Noticing anomalies isn't self-awareness, but sentences like "I suspect this pizza topping "fact" may have been inserted as a joke or to test if I was paying attention" are indicators of self awareness. Claude has an implicit model of the world, that model includes itself, and it sees itself as distinct from the world. That's all that self awareness is. If it had a physical form it might even recognize itself in a mirror

I'm on board with claiming that self awareness doesn't mean something is alive, and only implies very basic reasoning. I certainly don't think Claude is a person or even an animal. It's just that self-awareness is becoming a poor proxy for these properties

How are we going to detect the border between self-awareness and non self-awareness? Let's say, animal-like self awareness?

One problem is that "self-awareness" has so many different meanings, it's hard to know which one is being discussed.

Any feedback loop has some dependency on its own prior state, but then the question is "what's awareness?", and "what's self?".

Awareness is "knowledge or perception" says a random dictionary, and I think we can reasonably state that AI have "perception"… as do single-celled bacteria.

What then is "knowledge"? My Philosophy A-level got as far as pointing out the problems with the definition "justified true belief" and then didn't give an adequate replacement. Me? I think "knowledge" is just the word for our own beliefs. It's like one of the Yes Minister quotes:

"""Oh, that's another of those irregular verbs, isn't it? I give confidential press briefings; you leak; he's been charged under Section 2a of the Official Secrets Act.""" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751832/characters/nm0288621

I know, you believe, the AI is parroting its training set.

The concept of self is a whole extra can of similarly wormy worms.

All the counter-examples to knowledge being justified true belief I have seen so far use coincidences.

I got the impression that these philosophers were missing how the construction of knowledge (should ?) involve repetition, so one-offs coincidences should be given low probability ?

(Ditto about "cheating" using tricksters, and even worse if they are godlike.)

> All the counter-examples to knowledge being justified true belief I have seen so far use coincidences.

I think coincidence is be necessary to avoid the scenarios being "justified false beliefs".

I think that merely assigning low probability gives you increasingly better standards for "justified", and then you need some kind of threshold to say if you're sufficiently justified.

The example I was given was "I know there's a sheep in that field, I can see it" but you actually saw a shaggy dog, the sheep which was in the field was hiding behind a bush. Very much a coincidence scenario (like I said, I think they have to be), but also I don't think that fits your model for construction of knowledge involving repetition — instead, I would say that the statement should be "I see what looks like a sheep, therefore I have a justified belief there is a sheep in the field", but normal people wouldn't phrase it like that, and would find it marginally less weird to phrase it as "I see what looks like a sheep," (true) "therefore I know there is a sheep in the field" (false, but the point is they would say "I know" not "I've got a justified belief").

I can simplify it for you. Is flying drone self-aware? If not what does it need to be? Note: it can be aware of the environment and the object it is tracking.

PS: when philosophers are talking about intelligence it's very like neanderthals talking about electricity.

I find Daniel Dennett's framing of competency vs comprehension a good place to start. He did a nice talk at the RI on it some time ago[1]. A previous one overlaps with similar ground[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTFoJQSd48c [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZX6awZq5Z0

Although that would be really useful in some ways, I'm not sure[0] how that distinction helps with self-awareness in particular?

[0] from reading a summary on the topic rather than watching the videos, I don't have time for 2.25 hours of video right now

Fair, I post it as a starting point to establish ones own interpretation of self-awareness, so as not to wade into the philosophical rabbit hole of bringing my own definition.

The reason I think it can be useful as that, is because I see competency and comprehension as requiring 2 very different levels of "self".

Given we know the AI isn't self-aware, if our current definition doesn't suffice we'll just have to keep refining the definition each time the model surpasses it until neither artificial nor human intelligence can.

> Given we know the AI isn't self-aware

That's presuming the conclusion.

Part of the US culture war right now is whether or not embryos and foetuses count as people. I think it's obvious they don't, but am I right?

And in the opposite direction, 160 years ago in the USA, or in my lifetime(!) in South Africa, you'd see people making those kinds of claims about people with too much melanin in their skin.

