[elif]

I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy.

You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.

[indigo945]

I fully agree with this. I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed. This used to be a thing of science fiction, that people dreamed, fantasized about. Now they are everywhere, people rely on them for the most mundane of tasks, and the only debates happening about them are - is their water use efficient enough? Is this CEO likable enough? There seems to be no sense of wonder. Do androids dream of electric sheep? Do humans still dream at all?

[mnewme]

Most sci-fi is about genuinely sentient AI, and we are far from that. There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation. If you know anything about machine learning, you know that the idea that LLMs have any form of consciousness is ridiculous. Humans just like to anthropomorphise, that is all.

[f6v]

> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation.

I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve.

But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli.

So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.

[mnewme]

That is a lazy definition. A machine doesn’t even want to watch TV. Apes are conscious, dolphins are, maybe octopus, but definitely not LLMs

[indigo945]

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.

Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

[breuleux]

> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is

We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.

[kelseyfrog]

If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories.

Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.

[mnewme]

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

[perpetuallunch]

I like your argument.

It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own.

Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world.

But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form.

What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry?

Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.

[mnewme]

We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.

[ChrisGreenHeur]

If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.

[eru]

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably.

But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

[prmph]

You are committing a type error.

Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold

[eru]

I'm with Turing on this one.

[perpetuallunch]

We can’t measure the temperature of consciousness like we can the temperature of simulated snow.

As you write consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, but it may, at least to some degree, we don’t know. We don’t have reliable methods of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, or even a rigorous and agreed upon set of metrics to measure.

Where as simulated snow is most certainly not real snow at all.

[mnewme]

Nope, only if the architecture changes. Still probabilistic prediction models

[bitwize]

Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.

[cwillu]

I never thought I'd have so much sympathy for Kate “Forgive me, Mr Data; I am not accustomed to work with non-living devices that… Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive.” Pulaski, but here we are.

[gpderetta]

Agree. Unscientifically, I don't think current LLM are conscious because I don't think they have enough awareness of their own thoughts (I, again unscientifically don't believe that the context window is enough).

Still, tthey are the stuff of sci-fi: it is the first time in recorded history that we can communicate with language with something that is not human! The consciousness "problem" is just a distraction.

Do androids dream of electric sheep indeed.

[f6v]

> I find it strange how quickly the novelty of AI chatbots has passed.

I had an eye surgery last year. The first day after was magical, I felt like I was on acid because the entire world felt different.

I went for a checkup one week later and told the doctor the vision has gone down since. They checked and it was objectively the same as on the first day. They told me: "People get used to good vision very fast".

I think it's just human nature.

[criddell]

I like the debate because I've learned a lot of stuff about consciousness, thinking, free will, determinism, agency, intelligence, emergence, problems with reductionism, qualia, etc... Lots of these concepts may be related but it might just be a correlation.

For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).

[eru]

Determinism is interesting. It's mostly a question of 'deterministic in what context'.

Eg the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice. Similarly, algorithms are often analysed as if the antagonist that provides the data has free choice (so we assume the worst case to be sure).

That's a very different non-determinism from assuming a probability distributions.

And different frames might be accurate depending on context. You might know what chess bot you are playing against and that chess bot might be a deterministic computer program, or might be a computer program that uses radioactive decay to randomise.

And as you suggested, free will is yet another kettle of fish.

[criddell]

> the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice

How else could they be written?

[ChrisGreenHeur]

How about I call it not conscious at all, not even a little bit?

[amanaplanacanal]

Everybody wants to argue about whether machines are conscious, without even deciding whether other mammals are conscious.

My sense is that the whole machine consciousness debate really kicked off since LLMs started being able to spew out a bunch of words in a row that sound like they make sense. Since only humans could do that before now, and humans are conscious, therefore...

I don't think language has anything to do with consciousness.

[criddell]

> I don't think language has anything to do with consciousness.

What do you think of the bicameral mind theory?

[amanaplanacanal]

The Julian Jaynes stuff? Absolutely fascinating but probably complete bullshit.

Now I'm sure some of the problem is about how you define consciousness. I would define it as the experience of qualia. My dog seems to be just as conscious as me, she just can't talk about it. All mammals seem to experience love, and fear, probably so that they will take care of their offspring and avoid getting eaten. Can you experience emotion but not be conscious? That doesn't make sense to me.

Other people define it differently, so it's hard to have conversations about this stuff.

[criddell]

Jaynes definition:

> Subjective conscious mind is an analogue of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogues of behaviour in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioural processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision

So your dog has consciousness to some degree, but it’s going to be generally less rich than yours.

It’s interesting to think about what it means to think without language and everything that comes with language (metaphors, adjectives, etc...).

[f6v]

I agree that the goalpost is moving all the time. But the whole debate is a red herring. We don't have a good definition for consciousness. I can't really quantify the difference between a bee and a dog.