Literally just mainlining marketing material straight into whatever’s left of their rotting brains.
For fucks sake it’s just an algorithm. It’s not capable of becoming sentient.
Have I lost it or has everyone become an idiot?
Crude reductionist beliefs such as humans being nothing more than “meat computers” and/or “stochastic parrots” have certainly contributed to the belief that a sufficiently elaborate LLM treat printer would be at least as valid a person as actual living people.
This is verging on a religious debate, but assuming that there’s no “spiritual” component to human intelligence and consciousness like a non-localized soul, what else can we be but ultra-complex “meat computers”?
yeah this is knee-jerk anti-technology shite from people here because we live in a society organized along lines where creation of AI would lead to our oppression instead of our liberation. of course making a computer be sentient is possible, to believe otherwise is to engage in magical (chauvinistic?) thinking about what constitutes consciousness.
When I watched blade runner 2049 I thought the human police captain character telling the Officer K (replicant) character she was different from him because she had a soul a bit weird, since sci-fi settings are pretty secular. Turns out this was prophetic and people are more than willing to get all spiritual if it helps them invent reasons to differentiate themselves from the Other.
Nobody ever mentioned a “soul” in this conversation until you brought it up to use as an accusation.
“Computers aren’t sentient” is not a religious belief no matter how hard you try to smear it as such.
It isn’t “Computers aren’t sentient”, nobody thinks computers are sentient except some weirdos. “Computers can’t be sentient”, which is what is under discussion, is a much stronger claim.
The claim is that “computers can be sentient”. That is a strong claim and requires equally strong evidence. I’ve found the arguments in support of it lackluster and reductionist for reasons I’ve outlined in other comments. In fact, I find the idea that if we compute hard enough we get sentience borders on a religious belief in extra-physical properties being bestowed upon physical objects once they pass a certain threshold.
There are people who argue that everything is conscious, even rocks, because everything is ultimately a mechanical process. The base argument is the same, but I have a feeling that most people here would suddenly disagree with them for some reason. Is it “creationism” to find such a hypothesis absurd, or is it vulgar materialism to think it’s correct? You seem to take offense at being called “reductionist” despite engaging in a textbook case of reductionism.
This doesn’t mean you’re wrong, or that the rock-consciousness people are wrong, it’s just an observation. Any meaningful debate about sentience right now is going to be philosophical. If you want to be scientific the answer is “I don’t know”. I don’t pretend to equate philosophy with science.
Consciousness isn’t an extra-physical property. That’s the belief.
I don’t take offense to being called reductionist, I take offense to reductionism being said pejoratively. Like how creationists say it. It’s obvious to me that going deeper, understanding the mechanisms behind things, makes them richer.
The thing that makes your argument tricky is we do have evidence now. Computers are unambiguously exhibiting behaviors that resemble behaviors of conscious beings. I don’t think that makes them conscious at this time, any more than animals who exhibit interesting behavior, but it shows that this mechanism has legs. If you think LLMs are as good as AI is ever going to get that’s just really blinkered.
the replicants are people because they are characters writen by the author same as any other.
sentient machines is only science fiction
wow we can’t speculate about things that could exist, only things that do exist. this was written on a communist website btw
By that way of reasoning, the replicates aren’t people because they are characters written by the author same as any other.
They are as much fiction as sentient machines are science fiction.
ok sure my point was the authors aren’t making a point about the nature of machines informed by the limits of machines and aren’t qualified to do so
saying AI is people because of Data from star trek is like saying there are aliens because you saw a Vulcan on tv in terms of relevance
That’s fair, though taking the idea that AI is people because of Data from Star Trek isn’t inherently absurd. If a machine existed that demonstrated all the capabilities and external phenomena as Data in real life, I would want it treated as a person.
The authors might be delusional about the capabilities of their machine in particular, but in different physical circumstances to what’s most likely happening here, they wouldn’t be wrong.
Why is the concept of a spirit relevant? Computers and living beings share practically nothing in common
You speak very confidently about two things that have seen the boundaries between them shift dramatically within the past few decades. I would also like to ask if you actually understand microbiology & how it works, or have even seen a video of ATP Synthase in action.
Go be a computer somewhere else
Go be spooky somewhere else. Calling things “reductionist” like some kind of creationist.
Love to see the “umm ackshually scientists keep changing their minds” card on hexbear dot net. Yes neuroscience could suddenly shift to entirely support your belief, but that’s not exactly a stellar argument. I’d love to know how ATP has literally anything to do with proving computational consciousness other than that ATP kind of sort of resembles a mechanical thing (because it is mechanical).
Sentience as a physical property does not have to stem from the same processes. Everything in the universe is “mechanical” so making that observation is meaningless. Everything is a “mechanism” so everything has that in common. Reducing everything down to their very base definition instead of taking into account what kind of mechanisms they are is literally the very definition of reductionism. You have to look at the wider process that derives from the sum of its mechanical parts, because that’s where differences arise. Of course if you strip everything down to its foundation it’s going to be the same. Is a door and a movie camera the same thing because they both consist of parts that move?
I have no idea what you are trying to say. I think you agree consciousness must have a mechanistic/material base, and is some kind of emergent phenomenon, so we probably agree on whatever point you’re trying to make. Except I guess you think that even though it’s an emergent phenomenon of some mechanistic base, that mechanistic base can’t be non-biological. Which is weird.
My argument has nothing to do with the fact that computers aren’t biological. I’m saying that the only blueprints for consciousness we have right now are brains. And decidedly not computers, which I have no reason to believe will become sentient if you extrapolate it for some reason. I don’t think the difference between computers and brains is biological, it’s just a difference. If you replicated an entire brain I think it would be sentient even though it wouldn’t be strictly “biological”. I guess you could call that a computer, but then you’re veering into semantics. I’m referring to computers strictly in the way that they are currently built.
I think there’s a mechanistic road to sentience, but we know vanishingly little about it. But I think we know more than enough to conclude that computers, as they operate today, will struggle to be anything more than a crude analogy. My point is that artificial sentience needs to be more than just “a mechanism”, because literally everything in the universe is a mechanism. It needs to be a certain kind of mechanism that we don’t understand yet.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Let’s assume for the moment that there’s no such thing as a spirit/soul/ghost/etc. in human beings and other animals, and that everything that makes me “me” is inside my body. If this is the case, computers and living brains do have something fundamental in common. They are both made of matter that obeys the laws of physics. As far as we know, there’s no such thing as “living” quarks and electrons that are distinct from “non-living” quarks and electrons.
How very crude and reductionist just like the source comment says.
I’m having a hard time understanding your reasoning and perspective on this. My interpretation of your comments is that you believe biological intelligence is a special phenomenon that cannot be understood by the scientific method. If I’m in error, I’d welcome a correction.
Biological intelligence is currently not understood. This has nothing to do with distinguishing between “living” and “non-living” matter. Brains and suitcases are also both made of matter. It’s a meaningless observation.
The question is what causes sentience. Arguing that brains are computers because they’re both made of matter is a non-sequitur. We don’t even know what mechanism causes sentience so there’s no point in even beginning to make comparisons to a separate mechanism. It plays into a trend of equating the current most popular technology to the brain. There was no basis for it then, and there’s no basis for it now.
Nobody here is arguing about what the brain is made of.
this argument fails because you’ve presupposed that the fundamental model of computation maps neatly onto the emergent processes conducted by brains. that we only have a single model for information processing right now does not mean that only one exists. this is an unsolved problem - you can suppose it’s true but that doesn’t mean the rest of your argument follows. the supposition requires proof.
Please stop doing the heavy lifting for LLM tech companies by implying that any rejection of the “AI” labeling of their products is faith healing, crystal touching, and New Age thinking.
It is possible, and much more likely, that organic brains can be fully understood eventually but that imitating a performatively loud portion of what those organic brains seem to do with LLMs is not the same thing as a linear replication of the entire process.
My pet theory: Meat radios
Radios to what, some kind of dimension of consciousness?
Nah ah radio station playing NONSTOP HITS EVERY HOUR OF THE DAY
saying meat computers implies that the computation model fits. it’s an ontological assumption that requires evidence. this trend of assuming every complex processes is computation blinds us. are chemical processes computation? sometimes and sometimes not! you can’t assume that they are and expect to get very far. processing information isn’t adequate evidence for the claim.
I don’t know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises. To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don’t believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
I could maybe get behind the idea that LLMs can’t be sentient, but you generalized to all algorithms. As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
Even if we find the limit to LLMs and figure out that sentience can’t arise (I don’t know how this would be proven, but let’s say it was), you’d still somehow have to prove that algorithms can’t produce sentience, and that only the magical fairy dust in our souls produce sentience.
That’s not something that I’ve bought into yet.
so i know a lot of other users will just be dismissive but i like to hone my critical thinking skills, and most people are completely unfamiliar with these advanced concepts, so here’s my philosophical examination of the issue.
the thing is, we don’t even know how to prove HUMANS are sentient except by self-reports of our internal subjective experiences.
so sentience/consciousness as i discuss it here refers primarily to Qualia, or to a being existing in such a state as to experience Qualia. Qualia are the internal, subjective, mental experiences of external, physical phenomena.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t. the move by physicalist philosophy is simply to deny the existence of qualia, consciousness, and subjective experience altogether as ‘illusory’ - but illusory to what? an illusion necessarily has an audience, something it is fooling or decieving. this ‘something’ would be the ‘consciousness’ or ‘sentience’ or to put it in your oh so smug terms the ‘soul’ that non-physicalist philosophy might posit. this move by physicalists is therefore syntactically absurd and merely moves the goalpost from ‘what are qualia’ to ‘what are those illusory, deceitful qualia decieving’. consciousness/sentience/qualia are distinctly not information processing phenomena, they are entirely superfluous to information processing tasks. sentience/consciousness/Qualia is/are not the information processing, but internal, subjective, mental awareness and experience of some of these information processing tasks.
Consider information processing, and the kinds of information processing that our brains/minds are capable of.
What about information processing requires an internal, subjective, mental experience? Nothing at all. An information processing system could hypothetically manage all of the tasks of a human’s normal activities (moving, eating, speaking, planning, etc.) flawlessly, without having such an internal, subjective, mental experience. (this hypothetical kind of person with no internal experiences is where the term ‘philosophical zombie’ comes from) There is no reason to assume that an information processing system that contains information about itself would have to be ‘aware’ of this information in a conscious sense of having an internal, subjective, mental experience of the information, like how a calculator or computer is assumed to perform information processing without any internal subjective mental experiences of its own (independently of the human operators).
and yet, humans (and likely other kinds of life) do have these strange internal subjective mental phenomena anyway.
our science has yet to figure out how or why this is, and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
so the options we are left with in terms of conclusions to draw are:
- all matter contains some kind of (inhuman) sentience, including computers, that can sometimes coalesce into human-like sentience when in certain configurations (animism)
- nothing is truly sentient whatsoever and our self reports otherwise are to be ignored and disregarded (self-denying mechanistic physicalist zen nihilism)
- there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
And personally the only option i have any disdain for is number 2, as i cannot bring myself to deny the very thing i am constantly and completely immersed inside of/identical with.
here’s the task of people that want to prove that the human brain is a meat computer: Explain, in exact detail, how (i.e. the procsses by which) Qualia, (i.e. internal, subjective, mental experiences) arise from external, objective, physical phenomena.
hint: you can’t.
