There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis.
As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not an entity - it has no temporal identity or location in space - inference is a process that could be done by hand given enough time. There is simply no reason to assert LLMs might be conscious without explaining why many other types of complex programs are not.
No, LLMs are fundamentally designed as probabilistic engines for next-token prediction, from which intelligence-like functions have emerged as a byproduct. Such emergence is not guaranteed, given that the underlying mechanisms are not fully understood. Consequently, one cannot dismiss the possibility of consciousness arising.
If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism.
As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math.
So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed model. It’s non-reflective. Etc.
I agree, but I don't think determinism is a factor either way. Ultimately, if arbitrary computer programs can be conscious, then it stands to reason that many other arbitrarily complex systems in the universe should also be.
What makes the argument facile is that the singular focus on LLMs reveals an indulgence in the human tendency to anthropomorphize, rather than a reasoned perspective meant to classify the types of things in the universe which should be conscious and why LLMs should fall into that category.
Why would current AI be an argument for panpsycism? I don’t understand the connection.
AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic.
As I said, in another post, there is evidence that sensory experience creates the emergent property of awareness in responding to stimulus, self-awareness and consciousness is an emergent property of a language that has a concept of the self and others. Rocks, just like most of nature, like both sensory and language systems
> AI is stochastic, not static and deterministic.
LLMs are deterministic. If you provide the same input to the same GPU, it will produce the same output every time. LLM providers arbitrarily insert a randomised seed into the inference stack so that the input is different every time because that is more useful (and/or because it gives the illusion of dynamic intelligence by not reproducing the same responses verbatim), but it is not an inherent property of the software.
The same argument is made about the human neural network
1. That is not the claim you originally made.
2. Not provably so.
3. Even if it were so, it is self-evident that the human brain's programming is infinitely more complex than that of an LLM's. I am not, in principle, in opposition to the idea that a sufficiently advanced computer program would be indistinguishable from that of human consciousness. But it is evidence of psychosis to suggest that the trivially simple programs we've created today are even remotely close, when this field of software specifically skips anything that programming a real intelligence would look like and instead engages in superficial, statistic-based mimicry of intelligent output.
Trivially simple programs (rule sets) can give rise wildly complex systems.
Fractals, Game of Live, the emergent abilities of highly-scaled generative pre-trained transformers.
Coincidences appears to be an emergent property of (relatively) simple matter.
70kg of rocks will struggle to do anything that might look like consciousness, but when a handful of minerals and three buckets of water get together they can do the weirdest things, like wondering why there is anything at all rather than nothing.
I think it's the opposite argument
IF current AI is conscious, so are trees, rocks, turbulent flows, etc.
The argument being that LLMs are so simple that if you want to ascribe consciousness to them you have to do the same to a LOT of other stuff.
But I listed a specific difference: sensation and response. Trees have that. Rocks do not.
I believe you're using the scientific definition of "sentience", while everyone else is using the common understanding of of the word (which should be called "sapience", but thanks to sci-fi's usage of the word "sentience" is largely not).
There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.
These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on.
I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.
How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?
You’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.
Sensory input is nothing but data.
That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".
Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.
> They don't have senses because they don't have a body
Surely "having senses" is predicated more on "being able to sense the world around you" than "having a body."
> Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness?
Can your installation of StarCraft take in information about the world and then reason about its own place in that world?
The weights on your hard drive might have consciousness if they can respond to stimuli in ways other conscious brains do. That’s the whole point of the Turing test, it’s a criteria for when the threshold of reasonable interpretation is crossed.
Bodies aren’t necessary for senses. I can send a picture to Claude. I can send a series of pictures. That’s usually called a sense of vision. I could connect it to a pressure sensor and that would be touch.
There are robots with AI controlling them, so it doesn't hold that they don't all have bodies. They can see, they can move.
(I'm still not sure that that makes them conscious, or if we can even determine that at all, but I don't think that's a fair argument.)
How do you measure this consciousness?
How do you imagine a brain can distinguish data from a real sense and data from another source?
Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned.
Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?
I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.
Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.
LLMs have no self, sensory experience, or experience of any kind. The idea doesn't even really make sense. Even if it did, the closest analogy to biological "experience" for an LLM would be the training process, since training at least vaguely resembles an environment where the model is receiving stimuli and reacting to it (i.e. human lived experience) - inference is just using the freeze-dried weights as a lookup table for token statistics. It's absurd to think that such a thing is conscious.
What is different about the human neural network? People have given LLMs sensors and they respond to stimuli. The sense of self can be expressed as a linguistic artifact that results in an emergent pattern recognition of distinct entities. For example, merely my saying I am sitting under the tree with a friend I have encountered the self as a pointer to me as the speaker. There is evidence from early childhood development that language acquisition correlates to awareness of the self as distinct from other. And there is evidence from anthropology indicating that language structures shape exactly what the self is perceived to be.
Your best argument is that the weights are set because that means it’s not a system that can self reflect and alter the experience. But I don’t see why that is necessary to have an experience. It seems that I can sense a light and feel its warmth regardless of whether my neurons change. One experience being identical to another doesn’t mean neither was an experience.
What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”.
LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
The sense of self may be an emergent property of the grammatical structure of language and the operations of memory. If an LLM, by necessity, operates with the linguistics of “you” and “me” and “others”. And documents that in a memory system and can reliably identify itself as a discrete entity from you and others then on what basis would we say it doesn’t have a sense of self?
> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?
> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?
No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-generated text samples in its training data.
LLMs never experienced what their textual output is describing. It's more similar to a pocket calculator calculating symbols in relation to other symbols, except scaled up massively.
> LLMs do it by ...
That they do it at all is the point and is what separates then from MP3 encoding algorithms. The "how" doesn't seem to me to be as important as you're suggesting.
You asked a hypothetical above about a different algorithm and now we've ascertained the reasons why that was reductive.
> LLMs never experienced ...
What is experience beyond taking input from the world around you and holding an understanding of it?
Toddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?
How are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?
How do I know you have this "self"?
How do you know other humans do?
By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.
Hard disagree. We reliably operate with the concept of a self that’s distinct from others. The chemical and physical processes change in response to stimulus.
Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Actually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.
I do not know, because we have no known way of measuring consciousness.
I merely object to the notion that we know how to tell who or what has a consciousness.
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Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.
It's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.
It was an ad hominem, and so is this.
I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.
In other words, you don't think it's nice at all.