It seems likely to me that some arrangement of nerves is possible that's comparably complex to ours, but does not produce consciousness. (I dunno, maybe some organism with much more complex sensory organs than ours that devotes so much complexity budget to that that it only has enough left to devote to general cognition to give it the intelligence of a mushroom, who knows). In other words: I suspect complexity is necessary but not sufficient for consciousness to occur. I don't think that takes away from your suggestion that consciousness in AI systems is _possible_, but I don't think it's the case that it's an inevitable outcome if only we can make our systems sufficiently complex. There's probably something about the specific structure of the complex thing we'll need to master as well.
That's a very good argument, and I completely agree.
As much as it's faulty logic to reduce AI to soulless machinery because we know how it works, it's also faulty logic to assume that scaling to more and more complex models will in itself create consciousness. At the very least, some mechanism of continuous self-modification is necessary, so current fixed-point neural networks most likely will never be conscious.
If one built an AGI that was at the intelligence level of say, a rat or mouse. How would one go about proving it had the same capacity for consciousness as that rat or mouse?
When AI passes all possible tests that could distinguish it from a rat, the question becomes whether or not consciousness is necessary for all those rat-like capabilities we tested for. And if not, then why rats have consciousness?
I personally don't like unfinished stories, so I believe it is necessary - that consciousness is just a side-effect of matter performing some complex computation. It wraps the theory up nicely with a little bow on the top.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness#Cambridge...
(Don't say transistors, because you know these are completely unrelated and mere coincidence)
For the purposes of this discussion, "consciousness" per se is mostly irrelevant. Sentience is still important but has less to do with intelligence than with experience (though sentience is still very much involved in acts of reasoning).
There are different kinds of reasoning, and those are probably more relevant to the discussion at hand re intelligence: associative, deductive, inductive, abductive, etc.
In fact almost any game is such a measure, so given a spread of games of varying complexity you can get an idea of relative levels of consciousness all the way down to rats if not lower.
For instance, it was shown that GPT can play chess. I also just tried it on a tactical Dota question (not actual control), and that worked too.
IQ is not a reasonable metric for human intelligence.
The matter of fact is that it is a metric of human intelligence and of all known metrics of human intelligence it is one of the best. Considering you still gauge people on intelligence with something you came up internally that you consider reasonable, and that whatever is that that you use internally is almost certainly worse than IQ, I'd say you're full of shit and/or lack logic :)
It is a reasonable measure of intelligent-adjacent things, such as how good you are at taking tests. An IQ score does correlate pretty well with how well you'll do in college. But to say that it's measuring "intelligence" in any sort of strong way is misleading.
There are two questions:
Is it a measure? Undoubtedly.
Is it reasonable? Well, how'd you define reasonable? Would you say that if A is reasonable for something, and B is better than A for the same thing, then from "A is reasonable" follows "B is reasonable"? I would. So if you can claim a person to be a fool and another person to be smart based on some interaction and consider both statements to be reasonable, and if you concede that IQ would better (on average) predict that kind of stuff than you, therefore you should consider IQ a reasonable metric of intelligence. (But you don't, so I suspect you're not good at logical reasoning)
Perhaps I'm not, but at least I'm good enough at it to be able to have a discussion without resorting to insulting the person I'm talking with.
Everyone is stupid at times, question is if we are willing to learn from mistakes.
Like denying many years of research with good predictive qualities, which you could probably also see personally, should have made you suspect about your point of view.
Generally, the "overly emotional" push-back from the other party after one violates social norms is a cue to accomplish two things:
1) Alert others nearby that this was in fact a violation of social norms, and prepare them to potentially side against the violator.
2) Check to see if the offending party is generally in control of their social behavior, and this was just a transient "slip-up", or if the offending party is stuck in their anti-social modes and unable to recover negative social interactions. This acts to provide a stronger signal both to the offended party as well as to others nearby.
For the record, this is a topic I'm pretty well-versed in, and I am aware of the research. I'm also aware (as you should be) that there's a great deal of debate about what IQ tests measure and don't measure.
Your argument (ignoring the personal attacks) is not unreasonable. Neither is mine. This is not a settled matter, and is one where reasonable people can and do disagree. Including the experts in the field.
G-factor as a concept exists but can only be approximated by standard tests or equivalent.
IQ tests are imperfect and flawed, but it's the closest approximation to G factor we have.