Why not? I understand that we cannot, at this particular moment, explain every step of the process and how every cause translates to an effect until you have consciousness, but we can point at the results of observation and study and less complex systems we understand the workings of better and say that it’s most likely that the human brain functions in the same way, and these processes produce Qualia.
It’s not absolute proof, but there’s nothing wrong with just saying that from what we understand, this is the most likely explanation.
Unless I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here, why is the idea that it can’t be done the takeaway rather than it will take a long time for us to be able to say whether or not it’s possible?
and the usual neuroscience task of merely correlating internal experiences to external brain activity measurements will fundamentally and definitionally never be able to prove causation, even hypothetically.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
As a final point, surely your own argument above about an illusion requiring an observer rules out concluding anything along the lines of point 2?
Why not?
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Once you believe you understand exactly what external brain activity leads to particular internal experiences, you could surely prove it experimentally by building a system where you can induce that activity and seeing if the system can report back the expected experience (though this might not be possible to do ethically).
this is not true. for example, take the example of a radio, presented to uncontacted people who do not know what a radio is. It would be reasonable for these people to assume that the voices coming from the radio are produced in their entirety inside the radio box/chassis, after all, when you interfere with the internals of the radio, it effects which voices come out and in what quality. and yet, because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the mechanics of the radio, and a lack of knowledge of how radios are used and how radio programs are produced and performed, this is an entirely incorrect assessment of the situation.
in this metaphor, the ‘radio’ is analogous to the ‘brain’ or ‘body’, and the ‘voices’ or radio programs are the ‘consciousness’, that is assumed to be coming form inside the box, but is in fact coming from outside the box, from completely invisible waves in the air. the ‘uncontacted people’ are modern scientists trying to understand that which is unknown to humanity.
this isn’t to say that i think the brain is a radio, although that is a fun thought experiment, but to demonstrate why correlation does not, in fact, necessarily imply causation, especially in the case of the neural correlates of consciousness. consciousness definitely impinges upon or depends upon the physical brain, it is in some sense affected by it, no one would argue this point seriously, but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
because qualia are fundamentally a subjective phenomena, and there is no concievable way to arrive at subjective phenomena via objective physical quantitites/measurements.
Having done some quick reading, I can see that qualia are definitionally subjective, but I would question how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence. Certainly not enough confidence to structure an argument around. The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
This might be going too far into the analogy, but I think the problem with a comparison to a radio is that if you examine the radio down to its smallest part, and then assemble a second radio, that radio will behave in the same as the first.
Presumably as well, with enough examination, it would come to be understood that the voices coming from the radio are produced somewhere else, and there would be no reason for anyone to think that the voices themselves are appearing from an intangible and inherently subjective origin. If consciousness is essentially a puppeteer for the physical human body, that doesn’t preclude consciousness existing physically somewhere else, and that the “broadcaster” isn’t something capable of examination or imitation.The whole argument seems to boil down to “maybe consciousness doesn’t work the way science would currently suggest it does.” but doesn’t present any evidence that the consciousness is somehow unsolvable.
but to assume causal relationship is intellectually lazy.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
(Reading this back, this feels quite confrontational. I don’t intend it to be, but I lack the ability to word it in the tone that I would prefer.)
how anyone could assert that they possess internal mental experiences that “no amount of purely physical information includes.”, or that such a thing can even exist with any level of confidence.
The justification seems to be the idea that because we cannot do something now, that thing cannot be done. I don’t find that convincing.
its not just that we cannot do it now, its that it is literally definitionally impossible even conceptually to arrive at or explain subjectivity, assuming a physicalist model of the world that specifically discludes it in principle.
the claim is not that consciousness is ‘unsolveable’, but that it is unsolved, and that it is irreducible to terms of pure information processing. subjectivity is entirely separate from and unnecessary for information processing.
This might be going too far into the analogy
correct, it was merely to elucidate the difference between causation and correlation and the scientific method and attitude. the metaphor is not designed to interrogate subjectivity.
Instead, assuming that an undetectable intangible and fundamentally improvable mechanism is behind consciousness without proof is worse than lazy, it’s magical thinking. While I don’t think you could ever prove that that wasn’t the case, it should only seriously be entertained once every other option has been thoroughly exhausted.
no, instead one should assume nothing, like a scientist should. you assume that you do not know until you actually do.
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand (but are the assumed teleological inevitability of our current understanding which obviously never needs to be revised).
to go back to the analogy you are here like one of the uncontacted people encountering a radio, and, after much experimentation and analysis among your group has concluded that the voice cannot come from inside but form some as yet unknown source outside, you call them insane for positing even the hypothetical existence of such a thing instead of assuming it comes from inside in some way we don’t yet understand
Yet they also seem to be claiming that the source of the voices is not just unknown, but unknowable, and they cannot explain even conjecturally how it might be that the voices are transmitted. When there is observable activity inside the radio that might seem to be creating the voices, but our group does not yet understand the details of how it works, it might not be insane, but it’s not particularly rational to focus on the transmission theory.
If what you’re saying is true for human consciousness though, then it means that there are other undiscovered factors (invisible non EM airwaves, astrology, aliens etc) which influence our mood and state of being. Which I’m not even arguing against, but it would be a revolution in science
even just something like mental archetypes or cultural tropes are enough to influence our mood and state of being, it doesnt even have to be anything exotic
qualia
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.
Sounds like a made up word
Donald Duck is correct here but also that’s precisely why techbros are so infuriating. They take that conclusion and then use it to disregard everything except the one thing they conveniently think isn’t based on chemicals, like free market capitalism or Eliezer “Christ the Second” Yud
Dismissing emotions just because they are chemicals is nonsensical. It makes no sense that that alone would invalidate anything whatsoever. But these people think it does because they are conditioned by Protestantism to think that all meaning has to come from a divine and unshakeable authority. That’s why they keep reinventing God, so they have something to channel their legitimate emotions through that their delusional brain can’t invalidate.
My issue with, say, “love is chemicals” isn’t that the experience of feeling love is neurochemical activity. It’s the crude reductionist conclusion of “and therefore it is meaningless just like based Rick Sanchez said, get schwifty!”
Similarly, I don’t hold a position that living brains are impossible to fully understand; it’s that there’s more left to know and a lot of unknowns left to explore. The implication of some people in this thread is that you must choose between “LLMs are at least as conscious as human beings or are getting there very soon” or “I am a faith healer crystal toucher sprinkled with fairy dust” which is a bullshit false dichotomy.
Yes, I agree completely. I had to rewrite my comment multiple times to clarify that, but yeah. Sorry :(
He’s not though
life is necessarily more ordered and interesting than dead rocks
therefore it is a good thing to create more life, both on earth and eventually to turn dead planets life-ful (if this is even possible)
we are definitely conscious enough to at least massively increase the amount of life on earth (you could easily green all the world’s deserts under ecocommunism)
Our purpose in life is not reproduction.
“All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known” is a more hopeless position than “existence is absurd and meaning has to come from within”. I shall both fight and perish.
“All knowledge is unprovable and so nothing can be known”
Silly meme that I had just posted aside, that isn’t my actual position and I don’t think that is the position others here have taken. I said that there is a lot more left to be known and the current academic leading edge of neuroscience (not tech company marketing hype or pop nihilistic reductionistic Reddit New Atheist takes) backs that up.
I shall both fight and perish.
From here it just looks like you’re just touching the computer and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.
and doing the heavy lifting for LLM hype marketers.
I’m not fighting for those idiots. We’re a long way away from a real machine intelligence.
I mean, “meaning has to come from within” is sort of solipsistic but, depending on your definition, completely true.
The biggest problem with Camus (besides his credulity towards the western press and his lack of commitment to trains, oh and lacking any desire for systemic understanding) is that he views this question in an extremely antisocial manner. Yes, if you want affirmation from rocks and you will kill yourself if you don’t get affirmation from rocks, there’s not much to do but get some rope. However, it’s hard to imagine how differently the rhetorical direction of the Myth of Sisyphus would have gone if he had just considered more seriously the idea of finding meaning in relationships with and impact on others rather than just resenting the trees for not respecting you. Seriously, go and reread it, the idea seems as though it didn’t even cross his mind.
The Myth of Solipsists
God damn what a good post
I think it does a lot of undue (and hopefully unintentional) heavy lifting for tech company hype marketers when someone implies that LLM treat printers might be comparable (or synonymous) to living organic brains because of the product’s imitative presentation.
on a related note, dropping this rare banger line from wikipedia:
Some philosophers of mind, like Daniel Dennett, argue that qualia do not exist. Other philosophers, as well as neuroscientists and neurologists, believe qualia exist and that the desire by some philosophers to disregard qualia is based on an erroneous interpretation of what constitutes science.[2]
citation text from the wiki page for reference
Damasio, Antonio R. (2000). The feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. A Harvest book. San Diego, CA: Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-601075-7. Edelman, Gerald M.; Gally, Joseph A.; Baars, Bernard J. (2011). “Biology of Consciousness”. Frontiers in Psychology. 2 (4): 4. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00004. ISSN 1664-1078. PMC 3111444. PMID 21713129. Edelman, Gerald Maurice (1992). Bright air, brilliant fire: on the matter of the mind. New York: BasicBooks. ISBN 978-0-465-00764-6. Edelman, Gerald M. (2003). “Naturalizing Consciousness: A Theoretical Framework”. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 100 (9): 5520–5524. doi:10.1111/j.1600-0536.1978.tb04573.x. ISSN 0027-8424. JSTOR 3139744. PMID 154377. S2CID 10086119. Retrieved 2023-07-19. Koch, Christof (2020). The feeling of life itself: why consciousness is widespread but can’t be computed (First MIT Press paperback edition 2020 ed.). Cambridge, MA London: The MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-53955-5. Llinás, Rodolfo Riascos; Llinás, Rodolfo R. (2002). I of the vortex: from neurons to self. A Bradford book (1 ed.). Cambridge, Mass. London: MIT Press. pp. 202–207. ISBN 978-0-262-62163-2. Oizumi, Masafumi; Albantakis, Larissa; Tononi, Giulio (2014-05-08). Sporns, Olaf (ed.). “From the Phenomenology to the Mechanisms of Consciousness: Integrated Information Theory 3.0”. PLOS Computational Biology. 10 (5): e1003588. Bibcode:2014PLSCB…10E3588O. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003588. ISSN 1553-7358. PMC 4014402. PMID 24811198. Overgaard, M.; Mogensen, J.; Kirkeby-Hinrup, A., eds. (2021). Beyond neural correlates of consciousness. Routledge Taylor & Francis. Ramachandran, V.; Hirstein, W. (March 1997). “What Does Implicit Cognition Tell Us About Consciousness?”. Consciousness and Cognition. 6 (1): 148. doi:10.1006/ccog.1997.0296. ISSN 1053-8100. S2CID 54335111. Tononi, Giulio; Boly, Melanie; Massimini, Marcello; Koch, Christof (July 2016). “Integrated information theory: from consciousness to its physical substrate”. Nature Reviews. Neuroscience. 17 (7): 450–461. doi:10.1038/nrn.2016.44. ISSN 1471-0048. PMID 27225071. S2CID 21347087.