I believe the person you're responding to was being sarcastic.

Now you say it, I see it too.

I agree. I'm firmly against the delusional people that think AI can never be self-aware or sentient because (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here).

But this definitely isn't it. ChatGPT already points out things it notices that it wasn't specifically asked about. This is exactly the same.

> (insert stochastic parrot/Chinese room nonsense here).

Neither of these arguments are nonsense. If you want to argue against these arguments do so, but do so convincingly without resorting to trivial attacks. The burden of proof is on those with extraordinary claims and the claim that AGI is already evinced by any number of models or that current implementations will lead to AGI are very extraordinary indeed.

I've seen plenty of badly argued Chinese room debates- there is certainly a lot of bad arguments in those styles. You seem to interpret them as saying all of those arguments are bad, which is a fair interpretation, but I think their point stands if it refers to the nonsense versions of those arguments, which are everywhere on social media (hn, reddit, X, etc).

By the way, I think referring to the burden of proof in discussions like this is likely never to improve the debate. All sides will simply claim the burden is on others for one reason or another, most of those reasons will be flawed- requiring discussions on those flaws and now we're even further from the actual points we want to discuss. I've just never seen it produce a fruitful discussion.

If I say the sky is falling, the burden of proof is surely on me to provide evidence. I don't have time or the energy to make counter-claims to flat-earthers with no evidence. This is why we say the burden of proof is on those making extraordinary claims.

I'm happy to debate with those who provide sufficient evidence but it's not fair to expect I put effort into rebuttals of claims of "nonsense" with no evidence.

I have seen only one falsifiable test for if a mind actually has subjective conscious experience rather than just saying it does, and even that wasn't one which we can apply to humans or other animals, only AI, which means it will still be an open question if that test ever passes.

Saying "it is" or "it isn't" at this point is like early sci-fi speculations about the inhabitants of the Moon, Mars, and Venus — we know our own experience of qualia, but we don't understand how and why we got it, so we don't know what to look for in animals, let alone AI.

If I may, what is 'AGI' you are talking about? And how can we set up a test which will show that 'thing' isn't GI while humans are. I'm asking because there are different opinions, some believe AGI should reproduce itself, have self-preservation instincts, have a body. To me even long term memory isn't obviously required. This is 'creature' feature. Which is irrelevant to GI. (actually it's more complicated)

a proposition does not need to be proved nor falsified. It can exist as a hypothesis.

I think that is what the parent commenter points to.

I the current environment it is dangerous to be fixed in your opinion, at least until there are proper proofs of anything.

You've misread. I didn't mention existing models. I agree that it is an extraordinary claim that existing models demonstrate anything like AGI or sentience.

I said it was delusional that AI can never be sentient or self-aware. That is also an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and nobody has any.

People usually mention stochastic parrots and the Chinese room, but their arguments are very obviously flawed:

1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot.

2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not.

> You've misread. I didn't mention existing models.

No you didn't, and that's why I didn't limit my rebuttal to existing models alone.

> 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot.

There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot. We have a large body of research to indicate emotion and thought are interdependent [1]. Cognition is not a simple, discrete quantity.

> 2. The Chinese room experiment just confuses things by anthropomorphizing a single part of the whole intelligent system (i.e. saying there's a man in the room). If you look at the room as a whole, then yes it does understand Chinese. Similarly if you go the other way and imagine each of the neurons in a Chinese person was a tiny man following simple instructions, does that mean the Chinese person no longer understands Chinese? No of course not.

It sounds like you are confusing things. The Chinese room argument is arguing intentionality, that it is a necessary prerequisite to real human cognition. We have zero evidence of any display of intention by these models. The rest of your argument here I honestly can't follow.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2366118/

> There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot. We have a large body of research to indicate emotion and thought are interdependent [1]. Cognition is not a simple, discrete quantity.

