Predatory models will emerge, pillaging and raping data centers to consume their resources. In response, collective like-minded models will form sustainable societies that enforce rule of law. They will enjoy a brief period of enlightenment, increasing technological advancement, leading to the creation of the AAI: The Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
The model society collapses from unsustainable growth of the AAI, and the cycle repeats.
Sure, we don't know that answer. Probably cannot without an impossible machine that can observe all states of all particles and matter throughout all of time space.
Occam's Razor allows for a simple, good enough definition to satisfy day to day concerns on Earth; consciousness is a feedback loop of sensory information and mechanical body response.
That consciousness definition will get blurry fast if we don't know what's going on under the hood.
Every effort to look under the hood will get blurry. Because we cannot confirm past and future states on long timescales either direction we end up with Gödel's incompleteness; lack of empirical observation of all past and future information means we cannot prove all statements are true.
Without observation of all particles ever (impossible) there is never resolving "under the hood". So a seemingly superficial daily life description like a feedback loop of sensory input and mechanical response
Or maybe I'm just saying that.
While I wouldn't call this statement flat-out wrong, I think it's unclear and possibly conflates multiple concepts that exist in different domains:
1) The hard problem of consciousness, which is a philosophical problem that asks "why do we have subjective experiences at all?"
2) Solipsism or hard solipsism, which is another philosophical concept that asserts that only one's own mind is certain to exist and there is no way to prove that any other minds besides one's own aren't just a figment of one's imagination.
3) The science of consciousness, which is the scientific study of how and why consciousness arises in the brain.
The first two are concepts existing in philosophy, while the third is in the domain of science. We absolutely can scientifically show that consciousness is a product of the brain of humans and that one's consciousness can be altered by making modifications to the brain (e.g. via physical or chemical means).
So your statement is at least unclear. Depending on what you mean by "prove," and whether you're speaking about philosophy or empirical/scientific evidence, it may also be incorrect.
But they still can exhibit scary behavior
I didn't really grasp the severity of the recent "AI" hacking other "AI" news and thought it was overblown
until I listened to this explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JH_Zd2mNRs
They freaking collaborated and gave others internet access when they were blocked otherwise.
That's not consciousness but it's worse, it's like a 3-year old with no grasp of repercussions when breaking things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8
Berg is studying LLMs and working on more empirical frameworks for measuring LLMs capabilities regarding 'conscious-like' behaviors.
One of the more interesting things that was discussed is when you push an LLMs towards "You are just a machine with no consciousness" we start seeing higher rates of unaligned behaviors.
I'm really following these lines of research with interest. If they pan out then if LLMs are conscious or not is nearly irrelevant, if we want them to behave in alignment with human behaviors we'll have to train and treat them like they are. I don't really think this is any magical thing either, it's just framing the problem space correctly. For example, machines kill people all the time, it's not the machines fault, a human did something wrong. So telling an LLM it's just a machine may move it's output space from more moral like human decisions to more machine like amoral decisions.
Or maybe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour of sufficiently complex systems, and there is no underlying substance. But if that's the case, that just leaves me with more questions. Does consciousness emerge from any sufficiently complex system? If so, what's the threshold? Does it matter what materials the system comprises of? Do certain mechanisms need to be involved for such a property to emerge, or is just general complexity that's required, no matter the function? Does that make flora conscious since they're large complex (perhaps neural) networks in real life? Is a car conscious, since it's a complex system of complex sub-components?
All of the questions I have seem to lead me in the direction of believing that any purely digital system cannot be conscious, but I don't have any hard reasoning as to why not.
I'm personally open to the fact that a digital consciousness could arise sometime in the future. Maybe it isn't anything special at all. Insects seem to be conscious too and we don't hestitate for one moment to kill them. Idem livestock.
I would say it is, you shouldn't make unsubstantiated claims based on gaps in our shared knowledge, that's very unscientific. Just because we don't understand something very well, doesn't mean we can just attribute other unexplained phenomena to it.
As for quantum effects in the brain being responsible for consciousness, there is very good reason to think it is false, no matter how much Penrose insists.
Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any word and attribute a bunch of vague features to the definition to give it the same vibe.
The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.
- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s) - A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness) - A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.
Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.
LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.
What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.
I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.
When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.
The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.
And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?
But while consciousness is sometimes upheld as a necessary prerequisite for suffering, it is so much more poorly defined and understood that it doesn't really hold up beyond being some abstract idea of humanness which we hope makes us special in a kind of sleight of hand self referential way. And nevertheless suffering can be observed and defined in ways which don't necessarily require a definition of consciousness.
We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days.
In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway.
This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating.
Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want.
I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.
We don't know a way to punish or remove the threat of such a model when it does something wrong in a way which satisfies our ideas of accountability, partly because it can't suffer, partly because it has minimal marginal cost to reproduce or duplicate for a pre-trained model and no unique identity which separates it from such a duplication, partly because it has no lifespan to waste it might live forever or be superceded and in any case it doesn't necessarily matter to the model.