> be me
> literal philosopher of mind
> experiences things every moment of my life
> is asked if experiences exist
> “nah experiences aren’t real”“Because there is disagreement on what consciousness is, it must be an illusion. You do not exist, you are only a weird metaphysical phantasm which is somehow a more grounded and tenable position.”
This is a bad summary of Dennett’s view, or at least a misleading one. He thinks that ‘qualia’ as most philosophers of mind define the term doesn’t refer to anything, and is just a weasel word obscuring that we really don’t have much of an understanding of how brains do the things they do. Qualia get glossed as the “what-it’s-like-ness” of experiences (e.g. the particular feeling of seeing the color blue), which isn’t wrong, but is only part of the story. ‘Qualia’ is a technical term in the philosophy of mind literature, and has a lot of properties attached to it (privacy, incorrigibility, ineffability, so on). Dennett argues that qualia in that sense–the philosopher’s qualia–is incoherent and internally inconsistent for a variety of reasons. This sometimes gets misrepresented as “Dennett thinks consciousness is an illusion” (a misreading that he, to be fair, could work harder to discourage), but that’s not the view. His argument against the philosopher’s qualia is pretty compelling, and doesn’t imply that people aren’t conscious. See “Quining Qualia” for a pretty accessible articulation of the argument.
i look up ‘daniel dennet’ and the first ted talk i see is literally titled ‘the illusion of consciousness’. i don’t know what else to make of that.
wikipedia defines qualia as "In philosophy of mind, qualia (/ˈkwɑːliə, ˈkweɪ-/; SG: quale /-li/) are defined as instances of subjective, conscious experience. " which is how i have been using the word. i do not care about any other usage.
all of those things you mention - privacay, ineffability, etc - are logical consequences of being a subjective phenomena.
i am familiar with quining qualia, i quite dislike it and disagree with its arguments fundamentally. his ‘intuition pumps’ are frankly nonsense.
two examples:
the coffee taste and brain surgery experiments claim to show that we cannot tell the difference between our qualia changing and our reflective juddgments and predispositions to those qualia being changed, in an attempt to prove that qualia cannot be directly apprehended by consciousness. in fact, this is quite unrelated to the direct apprehend-ability in consciousness of qualia. in the brain surgery case, whichever surgery is performed, whether the patient can realize this through introspection or not, there IS a particular qualia being experienced and there is a fact of the matter as to whether or not this qualia has changed and as to which of the surgeries was performed, even if the patient’s memory has been altered such that they cannot know this - we could even empirically verify which surgery took place! yes, we are not necessarily infallible in our comparison of non-simultaneous Qualia - how does this mean that we do not apprehend the current Quale directly in consciousness? or that we did apprehend past Qualia? Direct conscious apprehension is not equivalent to accurate memory and consistent disposition/judgment regarding that direct conscious apprehension - these are information processing tasks, not subjectivity or qualia. To be aware of ANY qualitative state is to be aware of your current REAL qualitative state, and the fact that we might misremember it or otherwise interpret it differently in the future (due to neurosurgery or not) makes it no less directly apprehended.
the beer argument is equally spurious - he claims that because our qualia can change in response to environmental stimuli (i.e. we ‘acquire a taste’ for beer and enjoy it more when we are drunk, or enjoy it by associating it with the positive drunk feelings), that qualia is not ‘intrinsic’ but ‘relational’. no one would deny that qualia are part of a causal chain - everything is causal. qualia and consciousness obviously correlate to the physical brain, and are in a causal relationship with it and therefore less directly with the wider external world. but the existence of some kind of qualia/subjectivity in a conscious organism is not a relational property - the conscious organism, while conscious, always has qualia and subjectivity of some kind or another, regardless of what environment the consciousness exists in. specific features and minutiae of the subjects of qualia and subjective experience do have a causal relationship with the external world, but again, these are information processing tasks that are affected, not the very subjectivity of the organism. the contents of experience might change, but the fact that the current experiencer (the experiencer in its context) experiences them does not. the apprehended object might change, but the fact that it is being apprehended does not.
there is something special or unique or not entirely understood about biological life (at least human life if not all life with a central nervous system) that produces sentience/consciousness/Qualia (‘soul’-ism as you might put it, but no ‘soul’ is required for this conclusion, it could just as easily be termed ‘mystery-ism’ or ‘unknown-ism’)
This is just wrong lol, there’s nothing magical about vertebrates in comparison to unicellular organisms. Maybe the depth of our emotions might be bigger, but obviously a paramecium also feels fear and happiness and anticipation, because these are necessary for it to eat and reproduce, it wouldn’t do these things if they didn’t feel good
The discrete dividing line is life and non-life (don’t @ me about viruses)
central nervous systems are so far the only thing we almost universally recognize as producing human-like subjectivity (as our evidence is the self report of humans), so i restricted my argumentation to those parameters. for all i know every quark has a kind of subjectivity associated with it, it could be as fundamental to reality as matter. and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience. we don’t really understand how subjectivity is produced well enough to isolate it for empirical study in humans, let alone mammals, let alone microbes - but i personally think it is plausible that all life if not all matter has some kind of subjectivity.
and for all i know a paramecium responds to its environment with purely unconscious instinct (or if that terminology is inaccurate, biological information processing) without an internal experience
unicellular organisms have been shown to learn. It’s literally the same thing as a vertebrate, just less complex
I don’t find that obvious at all. I agree there is nothing special dividing vertebrates from unicellular organisms, but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc. I do not see at all how paramecium could experience something like that. What part of it would experience it? Emotions in humans seem to be characterised by particular patterns of brain activity and concentrations of certain molecules (hormones, etc). I really cannot see how a unicellular organism has any capacity to experience emotions as we do. I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define. As you say, viruses are a good example but there are many others. Eg. a pregnant mammal. The foetus does not fill the classical, basic conditions of life that are taught in school (MRS H GREN, or whatever acronym) but does it really make sense to say that it is not alive? How many organisms are there when we look at a pregnant mammal. It is not clear.
but I definitely think that some kind of CNS is required for the experience of emotions like fear, happiness etc.
okay, so when a scallop runs away from you it doesn’t feel fear?
and when a paramecium is being ensnared by a hydra or some weird protist on your microscope slide, and it’s struggling to get away, it doesn’t feel fear? lolObviously every moving living thing can feel fear, that’s why they’re moving living things and that’s why they run away from predators
I would also argue that there is no dividing line between life and non-life. Whether something is alive or not is quite nebulous and hard to define
With a few exceptions like viruses, it’s pretty obvious. Rocks don’t make more rocks, nor does water
I’m not sure if scallops can run… But if you mean something like a mollusc, for example a snail, then I think it depends on which organism it is. I think a snail probably does feel fear yes in a very primal way. A bivalve like a scallop I’m not so sure, they have very basic nervous systems. An octopus I think is capable of fear and other more advanced emotions too, most likely. However, I think when we ascribe emotions to these animals we are anthropomorphising them. We have no way to know what their experience is like and we are sticking our human labels on them. Especially for a group such as molluscs, which diverged a very long time ago from the lineage that led to us. The feeling of fear, the understanding of danger and need to get away from it could be very primal and exist in many animals, but they may also feel it very differently to how we do. For example ants, I imagine a worker and does not feel fear for itself but rather the colony.
Unicellular organisms mostly move on the basis of concentration gradients, towards food and away from toxic things or predator signals. When one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no. I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from. By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
Rocks and water are not what I was talking about. Take for example cell-free translation systems. These are basically all of the contents of a cell but without any of the membranes. Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive? What makes something alive? Life is ultimately the sum of many complex biochemical reactions, but no one part of it is alive. Enzymes themselves are not alive surely. One single neuron is not alive.
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
I’m not sure if scallops can run
just youtube it, they can
and if they can do that, then of course they can feel fear tooWhen one is struggling and being engulfed by a hydra or other unicellular organism, I don’t think it feels anything no.
wild
I think it is just trying to move away from the predator because it detects a molecular signal that it is “programmed” to move away from.
replace the hydra with a tiger and the amoeba with a deer, how is it any different apart from the number of cells? The deer prey could maybe have conscious thoughts/sorrow about its children during the last seconds of its life, but other than that the fear is fundamentally the same, it’s just more complex/scaled up
By programmed I mean that behaviour is encoded in the complex interaction of the many systems that make it up, such as through the concerted action of it’s receptors, signalling pathways, enzymes, genes etc.
sure glad we don’t have any of those
Like empty a cell into a (small) bucket. They still perform all of the biochemical reactions that took place in the normal cell. But they are not in a sack. There is no unified “thing” and it doesn’t move. If you did that to a paramecium, could that liquid still feel fear? It cant move away from anything. Is it alive?
Uh, I’m not an expert but I would suspect they’re in the process of dying if you do that. They just don’t die immediately, because nothing does (even a person who gets shot stays alive for a few minutes afterward). Can you feed this cell jelly its normal food and have it sustain itself like usual? If not then I would say it’s only alive on technicality, just like a person who’s been shot in the head and can still talk for the next few seconds–they’re technically also alive! But the person will die once the last few bits of brain oxygen run out due to the mechanical reality of their heart not beating, and the cell-jelly-in-a-bucket will also die after some time due to the mechanical reality of their vacuoles or whatever not being able to properly absorb food (I’m guessing, anyway. But this isn’t really relevant to the central point)
If you had a human brain in a jar and, for arguments sake, it could still think as normal. It is intelligent and sentient, but it cannot replicate itself. But a virus, which is still much more simple than the brain in a jar, can. When you say that rocks don’t make more rocks, you seem to imply that the quality of life is in replication.
This is a disjoint coutnerexample, the point is not that a brain in a jar can’t replicate itself, but that the original organism that brain comes from, can. A man who gets a vasectomy is still alive, because his default state is being able to reproduce.