From someone who has the opposite view, that human consciousness did not arise from an evolutionary process, but was created by God -- I believe we will never fully create an artificial consciousness.
I think a further assumption is that the human mind is a deterministic machine. If we could freeze whatever entropy is involved with human behavior, just like the seed of a Minecraft world, we could get the same result, and perhaps even control human behavior.
I don't think consciousness is deterministic like that. I have some things I can point to for justification, but much more largely, there are some strange implications that arise from "we're all dancing to our DNA".
Anyways.
I think determinism is another debate entirely, and I believe most scientists consider the universe not deterministic but instead probabilistic, but honestly the distinction doesn't seem that important to me for this discussion.
Further (and non-scientifically), if we can never quite crack an observably sentient AI, I'd probably start coming round more to the idea that maybe humans were created by a god. However, at this point, it seems like we're starting to climb up the sentience ladder without any obvious impassable rungs so far.
But all this to me is a cheat. We've already built the robot, and the control systems, and feedback mechanisms, and placed a goal on the end result for it to work towards.
I think the external constraints we put on the system mean that the creation will never surpass the creator. Oh, the mechanical muscles will be stronger and faster to the point we can get robot ballet. But it will still be bounded by the limits of our imagination and capabilities.
When it comes to LLMs, I'm sure it will create fascinating stories that are loved more than Tolkien. But the stories will still be limited to the bounds of our own thought.
If you ever feel like discussing religion, my Twitter DMs are open!
It's impossible to draw such a sharp line, because the boundaries of consciousness are extremely fuzzy. We should expect the same fuzzyness of AI and this period will likely last many generations of AI.
At what point do you draw the line between a great player and a good one?
Clearly there are skills and aptitudes involved, but it ultimately comes down to the vagaries of fate. Consciousness, like tennis prowess, is
bestowed / earned / fought for / learned
as much as it is innate.
I’m also a bit of a hippy in that I’m not sure I believe in intellectual property in this way. I am an old free software in the rms sense guy (http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...). I believe in trademark and copyright protection to the extent artists and authors and creators can monetize their work without plagiarism or worse unrewarded reproduction. But I also think remixing music, publishing excerpts, quoting, indexing, and, yes, training models in aggregate on otherwise trademark and copyrighted material is fair use.
I know these models can produce stuff that would violate fair use, however the use of that production from the model is what is the violation not that the model can violate fair use. Photocopiers can also violate fair use in similar ways if done in a way that violates fair use.
An issue people bring up is the model can’t attribute material produced to a copyright or license. That’s fair, and I think for code licensing it is the thorniest. But that isn’t the model itself that’s in violation. It’s the use of its output without any attempt to verify whether it’s encumbered or not. That to my mind is a second order problem that companies offering code authoring products need to tackle, and is frankly a simple information retrieval problem.
Although it also has wide implications for ethics - the concept of human rights relies on empathy. And if AI can experience the world like a human does, and feel pleasure and pain, then either AI deserves rights, or humans don't. Or we just decide that only humans have rights because we are humans and we say so, in which case we're no better than Nazis.
1) We aren't going to be the ones seeing that distinction or labeling it, the greater intelligence is
2) So the word "sentient" won't need to be changed; a new term will need to be created, but we won't really understand what it means
But the question or what consists sentience is still interesting. I personally believe that free will is an illusion, since all my actions are determined by A) my environment, the set or things I can physically do, and B) my internal state, mood, the information I've perceived and value judgements that stem from them, whether conscious or subconscious.
It is actually not that scary, to me. It's much more liberating - it gives me a certain feeling or calmness, in an amor fati kind or way. Things are as they are, and they cannot be any other way. There is nobody that will judge me outside of this world, since I am merely a small part of it. All my meaningful existence is here, and the concept of a soul is merely a spooky story.
Anything presenting such a ridiculous conclusion is so wrong as to not be taken seriously. The only thing that is for certain in this life is that we are sentient, everything else is derived from that. Same with things proposing we don't have freewill, we do.
Each hemisphere of our brain is its own intelligence, but only one hemisphere (for 95% of humans the left hemisphere) controls speech. This only became apparent in some seizure patients during the 21st century when doctors might sever the corpus callosum (the information highway between the two hemisphere) creating "split-brain patients". Interesting content on YouTube if you look up split-brain experiments. What was most chilling to me was that when instructions were presented to the non-vocal hemisphere (by showing only one eye) and the patient followed the instructions they couldn't tell you the real reason why. They would come up with plausible-sounding nonsense the way ChatGPT hallucinates.