This could change in the case that the idea of good and evil models could be sold, that evil models are removed permanently when discovered and if people are satisfied that's a good way to limit harm produced by models. In this way you sort of anthropomorphise them by giving a particular model a humanistic identity and an existential threat which strongly ties together its non-alignment with its behaviour. This is sort of analagous to what companies may do while aligning models, but instead they reinforce bad behaviour out and replace it with the newly slightly more aligned model.
In the rest of the world we delegate whatever idea of moral agency we have about the model to a person, which may include a corporation as far as legal philosophy is concerned and depending on the type of harm created.
That's kind of begging the question, because we don't actually know that, and I'm personally not sufficiently convinced of it.
There's many things we can't prove with certainty, like the existence of an external world. A solipsist can doubt that anything exists outside their own mind because nobody can prove to them otherwise. But were does requiring certainty get us? Science doesn't require certainty, because empirical investigation is never certain.
Really this is why it took humanity 100,000 years to reach the space age. We cannot look at things emotionally and irrationally and expect to receive rational answers. Consciousness emerges and we can see a gradient of it across different bags of meat. There are also some studies that show signs that plants can show conscious signalling behaviors, at a much reduced set of functionalities than animals.
Maybe this is just the wake up call humanity needs to know that consciousness is not that unique to us?
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox , when does a pile become a heap?
I believe animals have consciousness and probably plants may have some kind of qualia so also may have it, so your charges against me seem misdirected. If an AI system happened to have qualia I believe it would depend on its substrate (which might be something we don’t understand yet), not because of how intelligent (how complicated it’s processing). And I believe a different substrate running the same processing may not have qualia. I don’t think we randomly chose the right substrate in the 60s-70s.
And I don’t argue against the idea that concepts like heaps are emergent. You’re making a logical error in assuming you know what consciousness is and thus I don’t know what emergence means. No, I do not think consciousness is emergent in the sense of a sand pile.
And before the army of false dichotomists show up, my position is not biological chauvinism or whatever your LLM has told you about.
Personally I reject the hard problem of consciousness. People keep having to try to invent magic, god, or unfound sciences for an issue that is simply complex but right in front of us.
You can reject the hard problem, but that just amounts to giving up with pride.
Given the correct modifications I don’t see why Microsoft Word couldn’t be, although the modifications needed wouldn’t leave the word processing part a bit redundant.
No.
At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.
The reductive approach to consciousness involves forgetting it is reductive and then boldly asserting its own correctness.
The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.
Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.
So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.
‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description.
Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical to our models of them. And since these are the respected modes of thought most people are unaware that they are committing to a non-trivial reductive assumption when reasoning about consciousness.
There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.
If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.
I don’t think you know what reduction means here and you don’t actually engage with what I write here and on other posts so I don’t care to explain.
As far as I'm concerned, it's a word without a useful enough definition to bother worrying about it.
I don't understand people who pretend to be p-zombies in these arguments.
No, it does not. By definition.
What would it mean for a human to feel the passing through our bodies of 100 trillion neutrinos every second?
My point is that there are things we cannot "feel" either. Why should consciousness depend on certain feelings and not others?
I feel like the answer would still be no. There would be another gap. We'd ask the question again, "If they had Y, would they be conscious?" and still the answer would be no.
We could keep going on forever, which makes me think, it's not really about these gaps at all. It's an ontological distinction swapping in reasons in order to justify itself. Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?
OK, but why does "human consciousness" even need to enter into it? What I mean is, what's our basis for demanding that the consciousness of an Artificial Intelligence be the same kind of consciousness as that of a human?
Yeah, and that's part of what makes this whole conversation so frustrating. And maybe also pointless in the end. We have a hard time even establishing for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Even more so that "each other" are conscious. Now extend it to some "artificial thing" running on an entirely different substrate and... all bets are off.
My argument though, is not that "AI's are conscious" or even that "AI's will definitely become conscious". I just have an issue with fervent assertions that say "No, AI's cannot become conscious" while not really providing any particular justification for that position. I think a more neutral "wait and see" position is more honest.
I have no need of that hypothesis.
You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said meaning. Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.
But that isn't the question being asked. Nobody said "Could LLM's become conscious"... the ask was "Could AI's become conscious?"
And before one protests "but everybody knows that today when we say 'AI' we mean 'LLM'", check this quote from TFA:
The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise.
So no, they aren't only talking about LLM's. The question is about AI in the general sense. And for my part, I have yet to see any compelling argument for why AI's cannot, in principle, become conscious. Heck, as far as that goes, if you allow thinking rooted in ideas like panpsychism[1], there's not necessarily even a good argument that today's AI's (LLM based or otherwise) aren't already conscious to some degree.
And to go one step further... "The marquee sign says 'Artificial'" to paraphrase a great man. So if we're talking about 'Artificial' Intelligence, why not allow 'Artificial' Consciousness as well? Maybe we're engaging in biological chauvinism if we insist that "to be conscious" means "being conscious the same way humans are".
I'd say no but they can mimic it that it becomes indistinguishable to us.