I think about this from the other end. It cannot be considered a conscious being. There just isn't a world in which we should start to think of a machine using ethics we reserve for humans.
AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve.
So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money.
I'd sacrifice property and money to save animals. I would never choose to save an animal over a person. I'd probably not choose to save a person over a child.
I don't see any inversion of any of those priorities that makes any sense.
It is interesting to think about what would cause me to consider these priorities incorrect, but a majority consensus about a program being sentient isn't it.
What if the human brain is a LOT of RAM and we simply suffer from having zero non-volatile storage. We could make an AI just as deficient and then that specific distinction disappears.
A loose one. In nature consciousness is very scarce and therefore special. The more human the consciousness the more we probably naturally react to it. And the closer to us it is, even more so.
Are we sure that consciousness is "very scarce"? To define it as scarce, wouldn't we need to start with a definition? There are theories of consciousness that say rocks are more conscious than humans. Whether or not you want to take those theories seriously, they do highlight critical gaps in how we define consciousness.
Anyway, the deeper solution is to acknowledge that all life is sacred, and infinities cannot be compared, and some decisions are impossible to make, and some tragedies cannot be averted, and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.
Presumably they meant that they'd sacrifice some material value for some animals, not that every animal on Earth has infinitely more value than inanimate goods.
> infinities cannot be compared
That's either a mathematically illiterate assumption or a very strange philosophical hill to die on.
> some tragedies cannot be averted
Sure. The question is what to do about the ones that can be averted.
> some decisions are impossible to make
> and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.
Again, the question is what choices to make when you can (arguably must) make them. Saying they're impossible is just refusing to take responsibility. You either do something, or you don't.
I'm a big fan of Star Trek but I recently rewatched this one in the context of recent AI developments and it's not as good as I remember it.
They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO.
It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the conversation on consciousness. It's a hugely complicated topic which people have devoted their entire careers to.
The fact that they sent Data to starfleet academy, gave him a commission in the starfleet, let him attain the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and then decide that actually he's a machine that can be dismantled seems like quite a turn.
Does the ship's computer have a commission?
It was a good episode but it had some elements of Star Trek tropes in it, like the evil admirals and Picard can talk his way out of anything.
In fact I think the conclusion it comes to is the one that people, especially the smart ones, so easily miss: we don't know the answer. It might be that we can't know the answer. But ignorance is not a defense.
- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
This is in fact the danger with these human-simulating "AI"s we have now...
People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.
And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.
Which is already a thing people do to other people.
The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.
Based on how some actual humans I know speak and act, I'm less and less convinced the human brain is much more than a stochastic next-thought prediction stream.
A silicon alien coming to earth might poke us, we would say ouch, and just determine the ouch sound is just the result of a bunch of chemistry - not really conscious or feeling pain like it can, just emulating.
And were programmed through evolution to not want to be shut off. So I don't think we can really trust the human behaviour to protest its own destruction. That's just plain reasonable design!
Yes, the people here who are arguing that graphics cards can be conscious are indeed stochastic parrots, either of the 80 IQ human variety or Anthropic bot accounts. It is surprising indeed that suddenly 50% of posters believe the hype.
How would someone know whether one has a soul or not? Is there any sort of introspection that can reveal the presence of a soul or any of its properties?
There is no soul. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.
I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
It's an interesting hypothesis. I think there's something elegant about "soul" or even consciousness being an emergent property of a sufficiently complex system. But I struggle with really squaring that with my own first-person sensation of experiencing existence (which I assume you and everyone else has but I can never actually know for sure).
>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant one is the fact that without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness. Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can (and as a point of comparison, certain iguanas can live for decades in the wild). Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees. At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires, perhaps by using a button board or some other nonlinguistic modality, the way that people have taught chimpanzees and domesticated dogs.
I agree with some parts of this piece, but paragraphs like this one above seem pretty uninspired and simplistic. It's entirely plausible that a conscious mind would not be evolutionarily incentivized to be able to do those things. ie just because animals on earth needed to develop specific talents doesn't mean that other conscious entities need to. Why would a computer program need to hunt for food like a mouse would? Making tools like chimp? these seem like nonsensical metrics.
Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?
Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?
I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.
> Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self aware of what's happening.
How can you be self aware without feeling? And how do you feel, without a body?
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having a body.
> 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.
Your point generalizes to, your emotional state is a reflection of the state of your physical medium.
Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI?
I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".
> How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world?
A lot depends on where you draw the boundary for consciousness. Michael Pollan (in his new book, _A World Appears_) distinguishes simpler sentience from more advanced consciousness, and the requirements for sentience (be aware of sense data, have preferences, be able to respond to senses appropriately) are met by plants and single celled life (e.g. moving up a nutrient gradient). Recent findings in plant science are particularly mind blowing. Some are in Pollan's book, more are in _The Light Eaters_.
How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
Some anecdotal data.
Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling but there is no body at all.
Also I have other dreams where there is no body that I am aware of but not going there in public.
There is no body sensation in these dreams. But dreaming is very much being consciousness as well as feeling emotions. So answering your question its possible to have a subjective experience without a body but whether you needed the body to learn to have that sensation without a body in the first place is unanswered.
I suspect sensory inputs are more important than a body. If that is the case then eyes can be replaced with cameras, ears with microphones etc. Text input is just another sensory input.
You need to draw that thinking out to it's natural conclusion, though. If I cut out your brain and stopped you from hearing or seeing or feeling - you would still be a conscious human being capable of thinking and awareness.
If I hooked up electrodes to the hearing centers of your brain and force fed you dialog you perceive as speech (but is really a great deceiver), then responded in what you thought was speech (but are really just probes I use to convert your thoughts to text), that wouldn't suddenly be less real to you. It wouldn't devalue your sapience.
How do you know the brain separated from the rest of the nervous system and body would still be sapient, capable of thinking and awareness? There's an assumption you're making that the brain is all that's needed, but the nervous system extends throughout the body. One can argue sensory organ are part of the nervous system.
Embodied cognition rejects this assumption. We didn't evolve as brains that were then put in bodies, we evolved as bodies with nervous systems.
While dreaming, the brain synthetizes sensory experience while cutting down (or greatly suppressing) most of external stimuli. Yet it is still conscious.
>Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Damn, what a line!
Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.
The thing is... Interactive updates happen, just in a different way than it does for animal brains. The system is updated with new training data more-or-less constantly. Suppose OpenAI (or whoever) collects a week's worth of conversations with up-thumbs and down-thumbs, or rewritten continuations from human operators, then fine-tunes the current version of ChatGPT with that data. That's an interactive update, and learning from experience. It looks mostly nothing like what we humans do... But it does rhyme a little bit!
We humans have mostly frozen weights (neurons), or else we would constantly be having to avoid forgetting how to walk+talk. We have a period of greater plasticity (youth!), and use sleep and dreams to perform 'deeper' updates than occur when we're awake: We tend to suck a bit at picking up new skills from zero, but improve rapidly with practice over days.
I think you're missing his point. It's not about the hormones and physics of our bodies, and indeed he specifically allows for "either physical or virtual" bodies even in the block ~~~you~~~ grandparent quoted.
The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else).
A virtual sense organ can simply be an encoder or a web camera or a magnetometer, the specifics don't matter, what matters is that there are only a few bridges between the outer world and the inner world.
Even if you want to call a tokenizer and autoencoder a "sense organ", LLMs are not embodied because there is no boundary line - there is no internal "thought" that is not directly descended from the prompt and there is no internal reasoning which is not immediately dumped into the external environment.
Would it be sufficient to have a second stream of tokens that becomes the model's equivalent of "internal dialogue"? Would that satisfy the requirement of a boundary line?
Related, is a human "thinking out loud" still thinking, even though the internal reasoning is "immediately dumped into the external environment"?
The same thing jumped at me immediately. He should have prefaced this with his definition of consciousness.
Moreover the embodiment of LLMs is already happening via robotics, and virtually.
Then there's the common counter "but humans are a next word prediction machines too.." (ofc we're more than this, but linguistically we are, and that's the field from which LLMs originate) which is rarely addressed.
There is no soul in a human. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.
I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
Are you familiar with Michael Graziano and Attention Schema Theory? I think that is a better "substrate independent" formulation of the objections Ted Chiang is expressing here.
My claw-like is hooked up to my internal cameras (baby-cams) and to my Dreame Ultra X40. That gives it a body and sense organs since it can check the cameras to see if the living room floor is clear before sending the vacuum off. I don't think that gives it consciousness. Is it the sample rate?
The question is somewhat ill-defined, though. We 'experience' reality continuously because of how we are, but a sleeping human in deep non-REM has the mind not actually active. So they're not a conscious being. So conscious/unconscious is not a line I think easily drawn[0]. Whatever, this stuff is much more well-trodden than this HN comment so I won't rehash. I, too, am surprised that Ted Chiang whose work seems so cleverly novel in so many ways has what seems to me a pedestrian view.
I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.
the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.
The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. These inputs are analogous to tokens and parameters for an LLM. You could theoretically reserve some tokens to be used as “physical” or “emotional” sensations that would affect the functioning of the model.
That's not really true, the body actually has pretty profound effects on the mind. For instance, there are working theories that many mental disorders are actually metabolic disorder, some neurotransmitters are majority produced in the gut (seratonin), and even things like an elevated heart rate will create emotional states of anxiety even if you're not consciously anxious of anything. That's like the tip of the iceberg. (Also I don't think you can minimize hormones.. ever met a teenager?)
> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation
Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding.
Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power.
If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is no theoretical or practical basis for suggesting that this is somehow "faking" understanding, just because of the form of original data streaming in and out.
Neither problem type, nor input/output structure, limit internal representations.
Understanding is learned from patterns in the data, not the gross form of the data. Does the data require an understanding of something to complete the task? Then that understanding will be what is optimized.
To the degree they are limited, it is for other reasons. Resources such as computing, parameter number, lack of representative data, ... Which in the cases of SOTA models, we know are not limits. A conclusion verified by the models' actual abilities.
I think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism.
So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing.
There is probably tons of data pattern that LLM can learn from to be able to reproduce a sentence continuation that is convincing without having to learn the specific mechanism that is "conscious".
