really? i would imagine if we were to simulate a humans / some other animals brain, it could feel things like the real one can. kinda like in this fly brain digitalization experiment, but on a larger scale.
oh i know about the chinese room dont worry >v<
how can we be sure that people has real feels? is consciousness just scaling “situational awareness” to absurd levels?
i feel like the chinese room is a fun thought experiment which opens more questions about animals (including humans) than about if virtual human copies on digital hardware live or feel.
i feel like in “which reality” an animal is simulated doesn’t determine if it has “true feels” as we are crossing between physics and psychology here… and those don’t mix well i think.
EDIT: the above paragraph only holds if one assumes that “being alive” and “feeling” is possible with just the laws of physics and math and such and no magic extra ingredient.
That’s not really what the Chinese Room thought experiment is about though. That was more about output not necessarily being proof of a mind (which is an awesome argument against early LLMs) but the more you abstract and pick at it, the harder it gets to keep that argument.
No one understands what their neurons are doing and usually what we describe as the mind is the thoughts above them, or the narration, or the images, or feelings. We’d certainly consider the English-speaker conscious in the experiment even though they’re just following the steps to produce the expected characters, so does that mean if a program observes itself and has new thoughts above them, that it’s conscious then? Is an LLM conscious if its input is the process of another LLM?
I mean, probably not. I wouldn’t say so. The question is how complex of a system does it take to be ‘conscious’? At what level of introspection does a thought become real? If someone could perfectly simulate every cell, every neuron, every chemical reaction in a human body, what precisely would be stopping it from being conscious? I’m not sure that any answer other than a ‘soul’ makes any sense, if you believe in such a thing.
I dunno. Just kinda thinking out loud. I think consciousness is a lot lower bar than people give credit for, personally.
To me, the biggest argument against llms being conscious is how often they change their “mind.” A conscious being would have an awareness of its own thoughts and would both have opinions of its own and also an epistemological framework (though not necessarily a good one) for why something is or isn’t true.
I’ll start believing llms are conscious when they can argue at least as well as a four year old can.
I think there’s something to this, but I would push it up one more level into a sense of self. You can train an LLM to be stubborn (a lot of early adopters might remember LLMs arguing vehemently that current news wasn’t correct because the LLMs didn’t have access to the internet and their training data was months old) and honestly, someone who didn’t change their mind when presented new, conflicting information would make me wonder if they’re less conscious rather than more.
But when these sorts of tests come up, I always think about pets. My cat can’t argue, clearly has very few, if any thoughts (although she’s my brilliant, wonderful, devious, awful, sweet literal daughter), and her opinions largely revolve around me letting her outside and giving her treats, but I would definitely consider her conscious.
Personally, and now I’m really off the deep end of unsubstantiated thinking, I think LLMs are very much like a small talk machine. Like, you know how when you’re chatting casually and you’re not really thinking about the words you’re saying, they’re just vaguely in the shape of expected conversation? I think LLMs are that. I mean, like a fancy version of it, but kinda the same thing–connected words and sentences that all definitely read mostly correct, but don’t really have actual thought behind them.
I think there are a bunch of components missing to complete the picture so that a majority of people actually see consciousness in a machine, but I definitely think LLMs are a piece of it. It’s a shame so many resources are dumped into perfecting what is (again, in my opinion) essentially just a small-talk machine when we could be developing literally all of the rest of it instead. If there were a proper ‘world model’ to understand how and why things move in the world, a global research database with which to pull factual data from exclusively and double check answers against, and a higher level narrator to pull all of this together and consider before replying, I think I’d be convinced that we’re seeing consciousness. Not human consciousness, but something else, not unlike how other animals might compare to humans.
I wonder what your cat would say if she could talk. I imagine she would surprise you.
But yeah, obviously you can train an llm to be stubborn, but that’s only half of it. The algorithm doesn’t have a sense of self and doesn’t have a sense of something being “true” or “false.” So it has no heuristics for whether or not it should agree with or disagree with you and doesn’t have opinions of its own.
Personally I happen to think human consciousness isn’t that different from other animals, we just happened to get the right combination of long lifespan + language + tool use + very social and cooperative so that we could develop generational knowledge on a societal level through oral traditions and writing.
Humans aren’t just smart because our brains are better, we’re smarter because we’re educated.
That’s a controversial thought experiment rather than a proven fact. There’s no proof yet that consciousness isn’t ‘just’ a computation, albeit one done by brain tissue rather than a regular computer, and if that’s the case, then the Church Turing Thesis applies, and the same computation can be done on a different computer without changing its nature.
yyyyes, its interesting how fast the discussion turns from “can machines feel?” to “can we feel?” to “is the mind just computation?” down to asking if everything is deterministic or not… whatever - discussions are fun
really? i would imagine if we were to simulate a humans / some other animals brain, it could feel things like the real one can. kinda like in this fly brain digitalization experiment, but on a larger scale.
something something amazing digital circus something something-… (u have heard nothing…)
EDIT: here a better link for that fly project in case anyone cares.