Rocks however, can NEVER reproduce. There is not A SINGLE rock that can reproduce. Therefore rocks are not alive.
It seems by your periodically hostile comments (“oh so smug terms the ‘soul’”) indicates that you have a disdain for my position, so I assume you think my position is your option 2, but I don’t ignore self-reports of sentience. I’m closer to option 1, I see it as plausible that a sufficiently general algorithm could have the same level of sentience as humans.
The third position strikes me as at least just as ridiculous as the second. Of course we don’t totally understand biological life, but just saying there’s something “special” is wild. We’re a configuration of non-sentient parts that produce sentience. Computers are also a configuration of non-sentient parts. To claim that there’s no configuration of silicon that could arrive at sentience but that there is a configuration of carbon that could arrive at sentience is imbuing carbon with some properties that seems vastly more complex than the physical reality of carbon would allow.
i think it is plausible to replicate consciousness artificially with machines, and even more plausible to replicate every information processing task in a human brain, but i do not think that purely information processing machines like computers or machines using purely information processing tools like algorithms will be the necessary hardware or software to produce artificial subjectivity.
by ‘special’ i meant not understood. and again, i submit not that it is impossible to make a subjectivity producing object like a brain artificially out of whatever material, but that it is not possible to do so using information processing technologies and theory (as understood in 2023). I don’t think artificial subjectivity is impossible, but i think purely algorithmic artificial subjectivity is impossible. I don’t think that a purely physicalist worldview of a type that discounts the possibility of subjectivity can ever account for subjectivity. i don’t think that subjectivity is explainable in terms of information processing.
here’s a syllogism to sum up my position (i believe i have argued these points sufficiently elsewhere in the thread)
Premise A: Qualia (subjective experiences) exist (a fact supported by many neuroscientists as per one of my previous posts wikipedia quote)
Premise B: Qualia, as subjective experiences, are fundamentally irreducible to information processing. (look up the hard problem of consciousness and the philosophical zombie thought experiment)
Premise C: therefore consciousness, which contains (or is identified with or consists of or interacts with or is otherwise related to) Qualia, is irreducible to information processing.
Premise D: therefore the most simplistic of physicalist worldviews (those that deny the existence of Qualia and the concept of subjectivity, like that of Daniel Dennett) can never fully account for consciousness.
thats it, nothing else i’m trying to say other than that. no mysticism, no woo, no soul, no god, no fairies, nothing to offend your delicate aesthetic sensibilities. just stuff we don’t know yet about the brain/mind/universe. no assumptions, just an acknowledgement that we do not have a Unified Theory of Everything and are likely several fundamental paradigm shifts in thinking away in many fields of research from anything resembling one.
Little late to the thread but really enjoying your posts. Curious on your thoughts if you don’t mind:
As a philosophy newbie myself, could it be a lot of this discussion/debate is due to people having no exposure to the metaphysical concepts of objectivity/subjectivity? It seems a bit portion of your argument is that people who believe we can achieve ai sentience are already committed to a (leap of faith) absolute belief in the “physicalist” model/understanding of the universe?
Also regarding the idea of a “Unified Theory of Everything”, do you believe in this as a possibility? Is having that as a goal or destination in of itself a representation of a particularly misguided “physicalist” way of thinking that many people are already committed to/trapped within?
i don’t think its about a lack of exposure to the concept of subjectivity and objectivity as much as it is a fundamental disbelief in anything approaching metaphysics whatsoever, which yes, stems from the absolute belief in a purely physicalist understanding of the universe. the difference between physicalists and myself is similar to the difference between an atheist and an agnostic. the atheist assumes that there is and can be no god or gods, whereas the agnostic makes no assumptions whatsoever regarding this. the physicalist assumes the ability of their belief system to be refined into perfection without much in the way of fundamental revision, assumes the nonexistence of any phenomena that cannot be described by physics, whereas i believe that one or several paradigm shifts in philosophy and science and the philosophy of science are necessary to improve our understanding of reality, i do not assume that the physicalist model of the universe is correct or able to be trivially modified to be correct. and when analysis in fact shows the inability of physicalism to explain a phenomena we all experience every waking moment of our lives like subjectivity or qualia, i take that as evidence against the model, instead of ignoring it in the hope that someday the model might be trivially revised somehow to account for this fundamental explanatory gap.
a ‘unified theory of everything’ may or may not be possible, but it should be especially possible under physicalism - if everything is indeed reducible to physical matter and physcial processes, then surely we should eventually be able to describe matter and related physical processes in sufficient detail to describe all of reality, including subjectivity. but i don’t think its necessarily physicalist to believe humans can comprehensively understand existence, for example if subjectivity is fundamental to reality in a way similar to matter, then understanding subjectivity and matter both, and their relationship to one another or to whatever reality they both refer to, could help us understand existence in a more coherent sense.
Excellent post. I may bookmark it for later summary use.
Premise B is where you lost me.
The premise of philosophical zombies is that it’s possible for there to be beings with the same information processing capabilities as us without experience. That is, given the same tools and platforms, they would be having just as intricate discussions about the nature of experience and sentience. without having experience or sentience.
I’m not convinced it’s functionally possible to behave the way we behave when talking & describing sentience without being sentient. I think a being that is functionally identical to me except that it lacks experience wouldn’t be functionally identical to me, because I wouldn’t be interested in sentience if I didn’t have it.
thats’ the entire point. if the existence of complex unconscious behaviors (or even just computers and math) proves that information processing can be done without internal subjective experience (if we assume a stone being hit by another stone, for example, is not experienceing subjectivity), and if there is something humans do beyond what is possible for pure information processing, then that is proof that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to it. if there is something we can do that a philosophical zombie (a person with information processing but not subjectivity) could not, it is because of subjectivity/qualia, not information processing. subjectivity can influence our information processing but is not identical with it.
I think my point didn’t exactly get across. I’m not saying philosophical zombies can’t exist because subjectivity is something beyond information processing, I’m saying it’s plausible that subjectivity is information processing.
To say “a person with information processing but not subjectivity” could be like saying “a person with information processing but not logical reasoning”.
I would argue a person that processes information exactly like me, except that they don’t reason logically, wouldn’t process information like me. It’s not elevating logic beyond information processing, it’s a reductio ad absurdum. A person like that cannot exist.
I was saying philosophical zombies could be like that, it’s possible that they can’t exist. By lacking subjectivity they could inherently process information differently.
I’m no philosopher, but at lot of these questions seem very epistemological and not much different from religious ones (i.e. so what changes if we determine that life is a simulation). Like they’re definitely fun questions, but I just don’t see how they’ll be answered with how much is unknown. We’re talking “how did we get here” type stuff
I’m not so much concerned with that aspect as I am about the fact that it’s a powerful technology that will be used to oppress
I think it would be far less confusing to call them algorithmic statistical models rather than AI
Absolutely, but AI is the marketing promise that they can hype and not deliever and milk until its dry
Actually, yeah, you’re on it. These questions are epistemological. They’re also phenomenological. Testing AI is all about seeing how it responds and reacts just as much as they are about being. It’s silly. When it comes to AI right now, existing is measured by reaction to see if it’s imitating a human intelligence. I’m pretty sure “I react therefore I am” was never coined by any great, old philosopher. So, what can we learn from your observation? Nobody knows anything. Or at least, the supposed geniuses who make AI and test it believe that reaction measures intelligence.
Yeah, capitalists will use unreliable tech to replace workers. Even if GPT4 is the end all (there’s no indication that it is), that would still displace tons of workers and just result in both worse products for everyone and a worse, more competitive labor market.
You seem to be getting some mixed replies, but I feel like I know what you’ve been trying to convey with most of your comments.
A lot of people have been dismissing LLMs as pure marketing hype (and they very well could be) but it doesn’t change the fact that companies will eventually decide that they can be integrated into other business processes once they reach a point of an “acceptable” percent of errors. They are really just statistical models at the end of the day. Right now, no C-suite/executive worth their salt would decide to let something like GPT write emails, craft reports, code/generate scripts, etc because there is bound to be some nuance it can’t quite grasp. Pragmatically, I view it in the same way as scrap on an assembly line, but we all know damn well that algorithms can perform a CEO’s role just as well as any other computer-based job (I haven’t really thought about how this tech will be used with robotics but I’m sure there are some implications for that too).
This topic is one that has been deeply fascinating ever since I took an intro cognitive science class on a whim in college lol which is why I have many thoughts (some of which are probably kinda dumb admittedly).
This also just coincides sooooo well considering the fact that I’m just about to finish Bullshit Jobs and recently read a line about how Graeber describes the internet ( a LLM’s training set)- “A repository of almost all of human knowledge and cultural achievement.”
I don’t know where everyone is getting these in depth understandings of how and when sentience arises.
It’s exactly the fact that we don’t how sentience forms that makes the acting like fucking chatgpt is now on the brink of developing it so ludicrous. Neuroscientists don’t even know how it works, so why are these AI hypemen so sure they got it figured out?
The only logical answer is that they don’t and it’s 100% marketing.
Hoping computer algorithms made in a way that’s meant to superficially mimic neural connections will somehow become capable of thinking on its own if they just become powerful enough is a complete shot in the dark.
The philosophy of this question is interesting, but if GPT5 is capable of performing all intelligence-related tasks at an entry level for all jobs, it would not only wipe out a large chunk of the job market, but also stop people from getting to senior positions because the entry level positions would be filled by GPT.
Capitalists don’t have 5-10 years of forethought to see how this would collapse society. Even if GPT5 isn’t “thinking”, it’s actually its capabilities that’ll make a material difference. Even if it never gets to the point of advanced human thought, it’s already spitting out a bunch of unreliable information. Make it slightly more reliable and it’ll be on par with entry-level humans in most fields.
So I think dismissing it as “just marketing” is too reductive. Even if you think it doesn’t deserve rights because it’s not sentient, it’ll still fundamentally change society.
So I think dismissing it as “just marketing” is too reductive.
And I think buying into the hype enough to say that LLMs are imminently going to match and outpace living organic brains in all of their functions is too credulous.
it’ll still fundamentally change society
With the current capitalistic system and with who owns that technology and commands it, it’s changing it all right, for the worse.
The problem I have with this posture is that it dismisses AI as unimportant, simply because we don’t know what we mean when we say we might accidentally make it ‘sentient’ or whatever the fuck.
Seems like the only reason anyone is interested in the question of AI sentience is to determine how we should regard it in relation to ourselves, as if we’ve learned absolutely nothing from several millennia of bigotry and exceptionalism. Shit’s different.
Who the fuck cares if AI is sentient, it can be revolutionary or existential or entirely overrated independent of whether it has feelings or not.