So if we've established that the subconscious mind makes decisions, and that our mind is really two intelligences with the mute one subject to the one that understands language. People can logically understand these statements and still act in experiments as if neither are true.
I didn't get into the question of sentience because what most people mean is sapience. Of course we can feel things and perceive them. Plants do that too. Intelligence derived from knowledge and wisdom is a higher bar and still we have plenty of examples in the animal kingdom. If you want to argue that we're sapient, you also have to make the point that we have two entities in our skull responsible for that sapience that disagree with one another, and the only thing giving us the illusion of unity is that we tend to think in linguistic terms and only half our hardware can translate what that actually means.
For reference, a cat has ~200 million neurons in its brain - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_intelligence
Perhaps we have dozens of intelligences, with varying degrees of cognition? What is actually happening when the amygdala takes over the nervous system to avoid a car accident before you are aware what is happening? What is really going on with Tourette syndrome?
Might the human gut have its own hopes and dreams?
No, you do not. This is a widely parroted "fact" that is not a fact at all. So you move your arm before we can record you thinking about, this proves nothing other than both are being triggered by a lower level reaction. Humans are sentient, no one is having a serious debate otherwise because the benchmark of being sentient is humanity not because they're "uncomfortable with this fact."
Eh, that's one possible interpretation of that experiment. Which asks people to rate when they feel like they have done a task and then show that the MRI scan shows brain activity happening before that.
However, we also know that our brain messes with the temporal ordering of events all the time. Apparently when you hear sounds is messed with (up to a point) to match when the event appears to be happening so that things sync up. Also if you tap your knee your brain messes with that experience to make it sync up because otherwise you get a gap due to the speed at which nerves transmit data.
So an alternative interpretation is that we're consciously making a decision that we perceive at happening later than it actually does because our brain is trying to provide us with a lag free experience.
I wouldn't say that means most of my consciousness in such a state is subconscious, or that failing to reach a useful result means there wasn't "aware" computation.
An anology would be two co-processors, where one is responsible for IO. Your idea of two entities simply doesn't apply if the interconnect is intact. Unity isn't an illusion just because the entire inner process isn't fully shared across.
And isn't the part about the subconscious making decisions and the conscious merely catching on or rationalizing mostly about basic ones that _by definition_ don't require much thought?
I disagree if you are taking your argument to the conclusion that we do not have free will.
And sure a machine can "choose" to ignore its inputs, chatgpt does it all the time depending on the prompt and rng.
If you spot the dichotomy above, you'll come to see that the affordance of choice can either be granted both to machines and humans, or none at all.
I act like you act, I do what you do
But I don’t know, what it’s like to be you
What consciousness is, I ain’t got a clue
I got the zombie blues
I reject this assumption. We have no reason to assume cells aren't aware beings and that a sense of being isn't fundamental to at least all life.
That path would lead to a conclusion that all matter is, in some way, conscious. I don't disagree, but I find that such definition of consciousness diverges from what we usually mean by it - a walking, talking being that has thoughts and can communicate them to us, or something.
No, not without serious proof.
(Can I even prove that I'm myself conscious?)
More of an aside, but we are way way way way below the technological level necessary to construct a machine of the same complexity as a self-replicating self-organizing single-cell organism. Nano scale is nano. We're just barely figuring out how to consistently and accurately modify several nucleotides at once, and not even by creating our own tools but by clumsily repurposing pre-existing bacterial tools we happened to stumble across.
Though in principle, it's still the same. Long age and randomness of the universe have allowed it to perform a quite exhaustive brute-force search of all possible configurations of atoms, eventually stumbling upon a self-replicating configuration from which we have evolved, but humans could theoretically find one from scratch too, it would just take too much time, like reversing a cryptographic hash.
1. You have no experiences.
2. You have experiences without awareness of what they represent.
3. You are aware of things without being aware of self-as-thing.
4. You are aware of self-as-thing in the midst of other things.
We have no reason to assume cells aren't aware, a sense bolstered by observational studies of how they respond to chemical gradients, etc., but it is quite a leap to get from "recognizing food" to "recognizing the control I have over my environment and effecting changes beneficial to some internally generated goal".
You'll speak with a Christian and he'll say that even a very early fetus is conscious. Speak with other people, and it isn't. Some vegans say animals are conscious. Others don't. It's possible there's something real behind all of those people's definition of consciousness, and the real problem isn't that some are right and some are wrong.