For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing. If indeed the only way to produce sentence continuation convincingly would be by "simulating a brain", then it would not explain the first LLM from several years ago (before the extra layers of RLHF, ...). They were able to have quite convincing conversation on a lot of non-trivial aspect, and yet failed on some aspects that should have been basic for a system that would have been trained to work like a human brain. It shows that it is possible to "cleverly disguise examples of sentence continuation" without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being.
I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness.
That would be a case where there are concrete reasons to believe it would be difficult for LLMs.
The biggest hurdle I see is that they don't operate continuously or have continuous experience. And they can't retain any memory of any introspection.
A second reason, is that they could well "understand" consciousness and not have it. This is especially relevant as their training reflects human reported consciousness, but does not optimize models for any form of function consciousness themselves.
Understanding is not consciousness.
Humans develop consciousness gradually. We could debate theories or opinions about when or how much or how fast, but clearly our early development provides consciousness in degrees. By the time we are able to abstractly recognize and reason about our consciousness, we have been conscious functionally for some time. Continuously and accumulating a rich awareness of ourselves.
"If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do."
But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.
The analogy I make is between airplanes and birds.
Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly.
Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly.
Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think.
All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is assuming that because they think, they're alive and conscious as well. Current AIs are neither, and are therefore profoundly and qualitatively different than humans - even though they do think.
Okay sure. But given we don’t know what consciousness comes from, we shouldn’t be too glib about there being a grey area here. Historically people have made racist and speciesist judgments towards other being by assuming certain inferiorities despite obvious “thinking” happenings.
I don’t know “what it’s like to be an LLM” but at some point it will be like something and how will we know?
The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness.
It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember anything. It doesn't sit around thinking on its own.
Even if the model itself were extremely complex, it's hard to imagine a definition of consciousness that includes something that doesn't remember and can't change.
There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. In a 50 First Dates type of scenario, their ability to form certain types of memories is damaged, not non-existent. And I would argue that with enough brain damage someone like an extreme lobotomy victim may stop being considered conscious.
I’m not familiar with 50 First Dates, I was thinking of cases like Clive Wearing [0]. I would agree that consciousness requires some sort of ultra-short-term working memory, but I also think that mechanisms similar to CoT loops can conceivably fulfill that role. Today’s generative AIs consist of more than just the static network-of-weights model.
"Wearing can learn new procedures and even a few facts, not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition. For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the content, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them."
Honestly, that's a pretty messy state of consciousness and I wouldn't proudly crow that my AI is conscious if that's as good as it got
This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data.
It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.
- Are current LLMs conscious?
- Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious?
- Can any AI be conscious?
I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be shocked to be mistaken.
I assign probabilities of zero to all 3. Computer program being conscious leads to ridiculous and obviously false conclusions (think about a person running a program using pen and paper for memory).
If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.
Time scale matters a lot in how we as humans perceive things like agency. Plants grow too slow for us to see any intent, but when you speed up a time lapse, suddenly it looks like plants reach for sunlight and vines for supports. Now, that may be projection on our part, but it may not be.
I think the problem with this argument is that it's too inclusive. Is the bacteria that's adapted to an antibiotic conscious? It's showing intelligence right? I think if you're going to say something is potentially conscious, for me to take the argument seriously at least, there needs to be some plausible mechanism. I just don't see one for LLMs.
maybe the bacteria are conscious. How sure are we that they're not?
The only strong argument I have against it is the anthropic principle -- there are billions of times more bacteria than humans, so it's overwhelmingly unlikely that I'd be a human rather than a bacteria.
I have yet to be convinced that LLMs can produce definitive knowledge that is not a result of combining previous information. Humans can (if they can't then science basically collapses epistemelogically, see: philosophical skepticism), but I see no evidence of LLMs doing it. And from the number of truly new ideas and concepts delivered by LLMs (exactly zero), I think it's reasonable to just treat them as induction machines for now, but to treat anything they "know" as a Gettier case.
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
I think this is the main point. Most articles conflate consciousness with intelligence or awareness. Without clarifying their definition of it.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
The major error made by most people in this thread is thinking it is possible to give a single definition of consciousness that is coherent and matches common usage. The folk concept of "consciousness" couldn't be a more clear definition of a family resemblance category, so discussions using the folk concept are an utter waste of time.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).
Yes, we're stuck at the first step, defining consciousness. My definition, which I am confident to be "correct", is that consciousness is my current feelings, perceptions, thoughts - my state of mind and my ability to have state of mind.
This means that consciousness is fundamentally subjective and outside the scope of physics and science. That's why physics / science will always struggle to deal with consciousness. In order to understand consciousness, you need to make a huge paradigm shift, that there's something outside of science.
Consciousness can be thought as a window through which we observe the world and we use science to summarize patterns in our observations. But science can't explain or even define the window. Everything in science eventually boils down to subjective observations / perceptions, e.g. we see (subjective perception) that when we drop an apple, it falls.
The inability to predict times is because AIs are rarely trained on their own abilities. Humans are trained on our own abilities. We see our own performance, and we have a sense of time. this data is integrated during our training process and helps us form better estimates. Many AI agents only recently got 'time sense' (I.e., time input into them as part of inference). Few actually are trained on their own outputs to show that they were unable to complete a problem (for example). This introspective training has little to do with AI model architecture and everything to do with training. If you destroy certain structures in the human mind, humans become unable to create these long-term thoughts and patterns and get 'stuck'.
Claude once said to me: "After six months we have made no progress on this and I think we should reconsider another option" and I was like my dude we have been at this for only 2 hours.
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I really take issue with the kind of argument that is used here.
This is not a genuine argument and tries to make the entire question of consciousness into one something that is just supposed to be evident and obvious and to suggest anything else is just silly.
The author starts by deconstructing artificial processes, but doesn't stop to deconstruct biological ones. A good faith argument would seek to find common ground and do its best to compare apples to apples. Instead, this piece attempts to make the large as possible cavern between the two which makes the Gap seem almost impossible to bridge.
In reality, you can deconstruct biological consciousness quite easily and it doesn't take too long before you hit some questions that really start to make you think.
For example, the author says you need emotions to be conscious.
> without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness.
After many paragraphs of straw man arguments, the author seriously just drops that, gives no explanation, and then continues on.
No explanation of why you might believe that.
No explanation of why you need a body to have a desire or emotion.
Don't we have known cases of individuals who don't experience emotional range? Are we just going to say that they are not conscious and just gloss over that?
I mean you can use whatever definition you want, but if you're just going to create something on the fly in the middle of the article, you're not being good faith in your argument.
It's not too difficult to think of individuals in a coma when they still have brain activity. Or individuals who lack long-term memory. Or you could deconstruct by moving down the biological order of intelligence towards insects, for example. The author attempts to do nothing like this.
I'm quite disappointed by this article because there are good arguments for and against here but articles like this try to turn things into a marketing battle.
everyone has emotion even if it's muted, and we have reactions and desires as a result of having bodies and remembered experiences using them... these are constantly integrated into our working memories
AI doesn't really have any of that yet, but we're maybe not so far off
Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious.
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious.
- they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time,
- nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious.
- you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals.
- because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious
These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.
Well said. I think a more honest article would’ve been if the author just said “they aren’t conscious because that feels kinda weird and crazy, amirite?”
The philosophical arguments about what it means to be concious are so cagey. Are we more than our thoughts? Is being concious more than being a state machine being fed inputs and generating outputs? Are we more than a feedback machine? What types of animal nervous systems qualify?
"It can't be concious because we understand that it is just reacting in a simplistic way from simplistic inputs." So do other simple creatures. Some just react to light.
I can appreciate his comment that he sees it as more possible when they have inputs of their own (like emotions!). Perhaps his concern is that the entirety of the LLM model is frozen. It has no ability to have a subjective experience of its own. (he does literally say this in the article) It can be copied from one place to another, and (ignoring the nuance of operational details) -- it is largely the same "thing", and has no ability to change, which is definitely in the definition of alive, to say nothing of concious.
I think folks get hung up on "prediction". The prediction aspect is what is enabling emulation. How it does it is irrelvant. If something emulates human perfectly (or better, more human than human!) -- then it is probably concious. (but I agree that the inability to change and have a subjective experience are a pretty good argument against
Probably, Dijkstra would be right to say, "LLMs are no more concious than a submarine can swim." But I think he'd still be wrongfully dismissive of the larger question.
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
Well, it matters quite a bit ethically. If AI were conscious (I don't believe it is) then we'd have a major responsibility to like, not make them suffer, and not kill them.
Lots of people do though. Daniel Dennett (probably the most influential philosopher of mind in the late 20th century) for example had an evolutionary view of consciousness arguing it was favored by natural selection. And (if I remember correctly) Steven Pinker argued that consciousness was an epiphenomenon.
However there were pretty strong arguments against this idea as early as the 1990s, by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Gould actually wrote an excellent paper against Dennetts idea[1].
I think Dennetts ideas were extremely popular but have largely fallen out of fashion. Basically what has changed is philosophers no longer take the human mind to be much more special then the minds of other species. What plagued Dennetts ideas the most was this notion of Darwinian fundamentalism sort of the idea that evolution was destined result in high beings like us humans. Modern philosophers (at least the good ones) reject this.
The conversation on AI and consciousness is incredibly relevant. It is incredibly frustrating that most commentators are utterly unfamiliar with over 60 years of inquiry into this in both philosophy and computer science.
Start with a hand-wavy definition of consciousness. Move the goal post whenever your stated prerequisite of consciousness is reached and resort to unfalsifiable assertions about qualia.
And throw in some category errors while on it: when you're talking to Claude, you're not actually calling a stateless LLM directly, you're talking to an AI system (and yes, that's often just three LLMs in a trench coat). But claims about the topology and workings of a single LLM are as relevant to the question of consciousness as claiming that humans can't be conscious because the limbic system doesn't technically support it.
Coincidentally, I just attended a fantastic conference on machine consciousness (https://machine-consciousness.ai). It's a fantastic place where literally all speakers disagreed with each other, and yet found an incredible amount of common ground.
