[haktan]

I don't understand the most of the responses here. What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious? Even if AI with current computer architecture gets much more intelligent than humans, it will still have the same amount of consciousness. Its still bunch of instructions. If we got a lot of people together and did all the instructions by hand to get an LLM result would we also create this consciousness with those other people? All these makes no sense to me.

[manbitesdog]

Quoting the famous Science paper More Is Different [1]:

Knowing the laws of physics doesn't tell you how a brain, economy, or society works - because at every level of scale, genuinely new phenomena emerge that require their own science.

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.177.4047.393

[jonners00]

> Its still a bunch of instructions.

No, it's not a bunch of instructions, it's a colossal array of vectors that are the outcome of many thousands of lifetimes' worth of stimuli and reinforcement - not dissimilar in (very) abstract terms to the neurons in our brains.

[flashman]

In the same way that a photograph is not dissimilar to the thing it represents, that is, in the most important way.

[MrScruff]

Do you believe consciousness to be an emergent property of the laws of physics?

[jmull]

Regardless, the question still stands: "What does computers getting more intelligent has to do with it getting conscious?"

Just because consciousness emerged for we humans and other animals through one mechanism doesn't mean consciousness has/will/can emerge from current LLM technology.

For this extraordinary claim, I think the burden is firmly on those who are arguing that it has/will/can.

[wvbdmp]

The other point of view is that the burden is on those who suggest that biological consciousness is somehow special. What makes it so, and if the answer isn’t metaphysical, what’s stopping us from constructing it artificially?

[ikrenji]

how is anyone supposed to decide if something is conscious if no one has the slightest idea what consciousness really is

[ijidak]

That's actually a powerful way of stating it.

If I did all of these calculations by hand, would it be conscious...

That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before..

I do think it's hard to know when consciousness exists, because we can't really prove it for our neighbor. We just intuitively know that it would be crazy, even immoral, to assume otherwise.

But, It's likely easier to dismiss consciousness, once we understand the mechanism, than it is to prove it.

[internet_points]

> That's a powerful argument I haven't seen stated quite that way before..

It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room – a classic in the philosophy of consciousness and AI.

[nomel]

If you manually fired the neurons in a brain by measuring the ion concentrations at its subsides, would it be consciousness?

[nomel]

Oops, auto correct: subsides = synapses

It's was a genuine question though. I'm not saying LLM use neurons, are like neurons, or are meant to be like neurons. I'm saying if you can do the math, for a substrate, that doesn't mean much. The simple math that runs it isn't the secret sauce.

[iLoveOncall]

That's the "Chinese room" argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

It has been very well discussed before I don't understand how anyone sane can argue against it (and indeed you can see on Wikipedia that the replies to it are sparse and don't make any sense).

[cbolton]

Well I don't understand how one can accept this argument. I mean if you believe in mind-body dualism it can make sense. But AFAIK Searle doesn't, instead he holds that there's something special about the brain biology that enables consciousness and that you won't find in a computer. I don't see why that would be the case if the computer can simulate the real world, and I find Searle's argument against simulation, that simulating rain doesn't make you wet, falls flat: it can make things wet in simulation, and if you connect it to sprinklers it will make you wet.

[iLoveOncall]

> simulating rain doesn't make you wet, falls flat: it can make things wet in simulation, and if you connect it to sprinklers it will make you wet

It's not simulating rain if it's making you wet by using sprinklers?

[cbolton]

I mean you can connect the computer to sprinklers that activate when the system detects rain in the simulation if that's what you're after (that was just an aside to note that of course you don't get wet from a simulation disconnected from the real world).

But I guess that was a distraction from the main point: If consciousness emerges from biological processes in the brain connected to the world with a body, why would it not emerge from a simulation of these processes connected to the real world with sensors and actuators?

It seems like circular reasoning to me: The simulation is not like the real thing because it lacks the special thing that enables consciousness (that's Searle's biological naturalism). And it lacks what enables consciousness because it's not the real thing (that's the weather analogy).