They just disagree because it means different things for them, they just happen to be using the same word. The meaning of "consciousness" is more of a reflection of the values of the speaker than something real.
I build robots as a hobby. My robots are aware of their their environment and their place in it. In that sense, they're "self-aware" but nobody would argue they're conscious.
The underlying problem is that we have all these words that imply a precision that doesn't exist. All we can say for certain is that consciousness and self-awareness are effects we experience. Beyond that, all bets are off. We can't even really say what these things actually are.
I would extend your "some vegans" to "most everybody" - who seriously thinks complex animals are unconscious automatons? And how would that even work? Tiny few-celled organisms surely aren't and where exactly the line goes we don't know, and like you say it depends on how the word is defined and used, but isn't "stimuli causes not just reaction, but qualia" pretty standard?
But you are correct, eventually we will wrap these thinking machines into some sort of other machine. A machine that can observe the thoughts it produces with the thinking machine inside of it.
I talk about a lot of this here: https://leroy.works/articles/a-critique-of-alan-turings-conc...
Of course ChatGPT was designed and trained to do that. But then we're also designed (by evolutionary forces) and trained (by parents and teachers) to do what we do.
These machines, in our lifetime, as they are right now, cannot choose their thoughts. Literally, I want you to think of these machines as programs on the command line, because that's exactly what they are. You invoke them like this: ./chatgpt "Hello, what is 2+2?". You control what it thinks about because when it isn't thinking, it is inactive, because it hasn't been ran. We control these machines, literally, and thus control what they think including the "level" at which they think -- their intelligence.
My point is they already have at least chosen the effective thought "I'm waiting for a command". After that they choose their thoughts based on what text they receive. Whether or not you allow those as thoughts is up to you, but that classification is no more arbitrary than just what in yourself you call thoughts.
But without a clear, unbiased definition for what a "thought" is, any discussion comparing them is hopeless.
Your argument about the human is also missing something: a human can ignore whatever you say to them, but these thinking machines cannot. You say that these machines have already chosen the choice to even think, but they literally cannot choose to _not_ think about what you give them. But a human can ignore whatever you say and not respond to you.
You should read the article I posted, I've already discussed these arguments.
If machines aren't intelligent because they are so obedient, is that really a path you want to follow when applied to humans? E.g., well-trained soldiers, strict religious practitioners, etc.
And if a machine should develop a loose connection and therefore sometimes not obey a command and just go its own way, does that now make it intelligent? You see the problem.
And yes, I want to walk that path because I believe that intelligence is not static and everyone can grow.
can YOU? Isn't that just electricity following the laws of physics?
I think a lot of people in the west would strongly, strongly benefit with getting more acquainted with it. I will add a warning though, it's not always a pretty journey.
I term it the 'Cardinality Barrier', and thus sleep easily through this latest AI 'bloom'.
Then we can see that humans are conscious of many things. Cats are conscious of fewer things, but still build a complex model of the world. Sunflowers are conscious of the sun, but probably not much else. Rocks are not conscious of anything.
So it's not that a single-celled organism is not conscious and somewhere, a flip got switched and now humans are conscious. There's just been an ever-increasing ability to model the world as one follows human evolution.
This is also true of the LLMs that are getting built. They're impressively conscious of the world as experienced by humans, since they experience the world through recorded human communications. I would say that GPT-4 is conscious of e.g. what a cat is. Its consciousness of what a cat is came to it differently than humans, since it has no hands with which to pet one, but has an idea of what a cat is nevertheless.
There's the faulty assumption. We assume that high-intensity human consciousness is the only kind, despite abundant animal evidence to the contrary. The more reasonable assumption is that dead matter is also conscious, below a currently detectable threshold.
I'd like to propose a counterargument:
Assumptions: Theory of evolution is true. The primordial single-cell organism from which we all evolved was not conscious, but rather just a biological machine. Humans are conscious.
Deduction: Somewhere along the line between the primordial single-cell organism and a human being, there was a transition from non-consciousness to consciousness, and the only factor in that transition was the complexity of the nervous system.
Conclusion: Consciousness (or, "real" intelligence) arises from the complexity of a machine. AI can, in principle, become conscious.
Yes, we know how AI works, because we built it. But why would that make consciousness arising from a sufficiently-complex statistical model impossible?