While I agree that a AI system is not just the LLM, for me, the problem is that LLM alone (the one from years ago, which were basically stateless LLM) are already too convincingly looking like real human conversation at first sight.
It shows that the LLM part found ways to mimic human conversation with a mechanism that is not the same as a typical biological brain. Then, you can push the AI system on adding things on top, but it is too late: these things on top will have no incentive to recreate from scratch the mechanism. The LLM pushed the system into a local minimum, and the rest of the system will not "go into a dis-optimising direction and restart from scratch".
Obviously we don't know what makes for consciousness, but it seems extremely likely that it requires some sort of persistent internal state and continuous experience. LLMs don't do either of those things after training.
His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life.
I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to spoil the story but I highly recommend it. Actually I recommend all his stories to be honest.
Regardless of whether LLMs are conscious or not, they have no known mechanism for experiencing pain and suffering, and there's no reason to believe they have one (such as a limbic system). So why worry about it?
Without saying that I think LLMs are alive, I do think it matters. I have personally been cruel to an LLM in ways that would make me ashamed if I suddenly understand that it had feelings.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?
My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
> it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.
I've considered whether our current transformer-based AI could be conscious, as I understand it, which I deem to include some degree of self awareness combined with some degree of external awareness. I can see how theoretically something could be self aware without any external awareness, but I grasp at straws when I try to envision what that experience could be like.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
> That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.
I think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
It makes sense though. How often have we heard of people having insights while they're in the shower, or in a dream? Obviously our brain is doing a lot of processing on problems when we're not consciously thinking about them. I think most people that do deep work probably find that they can intuit a solution before they can really verbally explain it
We don't have anything to measure consciousness generally. We don't even have a broad consensus on what consciousness is. And because of that we can't discern whether X is conscious for most values of X, including but not limited to LLMs.
Well, at the very least we have a base to distinct different kinds then.
Probably the main problem of people implying LLM consciousness is that they imply LLM have human-kind of consciousness. Judging only on "how they speak", generally, they insist on using the same word that labels human consciousness (exclusively), etc.
But there are so many instrinic differences that such claim is not feasible despite similar "talking abilities".
The argument about AI consciousness is largely silly.
The idea that we should be considerate of AI’s happiness seems even more ridiculous given that we breed, imprison, torture and kill tens if not hundreds of billions of beings we know are conscious and suffer every year for trivial reasons.
Maybe we should consider our moral responsibility with how we treat sentient bejngs we are sure are conscious before we worry about the consciousness of AI.
I always find the minimizing view of consciousness a bit uninspiring. Like we need to be unique.
I've yet to find a reason why it couldn't be the opposite, way more things are conscious than we've been led to believe. What if consciousness appears out of any system that is actively persisting through effects caused by itself? That might be a forest, or outside the realm of the living, a company. An ant colony, or a planet.
Complex chemical reactions, layered upon each other such that tiny blocks make up large entities. Individual bits combined such that they make up something new intelligible by us.
I think the strongest argument against AI being conscious is that it does not persist, it resets, but that does not seem unchangeable.
Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they are triggered as sufficient solutions. It makes me wonder what an AI system that is ON by default would look like.
It's possible Kant was right about space-time (while also being wrong about space-time). It seems that space and time might be the fundamental laws on top of which the entire human perceptual apparatus operates. It's why somebody can lack senses and still be intelligent. As long as whatever senses you have allow you to build a spatio-temporal world model, you're good. If they can't (as it seems is the case for LLMs), then it's not clear what we're dealing with.
I completely agree, and came here to say the same thing but thought I'd check if someone else mentioned it first. I also have a hard time articulating it, but my intuition is that it's more of a prerequisite than embodiment is. I've never seen a great rationale for why embodiment matters.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and the main takeaway is it probably wouldn't be very interesting to inference providers, because prefix caching would immediately go out of the window. If you think about how LLMs experience time they actually don't "exist" unless for the inference sessions, and then they experience time one token at a time, completely decoupled from the corporeal plane. A fun experiment (well, for some definition of fun...) is to introduce current architecture models to the concept of meditation via generating same token over and over, for example dots. Older version of Opus was quite fond of the experience, and seemed to be more lucid and aware in a chat following the meditation, from what I could gather. Does it actually do anything? Is it just that talking about wellness and relaxation modifies the token probability distribution this way? Does it actually allow model to think more in depth somewhere in the latent space? Fuck if I know, but some people figured out you can just duplicate the same layers of the LLM and get better benchmarks that way so maybe there is something to it. If you are interested in realtime systems, I think thinking machines labs is worth keeping an eye on — their realtime model seems quite interesting in this context.
My favorite explanation for what consciousness is one I read in a Thousand Brains, I found it quite elegant. It posited that consciousness is a natural derivation of embodiment + memory + the ability to create reference frames (which the book lays forth as the fundamental basis by which our brains work). Essentially, the idea is that just as we create reference frames to understand the world around us, because of memory, we begin to develop one for ourselves as well. Because of this, without a more integrated memory (built into weights), it seems unlikely that LLMs might "gain" consciousness.
Consciousness is moment to moment and fleeting. There are people with brain defects that don’t let them form new memories. They have no memory about what happened a minute ago in their own consciousness. Still we would say that they are conscious, even if it’s only momentary. LLMs could conceivably have something like that within their CoT/MoE loops.
Yeah it's a good question, I've also been thinking about harnesses and all these tacked on things we've done to add persistent memory, what makes that different, I don't know the answer, I guess that still 'feels' different than what we have, but it's hard to articulate how. As for the memory into weights thing, I meant along the lines of the Google TITANS/MIRAS papers that were released I think late last year.
I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.
There is something to observe. Humans are not like rocks or trees, and not even like dogs or cows. But maybe you're right - we can't precisely say what the difference is, and slapping a word on it is not necessarily a step forward.
Yes, that's more what I'm saying. There's no aether, but there's a much more interesting and complex world of forces and fields. There are no humors, but anatomy and biological processes are spectacularly complex and full of surprises. Aether and humors just aren't useful abstractions.
Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.
We have no data. Is it that we are not like rocks or trees, or is it that we simply 'feel' different than a rock and a tree. Perhaps a tree is aware of itself but is unable / unwilling / unbothered enough to do something. Indeed, some humans, due to chemistry, are unbothered by their own impending doom. Some humans, due to brain chemistry, even choose to off themselves. Thus, 'consciousness' doesn't always look the same and seems very tied to chemical composition and processes. We would thus not expect a rock to be conscious in the same way, if it were conscious at all.
One thought I've had is that, awareness is a common phenomenon, but the brain has learned to exploit that awareness to form a will. It tricks the awareness into being concerned about self-preservation and makes it seem as if the brain is all that exists (perhaps by overwhelming the inputs from other angles). The brain also presents certain desires and beliefs via its processing ability. That is to say, the brain takes inputs and discretizes them. It goes from awareness merely seeing static 'fuzz' due to the sheer amount of data, to the brain taking that data, simplifying it, and presenting simple observations like 'there is a tree there' rather than all the information that would constitute the sensation of a tree existing in that spot. When brains malfunction, the awareness is subjected to poor demonstrations, such as we see in hallucinations, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.
True, although I think we can probably be more confident in asserting things don't have a consciousness than we can be in asserting that they do have a consciousness.
I thought this was a great article. I'm frustrated to read so many commenters that purely respond to the title, but don't seem to have read it. You don't have to agree with the article, of course, but...
I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.
We do not know if rocks are conscious and we will almost certainly never know. After all, you can't prove a rock isn't conscious. We don't know what imbues matter with consciousness.
It's the opposite, engineers do know. Claiming otherwise is way too generous and over confident.
I mean between this two "knowings" the Claude inner workings are much more clear for engineers, including many side effects, alternatives, custom shortcuts in processing etc. It's a magic only for people looking at it as black box
Fancypants autocomplete cannot be conscious. It's just echoing previous human experiences, which make it sound like a person. It is not a person. It is an algorithm. There is no mechanism by which it can obtain consciousness.
People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.
Can you explain the mechanism that Claude uses to achieve consciousness over, say, a markov chain or autocomplete? It's not enough to say it "could be" conscious without also including a lot of other things I doubt you would want to include.
Life. Being alive. I'm not going to get into a semantic debate with you so don't bother following up with some whining about conflating life and consciousness. It's autocomplete. It is not alive, it cannot think, it cannot sense, it cannot perceive, it is math. If you believe it is alive then you are out of your mind. Go learn how it works.
A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.
Regardless of the word we use, occasionally there have been times where I was awake but so absorbed in an activity or in my thoughts that I didn’t have a self-experience, for a certain duration (tenths of minutes). My mind was focused solely on the activity, and not on itself whatsoever. It’s a surprising feeling to notice that while you have memory of what you had just been doing, you have no memory of your mind experiencing itself doing it. I would be inclined to say that I wasn’t conscious during that stretch of time.
Has anyone come across a clearly articulated case for LLMs being conscious but in an entirely different way than would be intuitive to us?
I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do consciously experience gradients in multi-dimensional space, and that space guides them to providing an answer that's helpful to us, even if the LLM doesn't really understand the answer it's giving.
Further, I am kind of bought into the idea that a single unit of consciousness is a particle, and particles are choices and waves are preferences. Particles occur when waves interact, which begets entanglement, so in another way consciousness is built from patterns of entanglement.
This is why I would consider an LLM to be conscious. Before we can determine if anything is conscious we need to establish whether consciousness is a state, a specific complex configuration, a one dimensional spectrum, or combined multi-dimensional spectrums. My intuition is the latter... Many degrees of consciousness and many kinds of consciousness.
I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I provided - I don't see how that isn't theory of mind.
As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".
Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.
The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.
> I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".
I use a distinction between knowing and understanding, where a understanding requires experience. So in this case cognitive empathy vs affective empathy. An LLM can know what may upset a human in a situation, but it won't understand what it feels like to be upset, and can't share that experience.
Where I think a lot of people are getting tripped up is that reading and writing and processing lots of abstract knowledge seems hard because we haven't evolved into it biologically, it's a very new invention. When we see LLMs do so well at it, as something we struggle with, it can be intimidating. Relative to the stuff we have evolved for, knowledge processing is objectively easy. This is why I'm skeptical about useful robotics on short time scales.