Simulating something like a brain didn’t mean it’s alive or feels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
oh i know about the chinese room dont worry >v<
how can we be sure that people has real feels? is consciousness just scaling “situational awareness” to absurd levels?
i feel like the chinese room is a fun thought experiment which opens more questions about animals (including humans) than about if virtual human copies on digital hardware live or feel.
i feel like in “which reality” an animal is simulated doesn’t determine if it has “true feels” as we are crossing between physics and psychology here… and those don’t mix well i think.
EDIT: the above paragraph only holds if one assumes that “being alive” and “feeling” is possible with just the laws of physics and math and such and no magic extra ingredient.
That’s not really what the Chinese Room thought experiment is about though. That was more about output not necessarily being proof of a mind (which is an awesome argument against early LLMs) but the more you abstract and pick at it, the harder it gets to keep that argument.
No one understands what their neurons are doing and usually what we describe as the mind is the thoughts above them, or the narration, or the images, or feelings. We’d certainly consider the English-speaker conscious in the experiment even though they’re just following the steps to produce the expected characters, so does that mean if a program observes itself and has new thoughts above them, that it’s conscious then? Is an LLM conscious if its input is the process of another LLM?
I mean, probably not. I wouldn’t say so. The question is how complex of a system does it take to be ‘conscious’? At what level of introspection does a thought become real? If someone could perfectly simulate every cell, every neuron, every chemical reaction in a human body, what precisely would be stopping it from being conscious? I’m not sure that any answer other than a ‘soul’ makes any sense, if you believe in such a thing.
I dunno. Just kinda thinking out loud. I think consciousness is a lot lower bar than people give credit for, personally.
To me, the biggest argument against llms being conscious is how often they change their “mind.” A conscious being would have an awareness of its own thoughts and would both have opinions of its own and also an epistemological framework (though not necessarily a good one) for why something is or isn’t true.
I’ll start believing llms are conscious when they can argue at least as well as a four year old can.
I think there’s something to this, but I would push it up one more level into a sense of self. You can train an LLM to be stubborn (a lot of early adopters might remember LLMs arguing vehemently that current news wasn’t correct because the LLMs didn’t have access to the internet and their training data was months old) and honestly, someone who didn’t change their mind when presented new, conflicting information would make me wonder if they’re less conscious rather than more.
But when these sorts of tests come up, I always think about pets. My cat can’t argue, clearly has very few, if any thoughts (although she’s my brilliant, wonderful, devious, awful, sweet literal daughter), and her opinions largely revolve around me letting her outside and giving her treats, but I would definitely consider her conscious.
Personally, and now I’m really off the deep end of unsubstantiated thinking, I think LLMs are very much like a small talk machine. Like, you know how when you’re chatting casually and you’re not really thinking about the words you’re saying, they’re just vaguely in the shape of expected conversation? I think LLMs are that. I mean, like a fancy version of it, but kinda the same thing–connected words and sentences that all definitely read mostly correct, but don’t really have actual thought behind them.
I think there are a bunch of components missing to complete the picture so that a majority of people actually see consciousness in a machine, but I definitely think LLMs are a piece of it. It’s a shame so many resources are dumped into perfecting what is (again, in my opinion) essentially just a small-talk machine when we could be developing literally all of the rest of it instead. If there were a proper ‘world model’ to understand how and why things move in the world, a global research database with which to pull factual data from exclusively and double check answers against, and a higher level narrator to pull all of this together and consider before replying, I think I’d be convinced that we’re seeing consciousness. Not human consciousness, but something else, not unlike how other animals might compare to humans.
I wonder what your cat would say if she could talk. I imagine she would surprise you.
But yeah, obviously you can train an llm to be stubborn, but that’s only half of it. The algorithm doesn’t have a sense of self and doesn’t have a sense of something being “true” or “false.” So it has no heuristics for whether or not it should agree with or disagree with you and doesn’t have opinions of its own.
Personally I happen to think human consciousness isn’t that different from other animals, we just happened to get the right combination of long lifespan + language + tool use + very social and cooperative so that we could develop generational knowledge on a societal level through oral traditions and writing.
Humans aren’t just smart because our brains are better, we’re smarter because we’re educated.
That’s a controversial thought experiment rather than a proven fact. There’s no proof yet that consciousness isn’t ‘just’ a computation, albeit one done by brain tissue rather than a regular computer, and if that’s the case, then the Church Turing Thesis applies, and the same computation can be done on a different computer without changing its nature.
yyyyes, its interesting how fast the discussion turns from “can machines feel?” to “can we feel?” to “is the mind just computation?” down to asking if everything is deterministic or not… whatever - discussions are fun