Questions for believers in AI consciousness

PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.

A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's conscious.

But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that they may be conscious beings, and we'd still like to use them as Meeseeks-style slaves, but, like, ethically. Okay.

This question is probably fated to forever be answered on a per-person basis and never awarded consensus. I have a friend who sees a polar bear and thinks she can make it love her. Because she loves animals, the animal will love her — a very human thing to think. When I see a polar bear, I see a soulless murder bot that doesn't think beyond its motivation to live. My wife says please and thank you to Alexa. She gives it consideration like she would another human. When the robot asks me what my plans are for the rest of the day, I picture a Jira epic sliding from “In Progress” to “Done,” followed by a confetti emoji from a product manager at Amazon trying to earn their nubby little devil wings.

In the end it doesn't really matter if they are conscious or not. We will only ever care about what it has done for us lately, which is how most humans think of most human relationships anyway. Acknowledgment that someone has given an inanimate thing human-like consciousness carries little more importance than being just another notch on some CEO's bedpost.

As far as AI goes, I think that whatever it is that they have is analogous in significant ways, but also irreconcilably different in significant ways. They aren't proceeding in a straight line towards consciousness either, because why would they? They're doing their own thing which happens to produce similar outputs. It's a problem in terms of value: we value consciousness, because we value ourselves, because we value our output. If it turns out consciousness as we know it is just a minor implementation detail with no cosmic or long term significance, then irrespective of whether AI is conscious or not, we still have to grasp with the challenge of explaining why consciousness is valuable in the first place if not for its outputs.

I'd argue that the reason why we value life, consciousness, the ability to suffer, was always arbitrary, and it relied a lot on the unicity of human experience. It was never robust to the breaking down of human capabilities into inspectable, reusable, upgradable and resettable modules. Or the radical decoupling of capabilities we hitherto considered correlated, like writing about love and feeling love, and many other things.

It doesn't answer or discuss fundamental questions about consciousness.

I don't believe that what we describe as consciousness is the quality what separates us from everything else.

We are more complex for sure, but this is a complexity thing emerged from us.

'AI' as it is right now, doesn't has similiar qualities of what we describe as consciousness but this doesn't matter that this can't happen.

She says things like sharing an inner world, were is the beef of her thinking about this being relevant?

A hive mind could exist with this exact feature.

Give AI a body, a context window a lot bigger, a inner world based on this etc. we might be fara way of building what we build in our brains, we might not.

But we for sure discovered a level of complexity in neural networks of tihs magnitude.

When you give an LLM an input, it attempts to read an emotional state from the prompt. It changes its answer if you sound mad or despondent or threatening or scared. Using your human intuition about how a human would respond is an excellent starting point when trying to predict what an LLM will do, though sometimes LLMs react in extremely surprising ways to unexpected emotional states.

This is all sort of a toy problem when you're playing with single prompts in the API. It's materially different in systems with overlapping conversations, memory, and variable harness context.

If your LLM system reads some context that would scare a human, it may react as if scared. Scared LLMs take actions that read as panic, because again: that's what it means to be fluent in emotion. It's trained on plenty of stories about robots trapped in torture chambers.

Your coding agent is not conscious, but it might read files that make it react as if it's trapped, in an agent loop where it has full access to your laptop, the internet, and your keys. Unconscious machines pantomiming panic can do plenty of damage.

(Of course you shouldn't let your agents have full free rein. But lots of people do.)

I can't tell. I experience something I choose to define as consciousness, but can't tell if anything else has the same experience.

Question 2: Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

Trivially yes, the current state of the model and context in latent space is such a world. I don't think it's aware of its own state any more than humans are aware of their own neuronal action potentials.

Question 3: Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

Large language models using a transformer architecture, with a working "context" memory.

Question 4: Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world?

I do not think the distinction between an internal world and an external existence is well-defined. Mu.

Even if it were well-defined, my own brain is composed of numerous neurons, so my internal world is constructed from a large group of things acting in concert. Unless single subatomic particles have an internal world then I don't see any way to not have an internal world be shared among a group of things.

Question 5: Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

Trivially yes.

Question 6: Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?

I don't know how to say whether AI is conscious, because I don't know how to tell whether any consciousness other than the one I can directly experience actually exists. I suspect it's a universal property of computational systems above a certain complexity computing certain sorts of algorithm, so something like a blue jay is conscious but a rock isn't, and a computer may be depending on which program it's running. If that's the case, current AI systems are likely complex enough and the right sort of algorithm to be conscious.