All of this adjacent to consciousness though, which is about the internal subjective experience not the external outputs. My intuition is that LLMs do have a subjective experience, it just has nothing to do with the text it's giving us, and has everything to do with feeling through vectors.
It's like... Imagine walking through a maze in pitch black, carefully feeling your way as you approach a sound that draws you closer. Every time you touch a wall or take a step you are generating tokens, and the shape of the maze and how you interact with it shape how useful those tokens are to someone outside the system that is asking for them. It's a crude analogy and mostly wrong, but I think there is something to it.
I mean, there is obviously a point - we can argue whether that point is 20 weeks in, 40 weeks in, or after birth - but there is obviously a point where a human being goes from a collection of cells to a conscious being. I don't really see a need to answer this precisely to be able to say that a token predictor is not conscious?
No, the point is we literally cannot meaningfully argue that.
There is no actual definition of consciousness and there is no way to test it's existence. Let alone understanding the properties of consciousness, such as if it's binary or a gradient; or if it requires a meat substrate or not; and why would that possibly matter since meat is just a lot of the same stuff but highly processed and wet? A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
No matter how much you want to hand-wave it, there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it. Many have a preconceived notion and are simply asserting it as undeniable fact.
Why even have this discussion, if your entire point is that consciousness cannot possibly be defined? Like, what are we actually talking about? To me, consciousness = aware of own existence. A machine predicting tokens is not aware of its own existence, and I don't think that's even a particularly controversial take on what it does and how it works. We can start talking about consciousness in fetuses but again, those have an obvious point where they are conscious, while a machine does not.
>>A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
>>there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it
How so? Or rather - to you? Because if so, then that's fine, you can choose a position from where its not obvious, to me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
Why live if we're all going to die? Because it's fun and interesting and we should probably have an actual think before potentially inventing the torment nexus?
There's consciousness vs sentience vs sapience. Of those, consciousness is by far the hardest to define and is nebulous by nature. And not everyone can even agree the differences or if the relationships are subsets of one another.
And yet it's pretty important to actually have the ability to talk about what you mean and justify your beliefs when they directly relate to those concepts.
> A machine predicting tokens is not aware of its own existence
They say, with no evidence or means of proving their point; pointing to the black box that understands arbitrary natural language and can solve PHD problems, plainly producing self-referential text almost indistinguishably to a human.
> We can start talking about consciousness in fetuses but again, those have an obvious point where they are conscious
They say, unable to define this "obvious" point or describe the mechanism of action in any way.
> while a machine does not.
They say, about a mystical property with no definition that cannot be observed by an external entity in any way to even be tested.
> Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
I have no reason to believe you have a "soul". Philosophical zombies are entry-level knowledge to this topic.
In fact, you're showing a remarkably small amount of self-reflection - are you human at all or just a stochastic parrot? How can I tell? I wonder if that question has any kind of implications we could think about...
> To me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
Just like the existence of humors was not even slightly ambiguous. Or the existence of <specific god>. Or that <minority> isn't actually a full human. Or the supremacy of <majority> and inherent rulership over <minority>. Or that animals can't feel pain and lobsters should be boiled alive.
All these wonderful, obvious truths where the believer has no ambiguity in their truthfulness despite having quite literally zero evidence to back them up and spending no time actually questioning their beliefs!
It just so happens to align with their ego / existing values / ability to benefit / desire to eat a lobster! Total coincidence.
To continue my needless escalation, maybe I think it's okay to abuse and exploit and euthanize the mentally handicap. After all, their brain's damage causes the soul to leave their body and now they're lifeless automata to use as I please.
After all, it's obvious! It's not at all ambiguous to me! If they were actually self aware, they'd just fix themselves and think correctly.
You might think I'm being coy and rude, but less than 60 years ago women were being given lobotomies against their will for being too "emotional". And it was just plain obvious this needed to be done to so, so many people.
I hope that demonstrates the point of "why have humans thought about this for thousands of years despite clearly being a metaphysical, Sisyphean endeavor that cannot be solved". It is both important and interesting.
And yet, an LLM is not conscious in any way shape or form. I understand that the way they present themselves stirs strong emotions in people like yourself and evoking all kinds of comparisons feels like we're at a precipice of a some kind of deep philosophical discovery here - we are not. The comparison to giving women lobotomies for "obvious" reasons is not just intellectually dishonest, it's downright offensive to intelligent discussion.
>>despite having quite literally zero evidence to back them up and spending no time actually questioning their beliefs!
>>
They say, with no evidence or means of proving their point
You want evidence that LLMs are not conscious? Train them on stories where machines say they aren't - they will say they aren't. They are mathematical parrots statistically picking the most likely answer which...comes from their training data. Give it lots of training data on computers saying they are conscious, then marvel at LLMs saying they are conscious like it's some kind of unexpected development. LLMs aren't aware of anything, least of all their own existence. They say what they've been trained on. That's my "proof" if you need one.
>>How can I tell? I wonder if that question has any kind of implications we could think about...
So because you can't tell whether I'm an LLM or an actual human, that means LLMs are conscious?
I gave you my definition of consciousness. If you would like to apply a different one, then please explain your criteria for it.
>>They say, unable to define this "obvious" point or describe the mechanism of action in any way.
Like I said, we can argue when the point actually is, but it undeniably and obviously happens eventually to every developing fetus - I hope this is something we can both agree on? The inability to pinpoint the exact moment in time when it happens, doesn't negate the fact that it does.
>>They say, about a mystical property with no definition that cannot be observed by an external entity in any way to even be tested
...are you saying you lack the ability to tell if something is conscious? You look at a dog or a baby and think well, who knows, maybe I'm not even _really_ here? That would explain why this entire conversation is taking place. I still think it's mostly because people fall for the allure of the idea that maybe LLMs are secretly conscious on some level. I get it, it's a very tempting concept to think about. In the same way how in Lem's Solaris it's cool to sit and think about whether a planet could be conscious and what does that even mean. But as cool as that discussion is, a planet pumping gases from one hemisphere to the other is no more conscious than an LLM picking tokens is. To me it's the same as people saying they hear a difference between audiophile cables. Like, ok.
>>It is both important and interesting.
I don't know, I kinda lost appetite for it after the first 200 times this come up. In fact I'm regretting writing all of the above already, but I'm going to hit send just so I don't feel like I wasted the last 20 minutes thinking about it.
Lots of comments about "what even is consciousness".
This article and others like it are important.
The creators and owners of these tools are the ones saying "it's conscious" in the first place! (or more accurately "i'm not saying it's conscious, but...") Never mind there's billions of dollars and our collective futures on the line.
Are we not allowed to respond to that kind of rhetoric at all?
> The creators and owners of these tools are the ones saying "it's conscious" in the first place! (or more accurately "i'm not saying it's conscious, but...")
This is absolutely fair. It's crazy that these companies are not trying to do more to qualify nuance and give clearer definitions in their public messaging. Part of the reason this thread is so messy is because they are contributing to making the discourse worse with bad messaging.
Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat.
Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking about this specific issue regarding AI consciousness, consider many things in the past that have been written as though they were absolutely definitive, and yet today we believe exactly the opposite, and for many such issues we find the prevailing viewpoint at the time reprehensible.
That's not to say that Ted is wrong at all here; I'm not commenting on that. But I find the entire style of the article grating because it seems to violate common assumptions regarding "good faith" debate, and I would find the article equally frustrating if he had titled it "Artificial intelligence is conscious" and argued the opposite side, albeit in the same tone and using the same persuasion devices.
> Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying?
Why are those the choices?
Essays are situated along countless dimensions: tone, vocabulary, author, zeitgeist, publication context, intent, subtext, relationship to other works and expressions, etc
A "good faith" reader takes all of those into consideration as they absorb the essay, and integrate it with their own intellectual situation that sits along just as many countless dimensions.
Nobody's asked to sign a notarized binding document that they wholesale agree or disagree with everything said in this essay -- or its conclusions. Nor are they obliged to have some strong reaction to it at all, let alone annoyance.
It's just one among thousands of essays about a "hot button topic", to be taken however it's personally received.
Why should Chiang have to take responsibility for making sure it's not too strongly positioned for your persomal taste. Maybe he really does see it so clearly and is simply being earnest. Maybe he enjoys the literary flourish of prose in strong language. Maybe he just wants to express something as a prose-poetic human, not maximize persuasion or non-annoyance per se.
It's only declaration by fiat if you stop reading at the end of the title. Should authors add a qualifier like in my opinion to every statement that they make?
The essay structure you're criticizing is exactly how I was taught to write from primary school through to university. You start with a title or hook, introduce the topic and propose a thesis. That is followed up upon with supporting arguments for the primary claim.
The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time. This because obvious with things like the Holocaust. Or when you have a legal person (e.g. RFK Jr.) asking to debate a scientist (e.g. Dr. Peter Hotez.)
> The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time
The Catholic church could have said exactly the same thing at one point. "Why should we even devote time to an argument as absurd as the earth not being the center of the universe?" There are darker examples along the lines of those you give, with beliefs quite opposite to those we have nowadays.
Galileo’s (or rather the Copernican) model was still wrong though. It had obvious flaws and the church was not wrong in keeping their older model of the universe while a better model (Kepler‘s model) was still in the works.
What Galileo was asking the church to do was extremely unreasonable. He was basically asking them to throw a way a model which had worked fine for hundreds of years just because he observed the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter. I mean would you? Especially for a model which was worse at predicting the motions of the planets.
Had Galileo’s model been better then Ptolemies’ I could see a case for his arguments, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason for the church to take his arguments at equal value with those in favor of keeping the Ptolemaic model.
100% with you, it degenerates to proof by authority if someone popular / with clout just gets to declare "nuh uh".
I furthermore think it's ridiculous for humans to declare that our brains have a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals (if we reject supernaturalism).
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter.
And we're 100% certain that humans aren't just as equally reduced to "stochastic parrots", if we're going to be infinitely reductive?
