https://janellecshane.substack.com/p/okay-gpt-3-candy-hearts
Humans are frequently monumental idiots. The human language and inference model produces nonsensical, dangerous, and stupid results with alarming frequency.
(not to say I believe language models are sentient, but... you need something more than 'sometimes they spout made up BS' to refute the claim, because it turns out that is not particularly indicative of sentience.)
if anything, this proves that candy hearts should be larger, and less disgusting
I like to think of consciousness as whatever process happens to integrate various disparate sources of information into some cohesive "picture" or experience. That's clearly something that happens, and we can prove that through observing things like how the brain will sync up vision and sound even though sound is always inherently delayed relative to light from the same source. Or take some psychedelics and see the process doing strange things.
Sentience I guess I would call awareness of self or something along those lines.
As to your query, I've certainly met people who seemed incapable of commonplace logic, yet certainly seemed to be just as conscious and sentient as me. And no, I don't believe these language models are sentient. And I doubt their "neural anatomy" is complex enough for the way I imagine consciousness as some sort of global synchronisation between subnets.
But this is all very hand-wavy. Thanks, philosophy. I mean how do we even discuss these things? These terms seemingly have a different meaning to every person I meet. It's just frustrating...
It struck me that the intelligence theories of reinforcement learning have been encountering this same paradigm of self-simulation being necessary. A Tesla for example when it has to go down a street that also has another car needs to do a rollout not just for itself but the other car in order to actuate such that it can move in this motor control task. Not being able to model both agents makes it really trick to do planning. These tree search married to modeling problems seems to show up all over the place in the top performing architectures.
For this reason I'm really suspect of the language model view of consciousness; it doesn't seem plausible. Or at least, I'm a little skeptical. In theory for a significantly large enough language model I don't see why you couldn't use a "loop unrolling" argument to posit that for some subset of the network there is an analogous computation to what my best guess about what consciousness is might look like. Worse for me is that when I strong man the argument I run into things like "the training task involves predicting the output of conscious entities and so a truly generalizing agent would be directed to learn just that unrolled loop". I'm not saying I think the language models are conscious, but I do see how reasonable people can arrive at those views.
We probably need to write down a very hard definition of consciousness even if its wrong - or use terms that are better defined - because the ambiguity in the realm of things we don't fully understand makes this an annoying "words" problem rather than a concrete "facts" problem.
Is a self driving car aware of itself? Surely within its logic it represents itself as a vehicle, while also being able to logically represent other vehicles on the road. Its logic accounts for there being similarities (they both obey the same laws of physics and such) and differences (its logic controls its own behavior but not that of other vehicles). So it has a meaningful and useful concept of "self". All of this is required for it to be able to function.
What if some future iteration of a self driving car's vision system allows it to glean useful information from reflections, such as off of store windows? If it correctly can identify a reflection of itself as being itself... well then it has passed the mirror test. But that is a pretty silly thing to assign too much meaning to.
I just don't see "awareness of self" as being meaningful. It doesn't narrow down the definition at all.
I'm also a fan of ants. They have agriculture. They farm in their underground cities! They keep livestock too; insect livestock, but still! They give them medicines when they get sick, specially cultivated fungus for example. They are so cool.
Neosocial insects like ants are amazing indeed. I often wonder what kind of "mind" an anthill has. Hurts just to think about it.
And, to quote Oliver Sachs: "I'm not sure about octopuses..."
I find it very fun to think about and have been called wierd for taking about ants before with childlike excitement.
The AntsCanada channel is fun for watching ecosystems interact with each other. So fascinating. :)
I thought this quote was about the octopus that correctly predicted the outcome of games in a FIFA world cup. But seems it was something else?
It's a fascinating discussion with a lot of my favourite mid-late 20th century thinkers. It's up on youtube, lookup any of the names involved with "roundtable discussion". It's over 3 hours long though.
Anyway, Oliver was talking about what kind of mind he imagined various animals having. And that was most of what he had to say on octopuses.
It's a bit of a sad watch too because all the participants except Dennet and Sheldrake are dead now.
And yet, most would agree that a cat can feel pain, but a machine can't. I think most people would object if the Google engineer said "I think this AI is every bit as sentient as a cat." They'd still say he's crazy.
I also wonder what would happen if that particular AI actually had logic to "observe its own thought processes and integrate them back into consciousness". Would we then just spin on the semantics, such as by arguing that this isn't really "observing" and it certainly isn't "consciousness"? (how can you define words like "consciousness" without using words or concepts like "sentience", bringing us back to square one?)
So I don't think meta-cognition is the answer either.
I do agree that the terminology is unfortunately convoluted. The main term is “consciousness,” which does often seem unclear to me.
The basic mystery is just the ability to experience/feel, and is an undeniable part of life, for humans and at least some animals.
why would
Tl;dw: it wouldn’t. Some poor guys do way worse than GPT-3.
What gp-like comments usually mean is sentience is being adult, healthy, reasonable and intelligent. Idk where this urge comes from, maybe we have a deep biological fear of being unlike others (not emo-style, but uncanny different) or meeting one of these.
Logic isn't treated as the CS logic per se, but as a high level concept although at a fundamental level they will be compositional of the mathematical logic rules. That is still an ongoing goal - a unification of "world models" which can be modeled and explained