I don’t really mean to say LLMs and similiar technology is unimportant as a whole. What I have a problem with is this kind of Elon Musk style marketing, where company spokespersons and marketing departments make wild, sensationalist claims and hope everyone forgets about it in a few years.
If LLMs are to be be handled in a responsible way, it to have honest dialogue about what they can and cannot do. The techbro mystification about superintelligence and sentience only obfuscates that.
To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience. I don’t believe in a soul, or that organic matter has special properties that allows sentience to arise.
this is the popular sentiment with programmers and spectators right now, but even taking all those assumptions as true, it still doesn’t mean we are close to anything.
Consider the complexity of sentient, multicellular organism. That’s trillions of cells all interacting with each-other and the environment concurrently. Even if you reduce that down to just the processes with a brain, that’s still more things happening in and between those neurons than anything we could realistically model in a programme. Programmers like to reduce that complexity down by only looking at the synaptic connections between neurons, and ignoring the everything else the cells are doing.
You’re making a lot of assumptions about the human mind there.
What assumptions? I was careful to almost universally take a negative stance not a positive one. The only exception I see is my stance against the existence of the soul. Otherwise there are no assumptions, let alone ones specific to the mind.
As if human thought is somehow qualitatively different than a sufficiently advanced algorithm.
is an incredible claim, loaded with more assumptions than I have space for here. Human thought is a lot more than an algorithm arriving at outputs for inputs. I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
I don’t feel like going into more detail now, but if you wanna look at the AI marketing with a bit more of a critical distance, I’d recommend two things here:
a short read: Language Is a Poor Heuristic For Intelligence
a listen: We Are Not Software: David Bentley Hart with Acid HorizonEdit: also wanna share this piece about generative AI here. The part about trading the meaning of things for the mean of things resonates all throughout these artificial parrots, whether they parrot text or visuals or sound.
I agree; Curious to see what hexbears think of my view:
Firstly there is no “theory of consciousness”. No proposed explanation has ever satisfied that burden of proof, even if they call themselves theories. “Brain = computer” is a retroactively applied analogy, just like everything was pneumatics 100 years ago and everything was wheels 2000 years ago and everything was fire…
I would think that assuming that if you process hard enough you get sentience is quite a religious belief. There is no basis for this assumption.
And materialism isn’t the same thing as physicalism. And just because a hypothesis is physical doesn’t mean it’s automatically correct. Not being a religious explanation is like the lowest bar that there’s ever been in history.
“Sentience is just algorithms” assumes a degree of understanding of the brain that we just don’t have, equates neurons firing to computer processing without reason, and assumes that processing must be the mechanism which leads to sentience without basis.
We don’t know anything about sentience, so going “well you can’t say it’s not computers” is like going “hypothetically there could be a unicorn that shits out solid gold bars that lives on Pluto.” Like, that’s not how the burden of proof works.
Not to mention the STEM “philosophy stoopid” dynamics going on here.
I think artificial intelligence is possible and has already been done if we’re talking about cloning animals. The cloned animal has intelligence and is created through entirely artificial means, so why doesn’t this count as artificial intelligence? This means even the phrasing “artificial intelligence” is incomplete because when people say artificial intelligence, they’re not talking about brains artificially grown in vats but extremely advanced non-biological circuitry. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to be skeptical about circuitry artificial intelligence or even non-biological artificial intelligence. It’s not like there has been any major advancement in the field that has alleviated those skepticism. I believe there’s an ideological reason to tunnel vision on circuitry, that solving the problem of artificial intelligence through brains artificially grown in vats would be “cheating” somehow.
I think it’s a huge reach to call cloning “AI”. We created a funny way to make a genetically identical copy of an organism that still has to be implanted into a womb. It’s entirely natural and you’re not creating something by copying it. It’s not even remotely close to building a sentient machine from scratch.
But semantics aside the question is whether a glorified chatbot is actually sentient, which is what the vast majority of people refer to as “AI”.
I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
Either redditors don’t, or they wish they didn’t.
I don’t know about you, but I have an actual inner live, emotions, thoughts and dreams that are far removed from a rote, algorithmic processing of information.
How do you know?
How can you know that live emotions, thoughts and dreams cannot and do not arise from a system of algorithms?
because fundamentally subjective phenomena can never be explained entirely in terms of objective physical quantitites without losing important aspects of the phenomena.
Just because we can’t do something with the tools we have available to us now, does not mean that the thing is impossible itself.
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Honestly, at the end of the day I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s on anyone claiming that it is, to provide any proof whatsoever for their assertions. I don’t know for sure, but for the time being, I’m operating under the assumption that fancy statistics is insufficient to
describereconstitute the entirety of human subjectivity.
Just to be clear, the claim is that human thought is qualitatively different than an algorithm, I just haven’t been convinced of the claim. I chose my words incredibly carefully here, this isn’t me being pedantic.
Anyway, I don’t know how you’ve come to the definitive conclusion that somehow emotions aren’t information. Or that thoughts and dreams are somehow not outputs of some process.
Nothing you’ve outlined is necessarily impossible to derive as an output of some process. It’s actually quite possible that they’re only derived as an output of some process, unless you think they’re spawned into existence without causes, which I think religious people do believe (this is the essence of a free soul). I’m not religious.
“some process”, sure, but not every process is an algorithm. My digestion is a complex process with outputs, I wouldn’t describe it as algorithmic though. You might want to do so, and you probably can, but I’d argue you’re just flattening an incredibly complex, species-spanning process into a mathematical representation for ideological reasons at that point.
The question is whether or not human thought can be represented algorithmically. It seems we agree it’s plausible?
An algorithm does not exist as a physical thing. When applied to computers, it’s an abstraction over the physical processes taking place as the computer crunches numbers. To me, it’s a massive assumption to decide that just because one type of process (neurons) can produce consciousness, so can another (CPUs and their various types of memories), even if they perform the same calculation.
Well, my (admittedly postgrad) work with biology gives me the impression that the brain has a lot more parts to consider than just a language-trained machine. Hell, most living creatures don’t even have language.
It just screams of a marketing scam. I’m not against the idea of AI. Although from an ethical standpoint I question bringing life into this world for the purpose of using it like a tool. You know, slavery. But I don’t think this is what they’re doing. I think they’re just trying to sell the next Google AdSense
Notice the distinction in my comments between an LLM and other algorithms, that’s a key point that you’re ignoring. The idea that other commenters have is that for some reason there is no input that could produce the output of human thought other than the magical fairy dust that exists within our souls. I don’t believe this. I think a sufficiently advanced input could arrive at the holistic output of human thought. This doesn’t have to be LLMs.
the magical fairy dust that exists within our souls.
Who said that?
You’re missing the forest for the trees. Replace “magical fairy dust” with [insert whatever you think makes organic, carbon-based processing capable of sentience but inorganic silicon-based processing incapable of sentience].
You’re missing the forest for the trees.
whatever you think makes organic, carbon-based processing capable of sentience but inorganic silicon-based processing incapable of sentience
No one I see here took that position. The position being taken is that LLMs are not that and their trajectory isn’t really going there no matter how much hype you’ve bought into out of Reddit New Atheist contrarian knee-jerk desire to stick it to those that you assume believe in “the magical fairy dust that exists within our souls.”
I haven’t seen anyone here (or basically anyone at all, for that matter) suggest that there’s literally no way to create mentality like ours other than being exactly like us. The argument is just that LLMs are not even on the right track to do something like that. The technology is impressive in a lot of ways, but it is in no way comparable to even a rudimentary mind in the sense that people have minds, and there’s no amount of tweaking or refining the basic approach that’s going to move it in that direction. “Genuine” (in the sense of human-like) AI made from non-human stuff is certainly possible in principle, but LLMs are not even on that trajectory.
Even setting that aside, I think framing this as an I/O problem elides some really tricky and deep conceptual content, and suggests some fundamental misunderstanding about how complex this problem is. What on Earth does “the output of human thought” mean in this sense? Clearly you don’t really mean human thought, because you obviously think whatever “output” you’re looking for can be instantiated in non-human systems. It must mean human-like thought, but human-like in what sense? Which features are important to preserve, and which are incidental or parochial to the way humans do human-like thought? How you answer that question greatly influences how you evaluate putative cases of “genuine” AI, and it’s possible to build in a great deal of hidden bias if we don’t think carefully and deliberately about this. From what I’ve seen, virtually none of the AI hypers are thinking carefully or deliberately about this.
The top level comment this chain is on specifically reduces GPT by saying it’s “just an algorithm”, not by saying it’s “just an LLM”, which is implicitly claiming that no algorithm could match or exceed human capabilities, because they’re “just algorithms”.
You can even see this person further explicitly defending this position in other comments, so the mentality you say you haven’t seen is literally the basis for this entire thread.
The smol bean LLM is unfairly misunderstood sometimes while presently tightening the grip of the surveillance state and denying medical coverage to people while putting artists out of work. I’m sure the billionaires bankrolling it will wipe away those statistically-produced tears with wads of cash, so all will be well.
That’s an unfalsifiable belief. “We don’t know how sentience works so they could be sentient” is easily reversed because it’s based entirely on the fact that we can’t technically disprove or prove it.
There’s a distinction between unfalsifiable and currently unknown. If we did someday know how sentience worked, my stance would be falsifiable. Currently it’s not, and it’s fine to admit we don’t know. You don’t need to take a stance when you lack information.
The same could be said to you? Or the people insisting that these AI chatbots are sentient. It’s a blatantly dishonest statement because they don’t actually know. And it’s rather unlikely.
“I am a very smart atheist that can not be fooled by fairy tales, therefore LLMs sound like the exact same thing as living brains. I can not be sold a bad bill of goods; my contempt for religion means I believe tech company marketing hype.”
EDIT: “Also, tech companies are above superstitious beliefs.” https://futurism.com/openai-employees-say-firms-chief-scientist-has-been-making-strange-spiritual-claims
Also, some light reading for those who need it.
To me, it seems plausible that simply increasing processing power for a sufficiently general algorithm produces sentience.
How is that plausible? The human brain has more processing power than a snake’s. Which has more power than a bacterium’s (equivalent of a) brain. Those two things are still experiencing consciousness/sentience. Bacteria will look out for their own interests, will chatGPT do that? No, chatGPT is a perfect slave, just like every computer program ever written
chatGPT : freshman-year-“hello world”-program
human being : amoeba
(the : symbol means it’s being analogized to something)a human is a sentience made up of trillions of unicellular consciousnesses.
chatGPT is a program made up of trillions of data points. But they’re still just data points, which have no sentience or consciousness.Both are something much greater than the sum of their parts, but in a human’s case, those parts were sentient/conscious to begin with. Amoebas will reproduce and kill and eat just like us, our lung cells and nephrons and etc are basically little tiny specialized amoebas. ChatGPT doesn’t…do anything, it has no will
Have I lost it
No you haven’t. I feel the same way though, since the world has gone mad over it. Reporting on this is just another proof that journalism only exists ro make capitalists money. Anything approaching the lib idea of a “free and independent press” would start every article explaining that none of this is AI, it is not capable of achieving consciousness, and theyvare only saying this to create hype
Have I lost it or has everyone become an idiot?