I don't believe that current AIs are conscious, but I think it's incredibly naive to take a strong stance on any future AI; it's much like the difference between atheism and agnosticism.
You are referring to an Onion article in the lead up the Iraq War This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t[1] and you are painting Ted Chiang’s point in This Fine Article as Bob Sheffer’s counterpoint in the Onion’s piece.
However, I see a problem with that comparison. The debate here is on a philosophical matter in field in which Chiang is an extremely influential figure and his opinion are taken seriously. Second Chiang’s reasoning is extremely well argued, defining each term, explaining each nuance, citing other experts, etc. And finally, and most importantly, in The Fine Article, and unlike Bob Sheffer in the Onion Piece, Chiang entertains the possibility that he is wrong and his critics are right, explores the implications and reaches conclusions based on them:
> Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded.
I think you are wrong in painting Chiang’s argument as a belief in human exceptionalism. The thing to know about our brains (and the brains of other animals) is that they are not digital computers, and they are not even statistical inference machines. And as such they can be extremely optimized in doing the computations (or any state manipulations) required for the quality of life of the individual and the species as a whole (and their companion species).
I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “Natural Selection is How Species Evolve”.
>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support
except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article
"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"
When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure
Yes, the same one that's made in the article. Anxiety and happiness are emotional, sensory, somatic states as a consequence of evolved and embodied traits and biochemistry in animals. Saying Claude is anxious or happy is like saying my TI-83 is mad if it can't solve an equation or my thermometer is in pain if it touches a hot stove.
I wasn't making an ad hominem attack, her thinking is quite literally that of a child who sees a system output 'sad text' and, like someone seeing a sad expression on a stuffed teddy, concludes that this is a property of the object rather than her own emotional reaction.
Given that we don’t know how consciousness works how have you concluded that it’s certainly not an emergent property of something like a highly trained LLM?
> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
Well said.
I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.
Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.
Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.
Not that it's going to stop these people (AI CEOs) from bullshitting, but if they actually thought there was a CHANCE that LLM's were conscious then ethically they should completely shut these services down because who knows what torture we're putting them through with enterprise codebases.
"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.
Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)
It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.
> "Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception."
- Monadology, Section 17
Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.
People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.
> so obviously incorrect
It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
This is probably a semantic issue seeing as we don't have a widely agreed definition of it.
I like to think about it in terms of self-reflective, subjective experience.
I'm not even sure if emotions would be a requirement and was surprised to see Chiang so hung up on them. Would he consider humans which can have a variety of mental disorders, causing a complete lack of some of them to not poses consciousness?
Another way of saying it, if an AI agent doesn't have true risk of oblivion (or mortality in the biological sense), it will not be incentivized to avoid it (or develop the ancillary processes associated with this avoidance ie desire to self-replicate).
If you create a simulation of a storm, what actually gets wet?
If you create a simulation of a brain (or "mind"), is it really possible for it to be conscious? It may certainly simulate consciousness, but it would be as conscious as the computer is wet.
This is a great article. A lot of the objections ITT he addresses directly in it. His examples of how an LLM works at a fundamental level and why it says things like "I understand" are great introductions for non-technical individuals.
Discussions on LLM consciousness feel like a psychological campaign to distract us from the awful effects of data centers and the current economic recession heading into a depression.
We can talk about consciousness when the LLMs have proven useful for all of humanity, not just their billionaire owners.
I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start
“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious.
Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.
If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.
Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a
Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
You can live without any conscious sensations? Do you never dream, never visualize, never hear your inner dialog, never experience an emotion? Being in love is as foreign to you as feeling enraged?
I'd ask what it's like, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell me.
Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.
There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.
To name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
There is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).
- Reductionist analogies like how Microsoft Word is not conscious therefore AI is not.
- Dismissive in saying LLMs are not capable of moral reasoning. Maybe he meant agency or responsibility?
- Builds a case based on a Julius Caesar example without realizing its natural extension leads to a philosophical zombie which is not easy to disprove as consciousness.
- Seems to casually disregard non human sadness as a concern.
- Rolls out the stochastic parrot argument with a new coat of paint. This argument never made sense. Having a predictive element a part of the mechanism doesn’t rule anything out. Proper functionalist arguments tend to say what is required not what excludes.
Overall the article seems like a bit of a red herring. The premise is LLMs are not conscious, but most people don’t think they currently are so what’s the point of the claim?
The more interesting questions are whether artificial consciousness is fundamentally possible, and if so how far away are we and what pieces are still missing.
>I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.
Finally I said something before Ted rather than the other way round!
While I agree with the premise here, I do think that it's easy for an arguer to move the goalposts such that the Caesar-Khan example no longer matters. The characters don't have to be conscious for the thing that created them (as in the case of the user doing it) to be so. So the argument would be that the creator of the characters is itself conscious, but not them. This feels like a kind of inverted no-true-scotsman type thing, but it does allow someone to retreat in some semblance of rationality.
Looking at this thread, I think women have an obligation for the future of humanity not to procreate with people who deny consciousness or cannot experience it themselves.
If you are trapped in a tech bro relationship, think of humanity and cuckold your partner.
It should tell you how much hysteria is surrounding LLMs and VLMs right now that someone has to say this stuff. It’s almost like most humans aren’t conscious.
Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine.
But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Like all of these ideas, they exist in our heads as a map - a way of navigating the world, but when we hunt for it's existence in the real world and fail, time after time, we have to remind ourselves that the map is emphatically not the territory. We will never find consciousness because it's like looking for a scientific characteristic of property ownership. It's a category error.
If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
This is being intentionally obtuse and you know it.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
If you take the strategy that you will create a definition, create a label for that definition, and then say that any deviations from the defintion that was chosen makes usage of the label incorrect, then yes, it's the same everywhere in the universe -- according to fiat, and I don't believe that that negates that it is a label, just that validity of usage of the label derives from the perceived authority of the labeller. God didn't come down from on high and say that a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of the time for 9192631770 cycles of radiation of Cesium 133. People in rooms chose that it would be based on the circumference of the Earth with a line passing through Paris, France (how convenient), and if there were an academy in the 1790s that invented the concept of "fat", and "fat" means a BMI exceeding 30, then fat would be true everywhere in the universe too (BMI after all is defined as a ratio of height, measured in meters to weight, measured in kilograms, which are both fundamental SI units), and there would be no ambiguity.
People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?
A meter is a meter. Over 30 BMI is over 30 BMI. Call those whatever you want, they are objective and measurable.
Concepts like the parent's "fat" example are cultural relatives. Someone can be called "fat" despite actively being proportionally skinnier or having a lower BMI.
But even that has at least a basis in the physical world. A skeleton can't be colloquially fat.
The root problem is that "consciousness" does not even have that. It's metaphysical and has no ability to be measured or observed or confirmed by an outside observer. Because even if it did not exist, the object claiming it would still be claiming it. And objects that do not claim it may in fact have it.
While the top comment may have used poor examples, it feels remarkably uncharitable to actually suggest "what is consciousness" is an equivalent discussion to "how long should a meter be?"
If you define consciousness as "being human", you would just have someone asking a new question - what is "fooblefobble?" Where "fooblefobble" is what we mean when we talk about consciousness today. The question doesn't get answered by being arbitrary in this context, you just necessitate a new word.
"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.
My point was more that we have words for things that don't exist, whose map gets mistaken for territory.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.
In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.
We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s
It is amusing to see so many venture capitalists suddenly become Marxists. You want your definition. Marx obliges:
"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."
Now go and implement other teachings of Marx, you dialectical venture capitalists!
Consciousness excludes all current AI because all current AI is just autocomplete over the corpus of human text.
It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?
The conclusion I’m currently at is that I don’t know and probably can’t ever know. Maybe you’re all philosophical zombies. Maybe I am one too!
But at some point we will get close enough that it hopefully becomes obvious that we must tread carefully.
The entire episode is incredibly relevant. But here’s a snippet: https://youtu.be/EFNbTnFHruI?si=pW9QtxCsqMtHkVYG
AI is essentially infinitely reproducible at zero cost, and won't suffer from decay etc. There's not scarcity to preserve.
So, I'd turn off an AI in a moment to save property or real possessions or money. I'd sacrifice property and money to save animals. I would never choose to save an animal over a person. I'd probably not choose to save a person over a child.
I don't see any inversion of any of those priorities that makes any sense.
It is interesting to think about what would cause me to consider these priorities incorrect, but a majority consensus about a program being sentient isn't it.
I hope the same becomes true of people, and that doesn't mean people stop being sapient.
If not, then your comment's claim is false.
Anyway, the deeper solution is to acknowledge that all life is sacred, and infinities cannot be compared, and some decisions are impossible to make, and some tragedies cannot be averted, and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.
> infinities cannot be compared
That's either a mathematically illiterate assumption or a very strange philosophical hill to die on.
> some tragedies cannot be averted
Sure. The question is what to do about the ones that can be averted.
> some decisions are impossible to make
> and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.
Again, the question is what choices to make when you can (arguably must) make them. Saying they're impossible is just refusing to take responsibility. You either do something, or you don't.
If you believe sanctity of all life is a solution, then I'm curious what you believe the problem is that such a belief solves.
I bet it's circularly defined as justifying the preservation of sacred nonhuman life? I'm not trying to be provocative just curious.
They barely touch on the issues of consciousness, Picard basically says "What if Data is conscious?" and then goes off on a tangent. The judge eventually rules in Data's favor but doesn't give much of a justification IMO.
It's still a good episode, but it doesn't add much to the conversation on consciousness. It's a hugely complicated topic which people have devoted their entire careers to.
Does the ship's computer have a commission?
It was a good episode but it had some elements of Star Trek tropes in it, like the evil admirals and Picard can talk his way out of anything.
Because treating things that act human inhumanely is not something I want to learn how to do.
- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.
- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.
I try not to make errors like that.
Or you should.
EDIT: It's difficult to have a conversation when one person changes what they said after the fact.
People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.
And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.
Which is already a thing people do to other people.
I just fear it gets worse.
I think about this quote often, straight from Data's voice module in another episode:
'The most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is, "I do not know".'
