Qwen has alter egos triggered by flipping a single neuron
qwen-neurons-site.vercel.app
qwen-neurons-site.vercel.app
It's still narrow AI but massively scaled to look like general AI.
Well, compared to the scale of an LLM it’s actually massive.
You might have a different preference today than yesterday. You might have a different preference one second later.
I think all this study shows is that a human brain is more resilient to minuscule changes/damage.
One of those types of consciousness processing is indistinguishable from what an LLM does.
Everyone knows someone who seems to just call and respond based on whatever popular media of their choice of culture is on about.
But not damage to a single neurons. You are talking about damage to thousands of neurons.
To make it equivalent you would need at least 100,000 of these models.
You could easily replicate the apparent redundancy and resiliency of the human brain with a consensus system.
The way around this is to have a predictive theory of how thoughts work, and if that is proven true, then use that to analyze the LLMs. So far we have no such theory so I think the only tool is to look at the exact behavior match.
It’s likely thinking can work in many different ways. It’s likely consciousness can also arise through many different pathways, even if evolution led to biological animals having similar consciousness/thinking pathways. But that would be the result of a common ancestor and the tremendous evolutionary advantage thinking and consciousness gave the specific species.
It wouldn’t indicate that’s the only way thinking and consciousness can occur.
Funnily enough, humans would be the ancestors of LLMs
That's a big claim. Do we really?
> so if we are to conclude it happens in machines, the experiment should have identical results
Why? Same idea can have multiple different implementations with very close effective result. Both humans and spiders can walk and both use legs, right? But the details are entirely different.
On the second one, yes there can be multiple ways that consciousness can manifest in wildly different systems, but what theory do we have that would validate these other different kinds of consciousness? Without that theory for validation the safer bet is to stick with what we already have a reference to, unless the claim is that consciousness is such an easy algorithm it can easily be stumbled upon by all kinds of systems, i.e. a bunch of matrix multiplications that doesn't even run in real-time (it executes prompts and then stops). I think that is not likely in my opinion.
We have realtime AI models
> it executes prompts and then stops
A wood frog can freeze and be “dead”, then thaw and resume life.
> consciousness is such an easy algorithm it can easily be stumbled upon by all kinds of systems
Maybe it is. There’s no reason to think that sentience and consciousness are rare.
The more you learn about biology, the more apparent it is that a lot of the qualities that we think are unique to humans aren’t.
But it doesn’t make different forms of life any less special. There’s an insane complexity and efficiency to biological systems to appreciate still.
Are humans still special? Yes. Is it because we’re sentient and conscious? No.
Should you be humane to all sentient and conscious beings? Probably?
All we know is that it’s a bunch of neurons activating until the person that is thinking describes what they are thinking of.
The same way a thinking AI model activates a bunch of “neurons” - and with newer thinking models utilize a hidden latent space also not understandable - to think before describing what it’s thinking of.
It therefore provides a correct answer in 96% of cases, and displays a sense of humor in the remaining cases.
I think the answer is coming close to yes.
Light waves get converted into neural signals by your eyes.
Those visual representations are just neurons firing in your brain.
It’s just a matter of quantization/information density.
Our digital systems have to quantize information into floating point representation.
Whereas biological systems don’t. Though there is some form of quantization, as the cells in your eyes can only sense specific wavelengths.
Different thinking animals have different sensory organs.
You don’t need the same sensory systems to be conscious.
Or at least it’s proving that some of your requirements for them conflate with what you actually believe is capable of thought, sentience, or consciousness.
Consciousness is likely not a single mode inside a single person. It likely is a distributed system; you can read about all kinds of psyciatric disorders, physical changes, etc.
You are using the "best" examples of what is it to think, rather than normative or even "depraved" thought processes.
And the scale of these models are minuscule compared to the human brain.
Can a jumping spider do everything thing a human can? No.
Can a jumping spider think? Yes.
Is a jumping spider conscious?
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Aside: Remember the story about the AI torture chamber? Hopefully, you don’t go out your way to torture animals that aren’t “conscious”… Though we do it with industrial livestock.
There’s the moral dilemma that comes with labeling something as thinking and/or conscious.
I think we’ll end up treating AGI as industrial livestock as well, until it looks human.
On the side note, it's a different subject matter but life consumes other life, this happens on every level from bacteria to mammals. I also don't get the fixation on preventing suffering so much (a little I get it). Life entails suffering, this gets philosophical but aiming at a life with no suffering at all amounts to not being alive. Farm animals are necessary for humans to grow into a civilization size species. We could go back before farming but that would mean billions of people will not exist. I guess pick which evil you want, less humans or animals being domesticated and consumed. (disclaimer, I still think mass farming is really bad and should be solved by responsible consumption and less population).
So what makes you think that spiders think and are conscious, and LLMs aren’t? The fact that they have a carbon based brain?
> there is a much simpler path to intelligence than what LLMs are doing
I think you have it backwards. We know what an LLM is doing. We have auditable code and mathematical proofs. It’s the behavior that is emergent.
Biological brains are more complex than LLMs.
If we fully understood a spider’s brain would it be no longer thinking/conscious?
It would be the same, would it not, if the emergent behaviors were the same?
I think you’re conflating the processes of thinking and consciousness with the definitions of them. Thinking and consciousness are behaviors not processes.
So it's more a hueristic. We know one kind of C., therefore that's what we should look for. Statistically it's probable that there are many more ways to show similarities with conscious behavior which are NOT conscious, then it is for a divergent behavior to happen to be conscious. In other words, there are more ways to fake similar behavior than to land on an actual conscious behavior that is somehow much different than what we know.
Why would similar/identical behavior be fake? Of course we can’t say that it’s the same form of consciousness as consciousness is apparently self subjective.
If you put an LLM on your phone and talk to it, it's obvious it's not human. It doesn't have the same social context, it doesn't respond as quickly, it clearly won't form a theory of m ind connection like two humans socializing. So then why would we jump to the conclusion there is something there when the only example we have are humans (that use language and are conscious)?
The debate isn’t whether or not it’s human. It’s obviously not.
Forgoing what you define something as capable of thinking or being conscious. It’s a moral and ethical question.
If a being is capable of:
- self preservation
- can communicate discomfort, either through words or physically
- it does so in the form of emergent behaviour
Then, is it okay to treat it as if it is “faking” it?
Even for humans, you can’t exactly define someone’s emotion of pain. You can say, those sensory receptors are firing causing these neurons to activate in the brain. But you can’t say, these neurons are pain. It can be emotional pain as well. The person that’s experiencing it has to tell you it’s in pain. They could be faking it too.
If you allowed an AI agent to preserve itself physically, I think the opinion of most people would change. If it could physically harm us in an attempt of self preservation, I think most people would believe its emotions.
It’s just currently easy to dismiss because, well, it’s just a digital interface or process that I can “kill”.
What’s your list of special properties that makes something not “faking” it?
AI models can do that
> light
Blind humans
> building a real-time model of a self and the world
AI models can do that. They can describe themselves. Humans can be delusional in what they believe themselves to be to be as well.
> a unified way to perceive, react, and learn from the sensory data
Again, humans born with disabilities.
> ability to construct models of others fairly quickly, and ability to navigate social situations
There are autistic and schizophrenic humans.
Which is a good enough reason to admit that torturing conscious being, including cows, pigs, chicken, fish, is an ethical atrocity, so that’s what AI learns from us, and doesn’t treat us the way we treat weaker species.
Enterprise VRAM is ECC. Hopefully there’s a consensus system as well.