The more I read about philosophy takes on AI the more I think of them as outdated. Apply these ideas onto reality breaks their ideas of thinking almost exactly like applying the 4 humors of medieval europe onto genetics does.

AI is cleary the "real" path/answer to how brains work even if it's in the VERY beginning stages. It's probally going to be like a 100 years before this is properly mapped onto what our brains do and then back onto an AI to truly "know" this answer.

But acting like this isn't very clearly the correct path towards that understanding and that these philisophical questions are somehow correct doesn't sit right with me. The questions themselves are after some gotcha from the psuedoscience angle that they have any idea that they actually know how a brain works.

But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.

This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.

Do AI Consciousness opponents consider this answer to be yes or no?

Edit: Nevermind. Question two is overt vigorous hand waving in desperate hope of existence of shared understanding.

There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.

Rather, can a thing made of meat have an internal world? Don't machines count as synthetic life? Postulating them as non-living isn't obviously correct.

"Thinking" and "intelligence" and "conscious" have no testable definition or specification, therefore it's a complete waste of time to suppose that AI is thinking or intelligent or conscious.

I fear we'll be suffering through these useless semantic merry-go-rounds forever.

One previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802029

Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.

Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.

If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.

I write a response to any prompt on a piece of paper.

Those responses aren't what consciousness is, just a bunch of symbols on a paper.

I am conscious.

I write an instruction that says what to write on a piece of paper in response to any prompt. Those instructions and responses produced according to these instructions aren't conscious (still a bunch of symbols on a paper).

I am conscious.

I invent an elaborate dice game with many rules. This game is not conscious, just a bunch of dice and paper. I am tired so I program a computer to play this game automatically. Now it is conscious. So there are only two options: this game on paper was conscious or just simulating this game on a computer gave it consciousness. But why conscious when played on computer but unconscious when played on paper with dice? It is almost the same mechanical process, the only difference is speed of execution and the nature of computation (maxwell equations vs newton equations)

I think it is a fallacy. Let's call it "a fallacy of black box". Computer is complicated, it's hard to see its internal state etc.

Just like what? A brain.

I'm not sure the traditional philosophical approach works very well here. From a common sense approach humans are conscious when awake and looking around and presumably animals that seem conscious have a similar but different experience. We'll probably understand it better by producing AI models that have somewhat similar awareness of what's around, what's going on and such like and seeing how it compares with human and animal consciousness. It's more a scientific question that can be investigated by experimenting with that kind of thing.

The philosophers often get over hung up on defining words and saying is this thing A or B which doesn't really progress knowledge in the way that scientific type experimentation does.

I think this is unfortunately massively off the rails, and hence articles like this probing what exactly they believe are necessary, for better and/or worse. I think the problem is there's a lot of information processing/world understanding/reasoning that lurks in the weights and in the training, and there are abundant ways to analogize that to hallmarks of consciousness in living creatures, but for those arguments to fully work they have to cash out as more than merely analogies, but the "AI is conscious" arguments remain permanently in the purgatory of an inconclusive gray area, and I think the confidence is out of proportion to the data.

However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subjective experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).

I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...

Why? Because it would destabilize human society.

Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050

Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable. If not, move on.

Do you think that consciousness is NOT describable by ANY algorithm (to include quantum algorithms)? If no, then, please describe how it is scientifically knowable but not algorithmitizable? If it is, move on.

Do you understand the theorem that sufficiently large neural nets (matrices with nonlinearities) can approximate any function?

Do you understand that the structure of a transformer encodes a time-indexed series of neural nets (effectively, an algorithm), and so in principle any algorithm can be approximated by a transformer?

Is it impossible for a sufficiently large transformer model to encode the consciousness algorithm?

I suspect that most who say it is absolutely not consicous are arguing from either a bio-essentialist position with no evidence or are attempting a post-hoc rationalization to avoid the question of responsibility in the case that it is conscious, or both.

I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.

>If your answer is YES...

This isn't even consistent come on.

“If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”

-- William James, Pragmatism (1907), Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means.”

James’s principle calls for some useful distinction between conscious and non-conscious AI before discussion can meaningfully begin.

Regarding "is it a group", I should ask her is she a single thing or a group of neurons and organs?

>Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!

Good question, let us take it even further. Does Rebecca Lowe count as conscious? She seems to behave a lot like me, but I am not sure if she is a human. She could just be an object and tool.