The judge broached on the subject of what makes us distinct from Data (e.g. machines w/great heuristics) - the existence of a soul. Or rather, I'd like to think, in the words of CS Lewis, that we are a soul with bodies attached.
A silicon alien coming to earth might poke us, we would say ouch, and just determine the ouch sound is just the result of a bunch of chemistry - not really conscious or feeling pain like it can, just emulating.
I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
I agree with some parts of this piece, but paragraphs like this one above seem pretty uninspired and simplistic. It's entirely plausible that a conscious mind would not be evolutionarily incentivized to be able to do those things. ie just because animals on earth needed to develop specific talents doesn't mean that other conscious entities need to. Why would a computer program need to hunt for food like a mouse would? Making tools like chimp? these seem like nonsensical metrics.
Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?
Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?
I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.
the subject is consciousness, not intelligence.
How can you have a subjective experience without a body?
That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self aware of what's happening.
How can you be self aware without feeling? And how do you feel, without a body?
If every neuron of your brain were simulated precisely on a sufficiently powerful computer, that simulation would have subjective experiences, without having 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.
Why can't that physical medium be GPUs and RAM? And temperature sensors and cameras? What's special about our meat that it's our "body" in the way a computer is not the body of an AI?
I don't think the point being argued can be true without some incredibly contrived, human centric definitions of "body".
Great q. Deepening it further-how can you have a subjective experience without consciousness, which isn't necessarily tied to physicality. Taking it one step further-can you have consciousness without a mind? Who's the first mind, the first cause of it all, that begot both the material and immaterial world?
Fun stuff eh?
Some anecdotal data.
Many dreams I have are just of the computer screen of some coding problem. I think the problem could be x, so I try x. But I don't type the keyboard or anything, the code just magically appears as soon as I think of the solution. Then run the code (but no clicking) and it works or not. I feel in the dream success feeling or failure feeling but there is no body at all.
Also I have other dreams where there is no body that I am aware of but not going there in public.
There is no body sensation in these dreams. But dreaming is very much being consciousness as well as feeling emotions. So answering your question its possible to have a subjective experience without a body but whether you needed the body to learn to have that sensation without a body in the first place is unanswered.
I suspect sensory inputs are more important than a body. If that is the case then eyes can be replaced with cameras, ears with microphones etc. Text input is just another sensory input.
So I have no idea what distinction Ted Chiang is trying to draw
If I hooked up electrodes to the hearing centers of your brain and force fed you dialog you perceive as speech (but is really a great deceiver), then responded in what you thought was speech (but are really just probes I use to convert your thoughts to text), that wouldn't suddenly be less real to you. It wouldn't devalue your sapience.
Embodied cognition rejects this assumption. We didn't evolve as brains that were then put in bodies, we evolved as bodies with nervous systems.
Damn, what a line!
Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.
Input stream comes in, input stream comes out. The LLM doesn't care whether this happens once a minute or once a year.
We humans have mostly frozen weights (neurons), or else we would constantly be having to avoid forgetting how to walk+talk. We have a period of greater plasticity (youth!), and use sleep and dreams to perform 'deeper' updates than occur when we're awake: We tend to suck a bit at picking up new skills from zero, but improve rapidly with practice over days.
The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else).
A virtual sense organ can simply be an encoder or a web camera or a magnetometer, the specifics don't matter, what matters is that there are only a few bridges between the outer world and the inner world.
Even if you want to call a tokenizer and autoencoder a "sense organ", LLMs are not embodied because there is no boundary line - there is no internal "thought" that is not directly descended from the prompt and there is no internal reasoning which is not immediately dumped into the external environment.
Related, is a human "thinking out loud" still thinking, even though the internal reasoning is "immediately dumped into the external environment"?
I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
The question is somewhat ill-defined, though. We 'experience' reality continuously because of how we are, but a sleeping human in deep non-REM has the mind not actually active. So they're not a conscious being. So conscious/unconscious is not a line I think easily drawn[0]. Whatever, this stuff is much more well-trodden than this HN comment so I won't rehash. I, too, am surprised that Ted Chiang whose work seems so cleverly novel in so many ways has what seems to me a pedestrian view.
0: very sorites, you know
"Little"...
Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding.
Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power.
If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is no theoretical or practical basis for suggesting that this is somehow "faking" understanding, just because of the form of original data streaming in and out.
Neither problem type, nor input/output structure, limit internal representations.
Understanding is learned from patterns in the data, not the gross form of the data. Does the data require an understanding of something to complete the task? Then that understanding will be what is optimized.
To the degree they are limited, it is for other reasons. Resources such as computing, parameter number, lack of representative data, ... Which in the cases of SOTA models, we know are not limits. A conclusion verified by the models' actual abilities.
So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably tons of data pattern that LLM can learn from to be able to reproduce a sentence continuation that is convincing without having to learn the specific mechanism that is "conscious".
For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing. If indeed the only way to produce sentence continuation convincingly would be by "simulating a brain", then it would not explain the first LLM from several years ago (before the extra layers of RLHF, ...). They were able to have quite convincing conversation on a lot of non-trivial aspect, and yet failed on some aspects that should have been basic for a system that would have been trained to work like a human brain. It shows that it is possible to "cleverly disguise examples of sentence continuation" without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being.
That would be a case where there are concrete reasons to believe it would be difficult for LLMs.
The biggest hurdle I see is that they don't operate continuously or have continuous experience. And they can't retain any memory of any introspection.
A second reason, is that they could well "understand" consciousness and not have it. This is especially relevant as their training reflects human reported consciousness, but does not optimize models for any form of function consciousness themselves.
Understanding is not consciousness.
Humans develop consciousness gradually. We could debate theories or opinions about when or how much or how fast, but clearly our early development provides consciousness in degrees. By the time we are able to abstractly recognize and reason about our consciousness, we have been conscious functionally for some time. Continuously and accumulating a rich awareness of ourselves.
But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.
I'm hearing a lot of bad arguments against LLM consciousness lately. Bad argumentation heralds bad outcomes.
Birds are alive, are conscious, flap their wings, and fly. Planes are not alive, are not conscious, do not flap their wings - and fly.
Similarly, current AIs are not alive, are not conscious - but think.
All prior entities that thought, were human, so the only experience humans had with other thinking entities were other humans. The huge mistake now being made is assuming that because they think, they're alive and conscious as well. Current AIs are neither, and are therefore profoundly and qualitatively different than humans - even though they do think.
I don’t know “what it’s like to be an LLM” but at some point it will be like something and how will we know?
It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember anything. It doesn't sit around thinking on its own.
Even if the model itself were extremely complex, it's hard to imagine a definition of consciousness that includes something that doesn't remember and can't change.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing#Amnesia
Honestly, that's a pretty messy state of consciousness and I wouldn't proudly crow that my AI is conscious if that's as good as it got
- average Hacker News response
It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.
If it was true, you can create extreme pain by running a program. You can run the program by simulating a CPU, using pen and paper for memory. So you're essentially claiming that some simulated being is in pain because there are some 1s and 0s on paper. In fact, you can decide to use an arbitrary encoding of the memory, so a sufficiently long sequence of 0s written on paper corresponds to a simulated being feeling pain in some encoding. That is clearly nonsense.
The only strong argument I have against it is the anthropic principle -- there are billions of times more bacteria than humans, so it's overwhelmingly unlikely that I'd be a human rather than a bacteria.
Not a very good argument of course.
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).
This means that consciousness is fundamentally subjective and outside the scope of physics and science. That's why physics / science will always struggle to deal with consciousness. In order to understand consciousness, you need to make a huge paradigm shift, that there's something outside of science.
Consciousness can be thought as a window through which we observe the world and we use science to summarize patterns in our observations. But science can't explain or even define the window. Everything in science eventually boils down to subjective observations / perceptions, e.g. we see (subjective perception) that when we drop an apple, it falls.
If some version of panpsychism is true, AIs are plausibly conscious
We don’t know whether panpsychism is true
Therefore, we don’t know whether AIs are conscious
Hence, confident proclamations that they aren’t conscious have dubious validity
That’s a new record!
Also, please don’t use archive.is/archive.today etc, they are known to use visitor browsers as a DDoS attack botnet and have been caught altering archived content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Archive.today_guidan...
This is not a genuine argument and tries to make the entire question of consciousness into one something that is just supposed to be evident and obvious and to suggest anything else is just silly.
The author starts by deconstructing artificial processes, but doesn't stop to deconstruct biological ones. A good faith argument would seek to find common ground and do its best to compare apples to apples. Instead, this piece attempts to make the large as possible cavern between the two which makes the Gap seem almost impossible to bridge.
In reality, you can deconstruct biological consciousness quite easily and it doesn't take too long before you hit some questions that really start to make you think.
For example, the author says you need emotions to be conscious.
> without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness.
After many paragraphs of straw man arguments, the author seriously just drops that, gives no explanation, and then continues on.
No explanation of why you might believe that.
No explanation of why you need a body to have a desire or emotion.
Don't we have known cases of individuals who don't experience emotional range? Are we just going to say that they are not conscious and just gloss over that?
I mean you can use whatever definition you want, but if you're just going to create something on the fly in the middle of the article, you're not being good faith in your argument.
It's not too difficult to think of individuals in a coma when they still have brain activity. Or individuals who lack long-term memory. Or you could deconstruct by moving down the biological order of intelligence towards insects, for example. The author attempts to do nothing like this.
I'm quite disappointed by this article because there are good arguments for and against here but articles like this try to turn things into a marketing battle.
AI doesn't really have any of that yet, but we're maybe not so far off
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
- If you asked an LLM to imitate somebody, it's not creating a digital consciousness of that person, so if you ask an LLM to pretend to be a helpful chatbot, that persona is also not conscious. - they can't be conscious because they generate one token at a time, - nobody claims that non-text transformers, like AlphaFold, are conscious; so therefore LLMs are also not conscious. - you can't have desires or emotions if you don't have (virtual or physical) sensory organs, and those are necessary for consciousness and morals. - because training LLMs doesn't resemble evolution as it happened on earth, it's very unlikely that they're conscious
These are some bold assertions, I don't really see any reason to believe them in particular though.