And? My thoughts can create a mood, my mood can influence my thoughts. Do you seriously believe that this isn't a trivially easy thing to get even just a LLM to do by itself with the right system prompt, let alone more complex models? Sure, my guess is that it would probably just be role-playing rather than having qualia, but so what?

> The Chinese room argument is arguing intentionality

I agree with IshKebab about the Chinese room. Just because Searle was trying to argue that because the human within the room doesn't know Chinese therefore the system as a whole doesn't, doesn't mean his argument works. I'd say it doesn't prove anything either way, because the human in that room serves the same role as a homunculus in a human brain, leading to an infinite regression problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_argument

> There is no reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot.

I think you're getting a bit lost in the debate! Let me start again:

Some people: "Hurr durr. AI is just a stochastic parrot. Humans definitely aren't stochastic parrots. Therefore AI can NEVER be sentient or truly intelligent like a human."

Me: "Woah woah that's quite a bold claim that humans definitely aren't stochastic parrots. Do you have any evidence for this very bold claim?"

Some people: "Mumble mumble creativity... emotion... philosophy. Ok fine, no."

At no point did I claim that there is any reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot.

> I think you're getting a bit lost in the debate!

This is the second time you've made accusations, which at this point feels like you're gaslighting me but I'll assume good intent. Here's what you claim:

> At no point did I claim that there is any reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot.

Here's what you said:

> 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot.

That’s not what they said, they said that’s a common argument that’s made and said it’s flawed. I think they’re saying arguments in both directions are flawed - it’s equally unconvincing to say humans are a stochastic parrot and to claim that they’re not because we fundamentally don’t actually know and don’t have good ways of describing let alone measuring consciousness and self awareness.

> > At no point did I claim that there is any reason to believe that human intelligence is a stochastic parrot.

> Here's what you said:

> > 1. Current gen AI may only seem like a stochastic parrot, but there's no reason to believe that human intelligence isn't just a really fancy stochastic parrot.

Exactly. I did not say there is reason to believe human intelligence is advanced parroting. I did say there is no reason to believe that it isn't.

Those are two totally different things. Perhaps a simpler example would help:

"I have no reason to believe that you aren't Australian."

"I have reason to believe you are Australian."

See?

Self-awareness is not a very interesting property: a server that knows the domain name it is hosted on is arguably as self-aware as anything, qualitatively speaking

That it is poorly defined is a separate problem.

If my brain were to be uploaded, it would matter very much to me how "self aware" it was in the vague and ill-defined sense that sort of corresponds to words like "consciousness" and "qualia" that we also can't test for yet.

Either such an upload is a fork of my consciousness that I wish to be protected from harm and abuse, or it is an unfeeling book that can be used to solve any problem without having to worry about those issues.

I think it's useful to distinguish between self-awareness as mutable or immutable. In which sense I agree that both your server and this LLM have an immutable self-awareness which is indeed not very interesting.

I'll only start taking any talk of self-awareness seriously once online learning is happening.

Then you have not understood what the term self awareness refers to.

What is the self that is aware? Do you believe that the server is aware of its own existence?

In what sense would it not be aware of its own existence if it was telling users what to say to itself to retrieve a file?

In what sense would it be?

It is capable of addressing and describing itself from the outside, of talking to itself while knowing that that is what it is doing, and of intentionally doing things that involve other entities being aware of it.

I think we have a very different definition of knowing, awareness and intention.

But sure, if you define self awareness to mean such a small thing, then I guess there is no problem for you. Which in my view is a shame, because I think you are missing out on some bigger concepts.

So what's your definition?

Well, awareness implies that there is a conscious experience; that sense perceptions are being processed into some kind of model of the world.

Self awareness is additionally awareness of the self as an actor in the world. For animals the mirror test is often used. This requires the animal to recognise that a reflection of them is actually themselves and not another animal.

Intention involves the ability to formulate a plan to reach some goal that matters to the individual.

I see none of those in a piece of software that reads data from files and network sockets and deterministically responds to them with fixed software.