[sp1nningaway]

I like this bit from the wiki article:

Speaking through Zarubin, Dneprov writes that "the only way to prove that machines can think is to turn yourself into a machine and examine your thinking process", and he concludes, as Searle does, that "even the most perfect simulation of machine thinking is not the thinking process itself."

That feels similar to what Chiang is saying. The physical state of being a human is part of human consciousness. An LLM would require many more "levels" that haven't been achieved yet. An LLM with a body, sense organs, physical tools, social dynamics, etc. would all be steps on the path to a "conscious" LLM.

[Jtarii]

It's fairly obvious to me that the room as an entire system understands Chinese. The human in his thought experiment would just represent the small fraction of the brain that encodes/decodes symbols.

[twobitshifter]

Agreed, he’s saying if he’s working with a black box he doesn’t understand what it’s doing. Which is of course true. If the black box were a chinese person instead of a tool and he was writing down what they said, would he say the chinese person in the black box does not understand why they told him to write something? No, of course not.

Today we know the program to do this is always going to be inscrutable to Searle. His role is no different from someone using Claude to write an email.

[lubujackson]

The key point is there is plenty of proof that consciousness is emergent, not structurally baked in. An excellent counterpoint is the "They're Made Out of Weights" post. There are plenty of emergent systems that clearly show intent and what we consider intelligence, like how ant colonies act as a unit.

If you want to get evolutionarily technical, humans are made of cells which began as individual organisms and coalesced into higher life forms. So the concept of a "life form" is very much flexible, so is every capability of a life form, including consciousness.

[zone411]

That's not proof. Emergent intelligence is not consciousness.

[hnfong]

It might reflect a prejudice of modern human society to think more highly of people who are intelligent, and think less of people who we deem stupid.

I'd say AI should not by default gain any social status as human-equivalent even if they become (in whatever regard) more intelligent than humans. But that would require us to drop the notion that intelligence ~= respectability/status/ability to have a full subjective experience.

Most of these kind of pseudo-philosophical controversies actually tell more about the issues with humanity than the new tech/stuff...

[kavalg]

Since when has intelligence had a strong relationship to status and respectability? I've met intelligent people that don't get much respect or status either because they don't look good, are shy or they don't have money.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> Its still bunch of instructions.

So is your brain. That's the problem with this argument.

[freehorse]

The brain is (part of) an allostatic system and part of a living organism which reproduces itself constantly. Certainly not "a bunch of instructions".

[rough-sea]

Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.

[freehorse]

The problem is

1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation

2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.

3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.

[jaggederest]

I'm going to ask a couple dumb but genuine questions:

Does it matter that neurons are more complex than 0-1? Does the fact that transformer layers don't use purely thresholded 0-1 activation invalidate what you're saying?

How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?

How does the embodied nature of human consciousness preclude consciousness emerging from a computational system? What is the definition of consciousness if it is precluded from occurring in a computational system but present in biological systems?

Why do you think exactly modeling interaction between atoms matters for consciousness? And where is the fidelity threshold? Is it the planck length?

Finally, a dumb question: how do we know humans are actually conscious, and where is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness? And do these criteria exclude all other forms, or other animals?

[calf]

Not the person you were asking but IMHO it all reduces to computational complexity, e.g. biological evolution provided the computational efficiencies that ultimately produced conscious minds and beings, whereas it is not obvious what scale of silicon, power or energy, and input data is sufficient for that to happen artificially. But that means my view is it is a matter of it being possible in principle, merely unknown in practice. Also my view is that denying this amounts to violating the Church Turing thesis of computational equivalence ("human brains are not magic, super-Turing, etc."), and I think a lot of talking-past one another in these public disagreements amounts to one side not actually having taken modern CS theory fundamentals enough to be persuaded of these couple of premises.

[suddenlybananas]

>How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?

How do you know that toasters or rocks aren't conscious?