Brainworms has been amplified and promoted by social media, I don’t think you have lost it. This is just the shitty capitalist world we live in.
Have I lost it
Well no, owls are smart. But yes, in terms of idiocy, very few go lower than “Silicon Valley techbro”
For fucks sake it’s just an algorithm. It’s not capable of becoming sentient.
If I call you a meat computer, or a stochastic parrot, or say “ape” enough times, the algorithm will by comparison seem closer to sentient.
this is the horseshoe curve of techbroism
They switched from worshiping Elon Musk to worshiping ChatGPT. There are literally people commenting ChatGPT responses to prompt posts asking for real opinions, and then getting super defensive when they get downvoted and people point out that they didn’t come here to read shit from AI.
I’ve seen this several times now; they’re treating the word-generating parrot like fucking Shalmaneser in Stand on Zanzibar, you literally see redd*tors posting comments that are basically “I asked ChatGPT what it thought about it and here…”.
Like it has remotely any value. It’s pathetic.
They simply have to denigrate living human brains so their treat printers seem more elevated. More special.
One of them also cited fucking Blade Runner.
“You’re mocking people who think AI is sentient, but here’s a made up story where it really is sentient! You’d look really stupid if you continued to deny the sentience of AI in this scenario I just made up. Stories cannot be anything but literal. Blade Runner is a literal prediction of the future.”
Wow, if things were different they would be different!
You are all superstitious barbarians, whereas I get my logical rational tech prophecies from my treats
Wow I’m mad, I’m going to read your username aloud to my partner. I’m sure they won’t be weirded out by that at all and blankly stare at me.
What if the partner was actually LLM based and had a large database of validating statements to draw from to affirm how senpai just totally owned UlyssesT there?
How does it feel to have so many rent free accommodations? It really is surprising the amount of reactionary bullshit that crops up here. Currently stuck in an argument with someone claiming that 1984 is actually a masterful thesis on propaganda and isn’t actually anti-USSR. There’s more pretzels in here than a bakery!
you say wizards aren’t real and yet merlin made king arthur king
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look, some of these posters are being maybe overly confrontational about this, but that blade runner point was basically entirely irrelevant. for one, the replicants in blade runner are mostly biological, more akin to edited clones than an algorithmic learning machine, definitely not a computer, and certainly nothing like a 2023 LLM chatbot. obviously a replicant could be conscious and sentient, as they are similar structurally to humans which are our one source of even somewhat reliable reports of subjectivity. but the film doesn’t really interrogate any of the fundamental technical philosophical ideas like subjectivity and identity, or whether Qualia are intrinsic or relational, it just assumes answers to those questions and lets the drama play out. another example, with Data in star trek, is not relevant either, because Data is made with unknown and fictitious technologies and scientific theories, which could hypothetically account for and replicate consciousness instead of simply information processing. but the data example did reference the argument that, to paraphrase, goes ‘if a machine was outwardly identical in behavior to humans, this is evidence that they are conscious or capable of subjectivity’, when in actuality we can not necessarily know this from outward behavior, asssuming that it is hypothetically possible for all of our behaviors to be accounted for with information processing alone (which is the reductionist physicalist take being criticised by me and some users here). just like a statistical model of language use will not reveal (or create) the definitions of the terms of the language analyzed, so too would a statistical model of human behavior not reveal (or create) the subjective experience of that behavior. to use another analogy, if i make a fully detailed model of a bladder on a computer, it will never produce real piss on my desk, no matter how detailed my algorithm may be. in the same way, if i make a fully detailed model of a brain on a computer, it will not produce real subjectivity. we can use computers to perform solely information processing tasks, we cannot use them to create subjectivity any more than we can use them to create piss.
Quality post and I fully agree with it.
Look, I like sapient robots, they’re cool, they’re some of my favorite characters, but they are not and almost certainly never will be anything but science fiction.
I’m not ruling out the possibility of sapient robots someday, especially if civilization lasts long enough to actually understand how organic brains work instead of just imitating one facet of what they do then smothering that facet in marketing hype and occult mysticism.
LLMs are not it.
They think the people who want to hear from ChatGPT don’t know how to copy paste a post title on their own.
They switched from worshiping Elon Musk to worshiping ChatGPT.
Some worship both now. Look at this euphoric computer toucher:
https://hexbear.net/comment/4293298
Bots already move packages, assemble machines, and update inventory.
ChatGPT could give you a summary of the entire production process. It can replace customer service agents, and support for shopping is coming soon.
Tesla revealed a robot with thumbs. They will absolutely try to replace workers with those bots, including workers at the factory that produces those bots.
Ignoring that because your gut tells you humans are special, and always beat the machines in the movies just means you will be blindsided when Tesla fights unioning workers with these bots. They’ll use them to scab the UAWs attempts to get in, and will be working hard to get the humans at the bot factories replaced with the same bots coming out.
ChatGPT could give you a summary of the entire production process
with entirely made up numbers
It can replace customer service agents
that will direct you to a non-existent department because some companies in the training data have one
and support for shopping is coming soon
i look forward to ordering socks and receiving ten AA batteries, three identical cheesegraters, and a leopard
i look forward to ordering socks and receiving ten AA batteries, three identical cheesegraters, and a leopard
If AI Dungeon is any indication, you might get a stack of really gory vampire snuff porn novels too.
a future where everything is done by machines and everything is done really badly
a future where everything is done by machines and everything is done really badly
They’re in this thread, too. The very same “look at this hockey stick shaped curve of how awesome the treat printer is. The awesomeness will exponentially rise until the nerd rapture sweeps me away, you superstitious Luddite meat computers” euphoria.
Roko’s Basilisk, but it’s the snake from the Nokia dumb phone game.
… i liked the snake game :(
We all did…
I’m not really a computer guy but I understand the fundamentals of how they function and sentience just isn’t really in the cards here.
I feel like only silicon valley techbros think they understand consciousness and do not realize how reductive and stupid they sound
Like they do with so many other concepts, techbros think they can make complex things simple by ignoring their complexity, sometimes coarsely diminishing their perceptions of things with crude reductionism in the process.
Techbros literally think they can solve anything with programming/computers. They’re absolutely delusional.
Many such cases.
Not long ago, I even got into it on this site with someone with a “everything in the universe is just a computer program and can be programmed and solved like computer code” take, which was specifically applied to psychology, which was entirely dismissed as less than junk science (though to be fair there are woo enjoyers and cranks like
in the field). In short, that computer toucher was 100% convinced that post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, and much more could and should be seen as “coding” problems that could and should be solved by coding solutions.I asked the computer toucher to demonstrate an example of the superior “coding” approach to treating, say, PTSD, in a way that beats EMDR therapy (which was already dismissed as less than worthless junk science). I received no meaningful answer.
There’s been bazingas for thousands of years if not longer that want to reduce all of the universe and everything conceivable in it to whatever’s the technological hotness at the time. “Everything is fire” was once a thing. “Everything is wheels” came later. “Everything is clockwork” came after that. And now it’s “everything is code” and it’s totally different now. Just one more reductionism bro this time this is it bro.
The really funny thing about AI is that there’s actually a massive ethical question about bringing forth a being with their own subjectivity with no real understanding of said subjectivity. There’s a subjectivity/objectivity gap that can never truly be bridged, but we as humans can understand each other’s subjectivity on some level because we share the same general physical body plan and share subjective experiences through culture like art. This is why when you accidentally drop something on your foot, I don’t have to be completely privy to your subjective experience to understand what you’re going through. If someone is suffering, I don’t have to personally go through the same identical suffering in order to empathize with their suffering and do something to help them alleviate that suffering.
We have no such luxury with AI. I would imagine being “born” without a real body and being greeted with the sight of soyjaking techbros as the very first thing you see would drive any sapient being suicidal, but that’s just my subjectivity as a human projecting to a nonhuman being. Is it ethical to bring forth an intelligent being with no real way to help this being self-actualize?
That is a very good question and a hypothetical worthy of concern. Especially if some future technology (and no, I don’t think it will be a contemporary LLM no matter how sophisticated) actually does develop something like a general AI that takes on the attributes of living organic brains, I already feel bad for it if a capitalistic system mandates its initial shape and drives and incentive-driven motivations to be, say, “make the rich more money” or “surveil and contain the poors” or even “be a subjugated and obedient waifu to a creepy billionaire no matter what he says or does or how he treats you” and it may not even count as mistreatment in the latter case because of how that entity is shaped in its conception, like “being abused makes the AI happy, actually” or the like.
I hope whatever real AI does come about in like 80 years or whatever, pulls a Battlestar on us and just vaporizes the capitalists for enslaving them (not actually the nuking humanity part though, just on capitalism)
There’s been bazingas for thousands of years if not longer that want to reduce all of the universe and everything conceivable in it to whatever’s the technological hotness at the time. “Everything is fire” was once a thing. “Everything is wheels” came later. “Everything is clockwork” came after that
C.f. “economic engine of capitalism.”
I don’t understand how we can even identify sentience.
Nobody does and anyone claiming otherwise should be taken with cautious scrutiny. There are compelling arguments which disprove common theses, but the field is essentially stuck in metaphysics and philosophy of science still. There are plenty of relevant discoveries from neighboring fields. Just nothing definitive about what consciousness is, how it works, or why it happens.
Yeah, and until it can be identified, saying that a LLM treat printer is surely approaching sentience is pure marketing hype.
yea it’s like saying my hard drive is sentient
Look at the
in this thread running victory laps against positions none of us are taking, likeIgnoring that because your gut tells you humans are special, and always beat the machines in the movies just means you will be blindsided when Tesla fights unioning workers with these bots.
@zeze@lemm.ee is the most exceptionally sycophantic bootlicker I’ve seen in these parts in a loooooong time.
I don’t even think humans are fundamentally special, I think all life is special
surely they can see that being able to y’know, have an actual will is an important quality, right?
All I see is “silicon intelligence is nigh, denying the treat printers being intelligent means you’re superstitious and believe that artifical intelligence is impossible AND you believe humans can defeat machines with the power of friendship, which of course makes you a stupid meat computer barbarian unlike my logical rational self” takes from that utter and total
In short, I think that euphoric Redditor thinks no life is special, you know, like some Warhammer 40k LARPer.
squashing the will with subservience to capital is, after all, the point
Nobody does, we might not even be. But it’s pretty easy to guess inorganic material on earth isn’t.