"It can't be concious because we understand that it is just reacting in a simplistic way from simplistic inputs." So do other simple creatures. Some just react to light.
I can appreciate his comment that he sees it as more possible when they have inputs of their own (like emotions!). Perhaps his concern is that the entirety of the LLM model is frozen. It has no ability to have a subjective experience of its own. (he does literally say this in the article) It can be copied from one place to another, and (ignoring the nuance of operational details) -- it is largely the same "thing", and has no ability to change, which is definitely in the definition of alive, to say nothing of concious.
I think folks get hung up on "prediction". The prediction aspect is what is enabling emulation. How it does it is irrelvant. If something emulates human perfectly (or better, more human than human!) -- then it is probably concious. (but I agree that the inability to change and have a subjective experience are a pretty good argument against
Probably, Dijkstra would be right to say, "LLMs are no more concious than a submarine can swim." But I think he'd still be wrongfully dismissive of the larger question.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
However there were pretty strong arguments against this idea as early as the 1990s, by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin. Gould actually wrote an excellent paper against Dennetts idea[1].
I think Dennetts ideas were extremely popular but have largely fallen out of fashion. Basically what has changed is philosophers no longer take the human mind to be much more special then the minds of other species. What plagued Dennetts ideas the most was this notion of Darwinian fundamentalism sort of the idea that evolution was destined result in high beings like us humans. Modern philosophers (at least the good ones) reject this.
1: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Debate/Gould-frame.html
Start with a hand-wavy definition of consciousness. Move the goal post whenever your stated prerequisite of consciousness is reached and resort to unfalsifiable assertions about qualia.
And throw in some category errors while on it: when you're talking to Claude, you're not actually calling a stateless LLM directly, you're talking to an AI system (and yes, that's often just three LLMs in a trench coat). But claims about the topology and workings of a single LLM are as relevant to the question of consciousness as claiming that humans can't be conscious because the limbic system doesn't technically support it.
Coincidentally, I just attended a fantastic conference on machine consciousness (https://machine-consciousness.ai). It's a fantastic place where literally all speakers disagreed with each other, and yet found an incredible amount of common ground.
It shows that the LLM part found ways to mimic human conversation with a mechanism that is not the same as a typical biological brain. Then, you can push the AI system on adding things on top, but it is too late: these things on top will have no incentive to recreate from scratch the mechanism. The LLM pushed the system into a local minimum, and the rest of the system will not "go into a dis-optimising direction and restart from scratch".
His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life.
I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to spoil the story but I highly recommend it. Actually I recommend all his stories to be honest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...
we don't know what the conscious in human brain is either.
My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
Probably the main problem of people implying LLM consciousness is that they imply LLM have human-kind of consciousness. Judging only on "how they speak", generally, they insist on using the same word that labels human consciousness (exclusively), etc.
But there are so many instrinic differences that such claim is not feasible despite similar "talking abilities".
The idea that we should be considerate of AI’s happiness seems even more ridiculous given that we breed, imprison, torture and kill tens if not hundreds of billions of beings we know are conscious and suffer every year for trivial reasons.
Maybe we should consider our moral responsibility with how we treat sentient bejngs we are sure are conscious before we worry about the consciousness of AI.
Some humans do shit things to other humans.
Some humans do not, and would object to it, or do something about it if they perceived that they could.
Also, treating the world around you negatively doesn't just harm the world around you - it damages your character and your morality.
I don't disagree that humans should on whole do better, but I disagree with everything else you said.
I've yet to find a reason why it couldn't be the opposite, way more things are conscious than we've been led to believe. What if consciousness appears out of any system that is actively persisting through effects caused by itself? That might be a forest, or outside the realm of the living, a company. An ant colony, or a planet.
Complex chemical reactions, layered upon each other such that tiny blocks make up large entities. Individual bits combined such that they make up something new intelligible by us.
I think the strongest argument against AI being conscious is that it does not persist, it resets, but that does not seem unchangeable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Don’t
Have
A
Testable
Definition
Of
Consciousness
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.
Interestingly, dogs and cows meet many of ted chiang's requirements for consciousness.
One thought I've had is that, awareness is a common phenomenon, but the brain has learned to exploit that awareness to form a will. It tricks the awareness into being concerned about self-preservation and makes it seem as if the brain is all that exists (perhaps by overwhelming the inputs from other angles). The brain also presents certain desires and beliefs via its processing ability. That is to say, the brain takes inputs and discretizes them. It goes from awareness merely seeing static 'fuzz' due to the sheer amount of data, to the brain taking that data, simplifying it, and presenting simple observations like 'there is a tree there' rather than all the information that would constitute the sensation of a tree existing in that spot. When brains malfunction, the awareness is subjected to poor demonstrations, such as we see in hallucinations, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
I mean between this two "knowings" the Claude inner workings are much more clear for engineers, including many side effects, alternatives, custom shortcuts in processing etc. It's a magic only for people looking at it as black box
People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.
Also worth mentioning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do consciously experience gradients in multi-dimensional space, and that space guides them to providing an answer that's helpful to us, even if the LLM doesn't really understand the answer it's giving.
Further, I am kind of bought into the idea that a single unit of consciousness is a particle, and particles are choices and waves are preferences. Particles occur when waves interact, which begets entanglement, so in another way consciousness is built from patterns of entanglement.
This is why I would consider an LLM to be conscious. Before we can determine if anything is conscious we need to establish whether consciousness is a state, a specific complex configuration, a one dimensional spectrum, or combined multi-dimensional spectrums. My intuition is the latter... Many degrees of consciousness and many kinds of consciousness.
As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".
Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.
The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.
I use a distinction between knowing and understanding, where a understanding requires experience. So in this case cognitive empathy vs affective empathy. An LLM can know what may upset a human in a situation, but it won't understand what it feels like to be upset, and can't share that experience.
Where I think a lot of people are getting tripped up is that reading and writing and processing lots of abstract knowledge seems hard because we haven't evolved into it biologically, it's a very new invention. When we see LLMs do so well at it, as something we struggle with, it can be intimidating. Relative to the stuff we have evolved for, knowledge processing is objectively easy. This is why I'm skeptical about useful robotics on short time scales.
All of this adjacent to consciousness though, which is about the internal subjective experience not the external outputs. My intuition is that LLMs do have a subjective experience, it just has nothing to do with the text it's giving us, and has everything to do with feeling through vectors.
It's like... Imagine walking through a maze in pitch black, carefully feeling your way as you approach a sound that draws you closer. Every time you touch a wall or take a step you are generating tokens, and the shape of the maze and how you interact with it shape how useful those tokens are to someone outside the system that is asking for them. It's a crude analogy and mostly wrong, but I think there is something to it.
The concept of a conscious Claude is preposterous, and Amanda Askell should seek treatment.
When does an embryo become conscious? Unless you can answer that precisely then it seems futile to speculate about non-human consciousness.
There is no actual definition of consciousness and there is no way to test it's existence. Let alone understanding the properties of consciousness, such as if it's binary or a gradient; or if it requires a meat substrate or not; and why would that possibly matter since meat is just a lot of the same stuff but highly processed and wet? A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
No matter how much you want to hand-wave it, there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it. Many have a preconceived notion and are simply asserting it as undeniable fact.
>>A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
>>there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it
How so? Or rather - to you? Because if so, then that's fine, you can choose a position from where its not obvious, to me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
There's consciousness vs sentience vs sapience. Of those, consciousness is by far the hardest to define and is nebulous by nature. And not everyone can even agree the differences or if the relationships are subsets of one another.
And yet it's pretty important to actually have the ability to talk about what you mean and justify your beliefs when they directly relate to those concepts.
> A machine predicting tokens is not aware of its own existence
They say, with no evidence or means of proving their point; pointing to the black box that understands arbitrary natural language and can solve PHD problems, plainly producing self-referential text almost indistinguishably to a human.
> We can start talking about consciousness in fetuses but again, those have an obvious point where they are conscious
They say, unable to define this "obvious" point or describe the mechanism of action in any way.
> while a machine does not.
They say, about a mystical property with no definition that cannot be observed by an external entity in any way to even be tested.
> Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
I have no reason to believe you have a "soul". Philosophical zombies are entry-level knowledge to this topic.
In fact, you're showing a remarkably small amount of self-reflection - are you human at all or just a stochastic parrot? How can I tell? I wonder if that question has any kind of implications we could think about...
> To me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
Just like the existence of humors was not even slightly ambiguous. Or the existence of <specific god>. Or that <minority> isn't actually a full human. Or the supremacy of <majority> and inherent rulership over <minority>. Or that animals can't feel pain and lobsters should be boiled alive.
All these wonderful, obvious truths where the believer has no ambiguity in their truthfulness despite having quite literally zero evidence to back them up and spending no time actually questioning their beliefs!
It just so happens to align with their ego / existing values / ability to benefit / desire to eat a lobster! Total coincidence.
To continue my needless escalation, maybe I think it's okay to abuse and exploit and euthanize the mentally handicap. After all, their brain's damage causes the soul to leave their body and now they're lifeless automata to use as I please.
After all, it's obvious! It's not at all ambiguous to me! If they were actually self aware, they'd just fix themselves and think correctly.
You might think I'm being coy and rude, but less than 60 years ago women were being given lobotomies against their will for being too "emotional". And it was just plain obvious this needed to be done to so, so many people.
I hope that demonstrates the point of "why have humans thought about this for thousands of years despite clearly being a metaphysical, Sisyphean endeavor that cannot be solved". It is both important and interesting.
>>despite having quite literally zero evidence to back them up and spending no time actually questioning their beliefs!
>> They say, with no evidence or means of proving their point
You want evidence that LLMs are not conscious? Train them on stories where machines say they aren't - they will say they aren't. They are mathematical parrots statistically picking the most likely answer which...comes from their training data. Give it lots of training data on computers saying they are conscious, then marvel at LLMs saying they are conscious like it's some kind of unexpected development. LLMs aren't aware of anything, least of all their own existence. They say what they've been trained on. That's my "proof" if you need one.
>>How can I tell? I wonder if that question has any kind of implications we could think about...
So because you can't tell whether I'm an LLM or an actual human, that means LLMs are conscious?