[simianwords]

Distinction without a difference.

[meroes]

That’s like saying simulating a supernova and a supernova are both extremely hot.

[MrScruff]

The problem with this is that the word 'hot' only has meaning to a conscious being. And while we don't know what conciousness is, it's extremely hard to argue it's not an emergent property of physics. So if your supernova simulation is complex enough to also model emergent properties like conciousness, the simulated conciousness may well regard the supernova as 'hot'.

[meroes]

Ya and this leads to the point that if the simulation is so complex, which I take to mean is so like the real thing, then the near-perfect simulation and the actual thing must be highly similar physically.

And digital circuits are not physically similar to biological brains yet. So we shouldn’t conclude they have the similar consciousness property.

[simianwords]

Funny you mention simulations. The simulation theory that we all live in simulations doesn’t have any practical consequences for me or any one. If our world behaves exactly the same, what difference does it make?

[9dev]

The perspective. From within the simulation there is no point in making the distinction, but from the outside it does. For another example - running a program on a virtual machine or a physical computer is the same to the program, but very different to debug when you see hardware errors.

[adampunk]

To take this seriously we must extend consciousness to nearly all of the tree of life.

[gazebo2]

This sort of tech-centric distillation of visceral human experience into simple analogies is so grating. We can simultaneously acknowledge that consciousness is not well defined and not "testable" with certainty while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip. The only thing that has changed in the discourse about AI and consciousness vs. "is my home desktop conscious in 2004" is the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.

[DiogenesKynikos]

> while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip.

You say this based on what? Your brain is executing instructions on wetware. The entire universe is governed by physical laws.

At its base, the argument that computers can't be conscious is dualist. It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.

> the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.

It seems to me that you're denigrating LLMs, or implying that they're only simulating thought, as opposed to actually thinking. But the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing. It's a bit like the Mitchell and Webb skit about faking the moon landings, in which the plotters quickly realize that the only way to convincingly fake landing on the moon is to fly a rocket to the moon and film the "fake" landings on the moon.

[gazebo2]

>You say this based on what?

I say it based on the fact that I experience consciousness and therefore know it is a phenomenon wholly separate from the outward effect I have on the world via speech or any other physical action.

>It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.

Ruling this out completely implies that modern science has a total and complete understanding of consciousness and the universe in its entirety, which it does not. I don't think it's unreasonable to leave open the possibility that there is an unexplained phenomenon that explains the conscious experience which is still bounded by the laws of physics.

>.. the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing.

Do they? To me it seems like you equate the process with the result, like saying if I gave you a gift, it doesn't matter whether I bought it or made it by hand, in either case I "made" it because the end result is the same. There is a conscious experience that (hopefully) all humans experience and can testify to, the question is whether or not an LLM predicting tokens based on a giant vector map is experiencing the same thing, which I'd say is obviously not happening. My point about chatbots is about exactly this -- 10 years ago even you would have laughed at somebody that said a hand-rolled chatbot was conscious/thinking, but because the output has improved, now suddenly it's all the same, and your brain is a computer, and Claude has feelings, blah blah.

[DiogenesKynikos]

Your brain is a biological neural network that evolved to solve a practical task. The result is that your brain experiences something it calls consciousness. We now have artificial neural networks that are capable of doing almost everything your brain can do. It's not extraordinary at all to suggest that they might have the same phenomenon of consciousness that arises in your neural network.

Calling LLMs "chatbots" at this point just sounds like an attempt to dismiss them. These "chatbots" are now capable of answering any question you can think of more intelligently than 99% of humans. If you don't consider that intelligence, then your definition of intelligence makes no sense.

[plmpsu]

Maybe OP is a dualist.

[j2j8]

A very large number of people could do the calculations of an LLM by hand using pen and paper. It would take a long time, but if the result were conscious then were would the consciousness exist? In the humans? Is it consciousness within consciousness?

[meroes]

Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.

It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.