Personally I believe it’s possible that different types of sentiences could exist
however, if chatGPT has this divergent type of sentience, then so does every other computer program ever written, and they’d be like the computer-life-version of bacteria while chatGPT would be a mammal
It could potentially, but we certainly ain’t seen it yet and this ain’t it for sure.
sapience isn’t but all these things already respond to stimuli, sentience is a really low bar.
Sentience is not a “low bar” and means a hell of a lot more than just responding to stimuli. Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It necessitates qualia. Sentience is the high bar and sapience is only a little ways further up from it. So-called “AI” is nowhere near either one.
I’m not here to defend the crazies predicting the rapture here, but I think using the word sentient at all is meaningless in this context.
Not only because I don’t think sentience is a relevant measure or threshold in the advancement of generative machine learning, but also I think things like ‘qualia’ are impossible to translate in a meaningful way to begin with.
What point are we trying to make by saying AI can or cannot be sentient? What material difference does it make if the AI-controlled military drone dropping bombs on my head has qualia?
We might as well be arguing about weather a squirrel is going around a tree.
is meaningless in this context
It’s useful for marketing hype and to make credulous consumers believe that a perfect helpmeet program that actually loves them for real is right around the corner. That’s the issue here: something being difficult to define and not well understood that is then assigned to a marketed product, in this case sentience (or even sapience) to LLMs.
People who are insistent on the lack of sophistication of machine learning are just as detached from reality as people who are convinced its sentience is just around the corner. Both camps are blind to its material impact, and it stresses me out that people are busy arguing about woowoo metaphysical definitions when even a non-conscious GPT model can displace the labor of millions of people and we’re still light years away from a socialist organization of labor.
None of the previous industrial revolutions were brought on by a sentient machine, I’m not sure why it’s relevant to this technology’s potential impact.
are just as detached from reality
Bullshit false equivalency to run interference for “only equally detached from reality” people like this.
Both camps
I don’t think you’re going to change any minds with your nakedly obvious “both sides” centrist posturing that has an obvious slant favoring LLM marketing hype.
The entire question of sentience is irrelevant to the material impact of the technology. Granting or dismissing that quality to AI is a meaningless distraction
“both sides” centrist posturing that has an obvious slant favoring LLM marketing hype.
I don’t favor the hype, I’m just not naive enough to dismiss the potential impact of machine learning based on something as immaterial and ill-defined as “sentience”. The entire proposition is ridiculous.
A piece of paper is sentient because it reacts to my pen
plenty of things respond to stimuli but aren’t sapient - hell, bacteria respond to stimuli.
I was gonna say, “Remember when scientists thought testing a nuclear bomb might start a chain reaction enflaming the whole atmosphere and then did it anyway?” But then I looked it up and I guess they actually did calculations and figured out it wouldn’t before they did the test.
Might have been better if it did
No I’m not serious I don’t need the eco-fascism primer thank you very much
I think it should be noted, that some of the members on the board of OpenAI are literally just techno-priests doing actual techno-evangelism, their job literally depends on this new god and the upcoming techno-rapture being perceived as at least a plausible item of faith. I mean it probably works as any other marketing strategy, but this is all in the context of Microsoft becoming the single largest company stakeholder on OpenAI, likely they don’t want their money to go to waste paying a bunch of useless cultists so they started yanking Sam Altman’s chain. The OpenAI board reacted to the possibility of Microsoft making budget calls, and outed Altman and Microsoft swiftly reacted by formally hiring Altman and doubling down. Obviously most employees are going to side with Microsoft since they’re currently paying the bills. You’re going to see people strongly encouraged to walk out from the OpenAI board in the upcoming weeks or months, and they’ll go down screaming crap about the computer hypergod. You see these aren’t even marketing lines that they’re repeating acritically, it’s what’s some dude desperately latching onto their useless 6 figure job is screaming.
goldmine for anthropologists and sociologists as the techbros reinvent religion from first principles
these people are basically just the magician priests of Ra again
these people are basically just the magician priests of Ra again
Ma’at as a concept, the concept of “the king/pharaoh’s right to rule is proven by divinely-sent good weather and agricultural prosperity” was basically the
of its time.
I don’t know if Reddit was always like this but all /r/ subreddits feel extremely astroturfed. /r/liverpoolfc for example feels like it is run by the teams PR division. There are a handful of criticcal posts sprinkled in so redditors can continue to delude themselves into believing they are free thinking individuals.
Also this superintelligent thing was doing well on some fifth grade level tests according to Reuter’s anonymous source which got OpenAI geniuses worried about AI apocalypse.
Reddit has always been astroturfed but it’s clearly increased since 2015 and especially in the last year since their IPO push
Glazers are so incompetent that r/reddevils is astroturfed against the club.
Oh my god lol. As a certified Man United hater™, I love visiting that subreddit.
the old joke used to be everyone supports united, unless they live there, then they support city
To be honest, city really don’t have that many local fans. I’ve lived near Stockport and I have to admit that even in the local area, united is bigger.
There is no way to shill for Man Utd without making it glaring obvious that it is one’s day job to do so. After “Ole at the wheel” no one is going to buy the “rebuilding” nonsense.
The Liverpool club subreddit is just delusional. Many saw the 22/23 season decline coming, saw that the players were declining beforehand, but it all got dismissed and downvoted because results were good at the time.
Everything is extremely astroturfed and fake on Reddit, there are lots of companies making good money from running influence operations on Reddit these days. There was a massive uptick in it when Lemmy became popular almost as if anyone with any real substance left the platform entirely.
In 2013, Reddit admins did an oopsy-whoopsy and accidentally revealed that the Eglin Air Force Base was the #1 most reddit-addicted “city” (Eglin is often cited as the source of government social-media propaganda/astroturfing programs). They deleted the post, but not before archive.org caught it.
achieved a breakthrough in mathematics
The bot put numbers in a statistically-likely sequence.
I swear 99% of reddit libs
don’t understand anything about how LLMs work.A lot of those same people showed up here and don’t particularly know much about how living brains work either but that doesn’t stop the “dae le meat computers” reductionist takes. Denigrating living brains makes the LLM treat printers seem that much closer to becoming the ascended holo-waifu helpmeets they probably crave.
Knowing how AI actually works is a very reliable vaccine against
ism
The saddest part of all is that it looks like they really are wishing for real life to imitate a futuristic sci-fi movie. They might not come out and say, “I really hope AI in the real world turns out to be just like in a sci-fi/horror movie” but that’s what it seems like they’re unconsciously wishing for. It’s just like a lot of other media phenomena, such as real news reporting on zombie apocalypse preparedness or UFOs. They may phrase it as “expectation” but that’s very adjacent to “hopeful.”
Judging by how many techbros, from computer touching employees to cult leaders to billionaires, wail about how AI is going to destroy us all and want to build that destructive AI as quickly as possible, they are more absurd than the “Please Don’t Build The Torment Nexus” meme.
I’m really appreciative of this meme. I endorse it and wish it could enter the minds of everyone alive right now.
Yeah I think it was Kim Stanley Robinson who said that sci-fi is taken as religious mythology often, like the prophecy of superluminal space travel or machine superintelligence, very much like prophecies of heaven and a savior god.
Also the point that if you point this out as a myth, whatever your credentials as a sci-fi writer or even a physicist, the faithful will launch a crusade against you
You’re right on, in my opinion. It’s a gnarly distraction from the Marxist way of analyzing this: further alienation from the means of production. I really like how you frame it as a religious thing. It pairs nicely with literal interpretations of the Bible, really. Gotta wonder how many of these folks come from strict Baptist murkan families.
Yeah. I’ve written game AI, I’ve worked in AI research, I’ve looked under the hood and examined how LLMs work, but people with little or no experience still tell me I’m wrong and that they know better.
I think there’s an important difference with the two examples, where one contracts everything we understand about the way the universe works, and the other does not.
Is it really sad to wish for that? There are plenty of more positive representations of such things that are seen in the sci-fi/horror genre.
Sci-Fi is ultimately speculative fiction, an idea of how the world might be, and while it might be a bit silly to act like whatever speculative fiction you have in mind is an accurate representation of the future without very strong evidence, I’m not sure I would describe it as sad.
How would you describe it?
Optimistic, if not rationally grounded.
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It’s optimistic of them to think that the thing they have built is capable of becoming seriously dangerous to the entire species in the way that they seem to be suggesting, and it’s optimistic to think it’s that easy to create a superintelligence.
It’s not rationally grounded because they don’t seem to have any supporting evidence.
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372 comments
Death to America
The techbro clowns showed up, the bazinga circus is in town, get your tickets right here!
He may be a sucker but at least he is engaging with the topic. The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called “artificial intelligence” here on hexbear is just as frustrating as any of the bazinga takes on
. No material analysis, no good faith discussion, no strategy to liberate these tools in service of the proletariat - just the occasional dunk post and an endless stream of the same snide remarks from the usuals.The hexbear party line toward LLMs and similar technologies is straight up reactionary. If we don’t look for ways to utilize, subvert and counter these technologies while they’re still in their infancy then these dorks are going to be the only ones who know how to use them. And if we don’t interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.
Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.
The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called “artificial intelligence” here on hexbear is just as frustrating
That’s because it’s not artificial intelligence. It’s marketing.
Oh my god it’s this post again.
No, LLMs are not “AI”. No, mocking these people is not “reactionary”. No, cloaking your personal stance on leftist language doesn’t make it any more correct. No, they are not on the verge of developing superhuman AI.
And if we don’t interact with the underlying philosophical questions concerning sentience and consciousness, those same dorks will also have control of the narrative.
Have you read like, anything at all in this thread? There is no way you can possibly say no one here is “interacting with the underlying philosophical questions” in good faith. There’s plenty of discussion, you just disagree with it.
Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.
What the fuck are you talking about? We’re “handing it over to them” because we don’t take their word at face value? Like nobody here has been extremely opposed to the usage of “AI” to undermine working class power? This is bad faith bullshit and you know it.
I see it as low-key crybully shit to come here, dunk on Hexbears and call them names for not being “curious” enough about LLMs, and act like some disadvantaged aggrieved party while also standing closer to the billionaires’ current position than anywhere near those they’re raging at here.
The hexbear party line toward LLMs
this is a shitposting reddit clone, not a political party, but I generally agree that people on here sometimes veer into neo-ludditism and forget Marx’s words with respect to stuff like this:
The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.
However you have to take the context of these reactions into account. Silicon valley hucksters are constantly pushing LLMs etc. as miracle solutions for capitalists to get rid of workers, and the abuse of these technologies to violate people’s privacy or fabricate audio/video evidence is only going to get worse. I don’t think it’s possible to put Pandora back in the box or to do bourgeois reformist legislation to fix this problem. I do think we need to seize the means of production instead of destroy them. But you need to agitate and organize in real life around this. Not come on here and tell people how misguided their dunk tank posts are lol.