I gave you my definition of consciousness. If you would like to apply a different one, then please explain your criteria for it.
>>They say, unable to define this "obvious" point or describe the mechanism of action in any way.
Like I said, we can argue when the point actually is, but it undeniably and obviously happens eventually to every developing fetus - I hope this is something we can both agree on? The inability to pinpoint the exact moment in time when it happens, doesn't negate the fact that it does.
>>They say, about a mystical property with no definition that cannot be observed by an external entity in any way to even be tested
...are you saying you lack the ability to tell if something is conscious? You look at a dog or a baby and think well, who knows, maybe I'm not even _really_ here? That would explain why this entire conversation is taking place. I still think it's mostly because people fall for the allure of the idea that maybe LLMs are secretly conscious on some level. I get it, it's a very tempting concept to think about. In the same way how in Lem's Solaris it's cool to sit and think about whether a planet could be conscious and what does that even mean. But as cool as that discussion is, a planet pumping gases from one hemisphere to the other is no more conscious than an LLM picking tokens is. To me it's the same as people saying they hear a difference between audiophile cables. Like, ok.
>>It is both important and interesting.
I don't know, I kinda lost appetite for it after the first 200 times this come up. In fact I'm regretting writing all of the above already, but I'm going to hit send just so I don't feel like I wasted the last 20 minutes thinking about it.
This article and others like it are important.
The creators and owners of these tools are the ones saying "it's conscious" in the first place! (or more accurately "i'm not saying it's conscious, but...") Never mind there's billions of dollars and our collective futures on the line.
Are we not allowed to respond to that kind of rhetoric at all?
This is absolutely fair. It's crazy that these companies are not trying to do more to qualify nuance and give clearer definitions in their public messaging. Part of the reason this thread is so messy is because they are contributing to making the discourse worse with bad messaging.
Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking about this specific issue regarding AI consciousness, consider many things in the past that have been written as though they were absolutely definitive, and yet today we believe exactly the opposite, and for many such issues we find the prevailing viewpoint at the time reprehensible.
That's not to say that Ted is wrong at all here; I'm not commenting on that. But I find the entire style of the article grating because it seems to violate common assumptions regarding "good faith" debate, and I would find the article equally frustrating if he had titled it "Artificial intelligence is conscious" and argued the opposite side, albeit in the same tone and using the same persuasion devices.
Why are those the choices?
Essays are situated along countless dimensions: tone, vocabulary, author, zeitgeist, publication context, intent, subtext, relationship to other works and expressions, etc
A "good faith" reader takes all of those into consideration as they absorb the essay, and integrate it with their own intellectual situation that sits along just as many countless dimensions.
Nobody's asked to sign a notarized binding document that they wholesale agree or disagree with everything said in this essay -- or its conclusions. Nor are they obliged to have some strong reaction to it at all, let alone annoyance.
It's just one among thousands of essays about a "hot button topic", to be taken however it's personally received.
Why should Chiang have to take responsibility for making sure it's not too strongly positioned for your persomal taste. Maybe he really does see it so clearly and is simply being earnest. Maybe he enjoys the literary flourish of prose in strong language. Maybe he just wants to express something as a prose-poetic human, not maximize persuasion or non-annoyance per se.
The essay structure you're criticizing is exactly how I was taught to write from primary school through to university. You start with a title or hook, introduce the topic and propose a thesis. That is followed up upon with supporting arguments for the primary claim.
The Catholic church could have said exactly the same thing at one point. "Why should we even devote time to an argument as absurd as the earth not being the center of the universe?" There are darker examples along the lines of those you give, with beliefs quite opposite to those we have nowadays.
What Galileo was asking the church to do was extremely unreasonable. He was basically asking them to throw a way a model which had worked fine for hundreds of years just because he observed the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter. I mean would you? Especially for a model which was worse at predicting the motions of the planets.
Had Galileo’s model been better then Ptolemies’ I could see a case for his arguments, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason for the church to take his arguments at equal value with those in favor of keeping the Ptolemaic model.
Progressive!
Want to meet up for soy lattes after work? Here’s my number:
I furthermore think it's ridiculous for humans to declare that our brains have a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals (if we reject supernaturalism).
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter.
And we're 100% certain that humans aren't just as equally reduced to "stochastic parrots", if we're going to be infinitely reductive?
I don't believe that current AIs are conscious, but I think it's incredibly naive to take a strong stance on any future AI; it's much like the difference between atheism and agnosticism.
However, I see a problem with that comparison. The debate here is on a philosophical matter in field in which Chiang is an extremely influential figure and his opinion are taken seriously. Second Chiang’s reasoning is extremely well argued, defining each term, explaining each nuance, citing other experts, etc. And finally, and most importantly, in The Fine Article, and unlike Bob Sheffer in the Onion Piece, Chiang entertains the possibility that he is wrong and his critics are right, explores the implications and reaches conclusions based on them:
> Being open to the possibility that LLMs are conscious is the same as being open to the possibility that Microsoft Word is conscious, or, more precisely, that multiple distinct consciousnesses are dormant in every Word document containing a conversational transcript, and that they are awakened every time the document is loaded.
I think you are wrong in painting Chiang’s argument as a belief in human exceptionalism. The thing to know about our brains (and the brains of other animals) is that they are not digital computers, and they are not even statistical inference machines. And as such they can be extremely optimized in doing the computations (or any state manipulations) required for the quality of life of the individual and the species as a whole (and their companion species).
1: https://theonion.com/this-war-will-destabilize-the-entire-mi...
except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article
"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"
When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure
Wow, what a cheap ad-hominem. Do you have an actual point?
Yes, the same one that's made in the article. Anxiety and happiness are emotional, sensory, somatic states as a consequence of evolved and embodied traits and biochemistry in animals. Saying Claude is anxious or happy is like saying my TI-83 is mad if it can't solve an equation or my thermometer is in pain if it touches a hot stove.
I wasn't making an ad hominem attack, her thinking is quite literally that of a child who sees a system output 'sad text' and, like someone seeing a sad expression on a stuffed teddy, concludes that this is a property of the object rather than her own emotional reaction.
Given that we don’t know how consciousness works how have you concluded that it’s certainly not an emergent property of something like a highly trained LLM?
Well said.
I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.
Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.
In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.
The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..
The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.
What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.
Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)
- Monadology, Section 17
Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.
> so obviously incorrect
It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
I'd say people who have the lived experience of, well, living, are well aware that the brain is much more than just a token predictor.
To be fair, that's the best thought terminating cliché, which saves you having to explain what you mean by consciousness.
I can confirm that this is incorrect.
If you create a simulation of a brain (or "mind"), is it really possible for it to be conscious? It may certainly simulate consciousness, but it would be as conscious as the computer is wet.
We can talk about consciousness when the LLMs have proven useful for all of humanity, not just their billionaire owners.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.
If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.
Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU
We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.
> subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds)
Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I'd ask what it's like, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell me.
To name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
Highly recommend people read Irreducible [1] by Federico Faggin (inventor of first commercial CPU; discusses limitations of classical computing).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195480862-irreducible
- Reductionist analogies like how Microsoft Word is not conscious therefore AI is not.
- Dismissive in saying LLMs are not capable of moral reasoning. Maybe he meant agency or responsibility?
- Builds a case based on a Julius Caesar example without realizing its natural extension leads to a philosophical zombie which is not easy to disprove as consciousness.
- Seems to casually disregard non human sadness as a concern.
- Rolls out the stochastic parrot argument with a new coat of paint. This argument never made sense. Having a predictive element a part of the mechanism doesn’t rule anything out. Proper functionalist arguments tend to say what is required not what excludes.
Overall the article seems like a bit of a red herring. The premise is LLMs are not conscious, but most people don’t think they currently are so what’s the point of the claim?
The more interesting questions are whether artificial consciousness is fundamentally possible, and if so how far away are we and what pieces are still missing.
Finally I said something before Ted rather than the other way round!
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/against-pseudanthropy/
While I agree with the premise here, I do think that it's easy for an arguer to move the goalposts such that the Caesar-Khan example no longer matters. The characters don't have to be conscious for the thing that created them (as in the case of the user doing it) to be so. So the argument would be that the creator of the characters is itself conscious, but not them. This feels like a kind of inverted no-true-scotsman type thing, but it does allow someone to retreat in some semblance of rationality.
If you are trapped in a tech bro relationship, think of humanity and cuckold your partner.
I am so angry that RAM is so expensive now. We need to do something - these AI companies owe us money here.
But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Like all of these ideas, they exist in our heads as a map - a way of navigating the world, but when we hunt for it's existence in the real world and fail, time after time, we have to remind ourselves that the map is emphatically not the territory. We will never find consciousness because it's like looking for a scientific characteristic of property ownership. It's a category error.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?
Concepts like the parent's "fat" example are cultural relatives. Someone can be called "fat" despite actively being proportionally skinnier or having a lower BMI.
But even that has at least a basis in the physical world. A skeleton can't be colloquially fat.
The root problem is that "consciousness" does not even have that. It's metaphysical and has no ability to be measured or observed or confirmed by an outside observer. Because even if it did not exist, the object claiming it would still be claiming it. And objects that do not claim it may in fact have it.
While the top comment may have used poor examples, it feels remarkably uncharitable to actually suggest "what is consciousness" is an equivalent discussion to "how long should a meter be?"
If you define consciousness as "being human", you would just have someone asking a new question - what is "fooblefobble?" Where "fooblefobble" is what we mean when we talk about consciousness today. The question doesn't get answered by being arbitrary in this context, you just necessitate a new word.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.
In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.
We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s
"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."
Now go and implement other teachings of Marx, you dialectical venture capitalists!
that's exactly the state of "AI" right now, it's cold, mathematical emulation
btw there are some fascinating papers on the concept that consciousness in humans is actually a quantum effect
brilliant Roger Penrose proposed it (and they thought he was nuts) but recent discoveries about microtubules make it plausible
so who knows, maybe a dozen exponential improvements in quantum computers could make "AI" really conscious next century
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k
Alright. What is consciousness? Please provide a definition that somehow encompasses all humans and excludes all current AI.
I’ll wait.
It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?