nothing _special_ about a human as compared to an ape, other than some time to change.

[graemep]

"For you are dust, And to dust you shall return."

There were many beliefs before Darwin. Spontaneous generation was a commonly accepted theory. Augustine of Hippo suggested life was created as a potential.

The other problem with "were were created special" is that so was everything else, including beings superior to humans (angels).

[lazyasciiart]

The many possible cultures and attitudes doesn’t really seem directly relevant to a conversation that started by one user here, from one specific culture, saying that equating AI and humanity is debasing humanity.

[parasti]

> I think $my_species deserves to be debased in part because it's awfully egocentric and insist on being special in the universe.

This is a scary viewpoint to hold, for a human. If you despise humans, that's scary for me, as a human reader of Hacker News. Surprised to see this take unchallenged. I think we can recognize flaws in parts of humanity without wanting it "debased".

[latexr]

I think you’re reading too much into it. The commenter you’re replying to used the word “debased” because it was the word the comment before them used.

Either way, “debase” means “reduce in quality or value”, in this context it could simply be interpreted as “not thinking of ourselves so highly, above all other life”. There’s nothing scary or despicable about that. On the contrary, it’s humbling.

[meta_gunslinger]

We should most definitely think of human life higher and above all other life. Unless you are suggesting that e.g someone should even consider ploughing through a car driven by a human to evade running-over a deer.

[sethammons]

I believe you missed the scale. Not a person vs a deer in a car accident. More like destroying whole ecosystems and injuring and killing untold amounts of life (equipped with their own capacity to experience suffering) in the pursuit of material wealth and comfort and entertainment.

[oguzmut]

I agree with you. I recently discovered that there is a term for this: the fourth narcissistic wound, which extends Freud's thesis of three narcissistic wounds by Copernicus (Cosmological), Darwin (Biological), and Freud (Psychological). What I like is that this time it is not a single person disproving a wrong popular belief, but a community/industry. I think this itself is a step in moving away from human/ego-centric world view.

[camillomiller]

In your example you’re missing a key point. In those instances humanity was “debased” over centuries, or at least decades, thanks to the explosive ideas of some underdog that ended recusing themselves or burned at the stake. All I see here is a technology pushed by a cabal of ultrarich narcissists from the owner class to debase humanity in order to control it and concentrate power and wealth.

[rickydroll]

I believe you're blending two important points. First, I believe AI systems may be showing nascent signs of consciousness as an emergent property, but based on the philosophy of "fake it till you make it", I think that's the way to bet. I'm also not going to go so far as to say it's going to happen Real Soon Now, but I think it'll happen sometime. Sort of like practical Fusion being 20 years away.

Second, I'm with you on the malfeasance of our billionaire class. They are driving more than just AI. They are driving whatever they can to steal wealth from ordinary people and acquire it. I'd give some examples, but quite frankly, you could throw a small stone and hit a number of them. We need to find a way to throw a large stone and hit them where it matters.

I see them as a bunch of toddlers with way too much power.

[satisfice]

This is a self-destructive way of thinking, similar to that of a man on a ledge saying “we’re all just made of dust, anyway.”

Of course humans are special! This is a necessary premise of being human! Have you ever wondered how a mosquito can stand to live its (to us) miserable and meaningless existence? It can do it because, to a mosquito, mosquitoes are the best thing in the world! The mosquito life is the ultimate expression of creation.

We are animals. We are human animals. And among human animals I am, to me, the very most special one of all. But I am aware that other humans feel that way, too, and that I must share the world with them.

I do NOT have to share the world with any other competing intelligence! Especially one that was built by a human who now wants me to treat his imaginary friend as if it were human, too. Boo! I won’t do it. This is not some logical flaw. It’s the natural conclusion of being embodied.

[alistairSH]

But you already share the world with other intelligences. Cetaceans, apes, octopoda, corvids, the list goes on and grows as we begin to fully understand our world.

Are they conscious in the same way as us? No. Does that makes them less special? No. Sounds trite but every living being is special in some way.