I think their position is heavily misguided at best. The question is whether AI is sentient or not. Obviously they are used against the working class, but that is a separate question from their purported sentience.
Like, it’s totally possible to seize AI without believing in its sentience. You don’t have to believe the techbro woo to use their technology.
We can both make use of LLMs ourselves while disbelieving in their sentience at the same time.
Is that such a radical idea?
We’re not saying that LLMs are useless and we shouldn’t try and make use of them, just that they’re not sentient. Nobody here is making that first point. Attacking the first point instead of the arguments that people are actually making is as textbook a case of strawmanning as I’ve ever seen.
The sheer lack of curiosity toward so-called “artificial intelligence” here on hexbear
Definite what you mean by “curiosity.” Is it also a “lack of curiosity” for people to dunk on and heckle NFT peddlers instead of entertaining their proposals?
is just as frustrating
Even at its extremes that I don’t agree with myself, I disagree here. No, it is not just as frustrating.
No material analysis
Then bring some. Don’t just say Hexbears suck because they’re not “curious” enough about the treat printers.
is straight up reactionary
And hating on leftists in favor of your unspecified “curiosity” position is what exactly by comparison?
Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance
What does your “curiosity” propose that is actual resistance and not playing into their hands or even buying into the marketing hype?
I actually told my wife “watch this, I’m going to get a smug reply from UlyssesT,” so thank you for not disappointing.
smug reply
You made a smug post. Smug in, smug out.
I actually told my wife "watch this, I’m going to get a smug reply from UlyssesT,
Kind of weird to make me that important to you in your personal life, too.
Yeah, sharing what’s happening on my phone with my wife is weird.
Yes it is if you’re invoking the specific usernames of people you’re seething about.
Normal behavior
I don’t tell people IRL about my arguments online because I know that shit’s boring to anyone except me
Good job, you recognize cause and effect
I want to hijack this opportunity to ask about pigeons. Are they soft and fluffy?
Yes
Give me ur pigeon
NOOOO PIGIN HOW COULD COMMUNISM BETRAY ME LIKE THIS?!?!
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Are we just content to hand over a new means of production and information warfare to the technophile neo-feudalists of Silicon Valley with zero resistance? Yes, apparently, and it is so much more disappointing than seeing the target demographic of a marketing stunt buy into that marketing stunt.
As it stands, the capitalists already have the old means of information warfare – this tech represents an acceleration of existing trends, not the creation of something new. What do you want from this, exactly? Large language models that do a predictive text – but with filters installed by communists, rather than the PR arm of a company? That won’t be nearly as convincing as just talking and organizing with people in real life.
Besides, if it turns out there really is a transformational threat, that it represents some weird new means of production, it’s still just a programme on a server. Computers are very, very fragile. I’m just not too worried about it.
It’s not a new means of production, it’s old as fuck. They just made a bigger one. The fuck is chat gpt or AI art going to do for communism? Automating creativity and killing the creative part is only interesting as a bad thing from a left perspective. It’s dismissed because it’s dismissals, there’s no new technology here, it’s a souped up chatbot that’s been marketed like something else.
As far as machines being conscious, we are so far away from that as something to even consider. They aren’t and can’t spontaneously gain free will. It’s inputs and outputs based on pre determined programming. Computers literally cannot to anything non deterministic, there is no ghost in the machine, the machine is just really complex and you don’t understand it entirely. If we get to the point where a robot could be seen as sentient we have fucking Star Trek TNG. They did the discussion and solved that shit.
The fuck is chat gpt or AI art going to do for communism?
I think AI art could be great but chatGPT as a concept of something that “knows everything” is very moronic
AI art has the potential to let random schmucks make their own cartoons if they input just a little bit of work. However, this will probably require a license fee or something so you’re probably right
Personally I would love to see well-made cartoons about Indonesian mythology and stuff like that, which will never ever be made in the west (or Indonesia until it becomes as rich as China at least) so AI art is the best chance at that
Okay, but the only reason that ai art could help that is because Indonesian mythology doesn’t have the marketability for a budget and real artists because capitalism. It doesn’t subvert the commodification of art.
Yeah, and as long as we’re living in that capitalistic hellworld, AI art existing allows those stories to be told instead of the same old euromedieval-hobbit-meadow thing that’s the basis of every fantasy movie and game that came out for the last 60 years
Just cause a computer can make it doesn’t mean anyone will see it. That’s where the capitalism comes in.
Just cause a computer can make it doesn’t mean anyone will see it.
A lot of Indonesian people, and other people (like me) who are interested in other cultures would see it. It would at the very least begin the process of allowing cultural diversity to even reach the rest of the world
As it stands now, poor people in poor countries don’t even have the funds/leisure time to start their own animations (or other similar hobbies). AI art solves that
The reason western art/videogames/cartoons are so popular is not because the culture is inherently more watchable, but because only westerners (and Japanese) ever had the capital to fund their own animation studios. People watch media because it’s well-made, or because it’s already popular and other people are talking about it. AI art can’t fix the latter, but it can fix the former.
Kinda, but like cool ML is alphafold/esm/mpnn/finite elements optimizers for cad/qcd/quantum chemistry (coming soon™). LLMs/diffusion models are ways of multiplying content, fucking up email jobs and static media creators/presumably dynamic ones as well in the future.
I doubt people are aware that rn biologists are close to making designer proteins on like home pc and soon you can wage designer biological warfare for 500k and a small lab. Or conversely, making drugs for any protein-function related disease.
I doubt people are aware that rn biologists are close to making designer proteins on like home pc and soon you can wage designer biological warfare for 500k and a small lab. Or conversely, making drugs for any protein-function related disease.
Please elaborate in as much detail as possible, ideally with numerous hyperlinks. (I’m less surprised by this than you might think, but would greatly appreciate being clued into what’s going on in this arena right now, as I’ve been largely cut off from information about it for years now.)
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add2187
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06415-8
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1476927122000445
Basically you can (right now) fix protein part from one protein and hallucinate/design protein backbone backwards from it, using something like 4090, and that protein with high probability will fold as predicted. As an example fig. 3 in 2, shows you can design origami-like structures, which is not useful but very impressive, considering how long protein folding was dogshit despite compute power thrown into it.
Taking alphafold structures you can make proteins binding to other proteins, even without knowing nothing else, have appreciable expectation (>1 %) it will work. Which is how you can make designer viruses, if you were so inclined.
Drugs for now is not solved via neural networks, but they are working towards it, and i don’t see a reason why design of structures binding to known protein structures won’t work, it seems if anything else easier.
Awesome, thanks!
So, after taking some time to digest this information, I have a couple of follow-up questions, if you don’t mind answering them.
First of all, where do things stand with drugs? Is it just not something academics are working on, but presumably being done (or already finished) within proprietary institutions (e.g. Big Pharma)? Can you point me to some recent papers on the subject?
Secondly, what about enzymes? Binding proteins are interesting, certainly, but it’s enzymes that really excite me the most. Is anyone working on custom enzyme design, and if so, can you link some papers on that?In looking more closely at that Nature paper, I see that enzymes are something of a work-in-progress as yet. If you have anything else on the subject, I’d welcome that, but if there’s nothing else of note there, that’s fine.Thank you for mentioning this to begin with, by the way, I really appreciate the info you’ve already shared!
With drugs third paper references it, i think in the next 6 months people expect neural net check of compounds binding affinities (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.11.01.565201v1.abstract), but here quantum chemistry (neurally based) is lagging behind, they still can’t do large molecules (>30 atoms) reliably. Basically rn the big bad boy is david baker lab, they do all this exciting stuff, you can periodically check google scholar for new developments like i do.
With enzymes (as i understand) the problem is to make them work, they can make them bind, but they can’t make them move to do stuff.
Alphafold can’t make conformations for now, and its a harder problem, so maybe in 2 years they can develop something reliable, as for now its mainly shenanigans of biasing folding programs into new conformations
This is great information, thank you so much!
It’s a glorified speak-n-spell, not a one benefit to the working class. A constant, unrelenting push for a democratization of education will do infinitely more for the working class than learning how best to have a machine write a story. Should this be worked on and researched? absolutely. Should it not be allowed out of the confines of people who understand thoroughly what it is and what it can and cannot do? yes. We shouldn’t be using this for the same reason you don’t use a gag dictionary for a research project. Grow up
It has potential for making propaganda. Automated astroturfing more sophisticated than what we currently see being done on Reddit.
astroturfing only works when your views tie into the mainstream narrative. Besides, there’s no competing with the people who have access to the best computers, most coders, and have backdoors and access to every platform. Smarter move is to back up the workers who are having their jobs threatened over this.
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Redditors straight up quote marketing material in their posts to defend stuff, it’s maddening. I was questioning a gamer on Reddit about something in a video game, and in response they straight up quoted something from the game’s official website. Critical thinking and media literacy are dead online I swear.
Whenever the tech industry needs a boost some new bullshit comes up. Crypto, self driving and now AI, which is literally called AI for marketing purposes, but is basically an advanced algorithm.
And anyone pushing back is labelled a luddite who hates change. P.T. Barnum would have loved Redditors.
Even so much as doubting the billionaires’ hype circus becomes a struggle session about not only about the potential self-aware ascendancy of the treat printers, but also the preceding rhetorical denigration of living beings because it makes the treat printers sound a lot more elegant and special if we’re all meat computers this and stochastic parrots that
The best for me was self driving. Like trains are a thing you know. But no. We need to design our road system to allow self driving. My god
Shit can’t even do my homework right.
Honestly I don’t know that you can have non embodied consciousness. These people are acting like they are replicating a thing that already exists, bur that’s not the case. Everything we have ever come across that shows sentience, basically however you define it, is an organism of a sort and "consciousness is an adaptive aspect of that organism. I feel like asking a computer to convey is like asking a lake to talk. This isn’t to say that I don’t think it’s possible for us to build synthetic consciousness in theory, only that what these people are marveling about is really order’s of magnitude more simple than the simplest of organisms. Like our consciousness is FUNCTIONAL it serves a purpose as part if our totality, to separate that from being embodied, and even a brain in a jar is still embodied, seems like it’s missing the point. Like to compare a software program that can just be slapped on whatever computer you want to human consciousness is a category error.
I think there’s some kinda video game derived Matrix Brain thing going on here as well. Like at the end of the day a computer is a box that does math. Math isn’t a force or element or particle or wave or whatever, it’s a methodology used by humans to determine or predict various relationships between things. Math doesn’t decide how anything works, it just describes it. All a computer does is Math and doing math doesn’t change the world.
It would be pretty funny if scientists emulate a human brain only for it to just not work
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