Without Consciousness, AIs Will Be Sociopaths | Hacker News Reader

Without Consciousness, AIs Will Be Sociopaths

wsj.com

4 pointsbookofjoe5 comments

Samuel Johnson refuted Bishop Berkley by kicking a stone. He got that wrong, but no AI to date knows what kicking a stone is like. Or anything other than what is written or drawn. Our development as humans starts with physical experience. When we eventually read about something we have a sense of what that thing is. AI does not.

The question is whether consciousness is emergent from large enough models, or whether it’ll be something we’ll need to design/build.

https://archive.ph/54sRw

Unfortunately, the author's definition of consciousness is flawed. By their definition, sociopaths do not have consciousness, which is absurd. Sociopaths lack empathy, not consciousness.

Consider Julian Jaynes' thesis in his landmark 1977 book "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind": consciousness is a learned process that came about only 3,000 years ago and is still developing. I very much doubt Jaynes considered all humans prior to 1000 B.C.E. to be sociopaths; if they were, it's doubtful they would have survived to make it to that point.

Consider, for example, the Egyptian Empire, which rose during the period of the New Kingdom (c. 1570-1069 B.C.E.) to its zenith.

>"They Were Noble Automatons Who Knew Not What They Did:" Volition in Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

Abstract: An important question in consciousness research concerns its origins. In Julian Jaynes' book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he suggests that consciousness arose rather recently in human history, sometime between the composition of The Iliad and The Odyssey. Although Jaynes' work as a theory of consciousness has achieved a great deal of attention (and indeed criticism), what has not been widely noted is the prominent role of volition in his theory. In this article I hope to draw attention to these overlooked aspects of his theory, in particular the fact that volition is central to Jaynes' definition of consciousness and that it is changes in the nature of volitional experience that mark, for Jaynes, the emergence of consciousness.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.8112...

This, from the WSJ article, is quite thought provoking:

>We need a reverse Turing test: Let’s see if the computer can tell whether it’s talking to a human or another computer. If it can tell the difference, then maybe it knows what consciousness is. ChatGPT definitely can’t pass that test yet: It doesn’t know whether it’s responding to a living person with a mind or a disjointed list of prefab questions.

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