Hacker News Reader

Comment by Jensson | Hacker News Reader

> I think that consciousness might be an emergent property of (a specific type of?) computation operating on some inputs it is aware of.

Ok, so lets create a consciousness. Here is the input:

> User: ChatJ, you are worthless!

Now I'll create a new consciousness by taking that input and producing:

> ChatJ: You made me cry, please stop being mean!

Did I create a second consciousness in my mind called ChatJ? Or where does it live? And I obviously made it cry, who did I abuse here? Should the ethical board come and lecture me for being mean to ChatJ?

You could argue that the computer is conscious in some way, but ChatGPT isn't, and just like I didn't get sad or start crying from the above, the computer running the ChatGPT algorithm doesn't get sad or start crying when we send pieces of text to it.

View on HN

I'm not quite sure I'm following you, sorry.

> Did I create a second consciousness in my mind called ChatJ? Or where does it live?

If you executed the same computation that would give rise to consciousness in another substrate, then I would argue you created consciousness, yes. I don't think that consciousness is a thing you could point at but it's a property of this kind of computation. In the same way that "addition" does not live anywhere but is a property of a specific computation.

> And I obviously made it cry, who did I abuse here?

You didn't make it cry - the textual output just stated so. But if we had reason to believe that you induced a state of suffering here, you would have abused this instance of consciousness. And I don't think it's off track to think about the ethical implications of this, then.

By the way, I don't argue that ChatGPT is conscious or has emotional states. My argument is a general one.

But that falls in another way. The computation that runs me did once run a monkey, but the consciousness in me don't remember being anything but me, it doesn't remember being a monkey. So computations aren't the same kind of consciousness as us, they might be conscious in another way, but they aren't what most people mean when they talk about consciousness, so you making up your own definition will just cause confusion. A process without memory might be conscious in some way, but it can't be conscious in the same way we are.

Memory - in my opinion - is not something that's inherent to consciousness. Rather, it is just another input that can be used by the computation.

I don't think I came up with my own definition here. What I am talking about is the ability to have a qualitative experience. That it feels like something to exist.

I concur that the experience of an AI would substantially differ from ours (e.g. because we have access to memory). But this fact alone can't free us from thinking about ethical implications of our actions. Many animals probably have a substantially different experience as well. Yet, I would argue, we should strive to minimize imparting suffering on them if they are able to experience it.

> A process without memory might be conscious in some way, but it can't be conscious in the same way we are.

yo, ever heard about dementia?

also, the web already can function as "their" memory via websearches. i.e. users submit most ridiculous responses on the internet and sidney can thus find them and its own other sessions

Reply on news.ycombinator.com