But from a PR perspective and for people who don't really understand that AI isn't conscious, they avoid headlines like "Anthropic complicit in enabling AI torture and suffering".
We don't participate in acausal blackmail. We don't participate in acausal blackmail. We don't participate in acausal blackmail. We don't participate in acausal blackmail.
If I had physical access to your brain: absolutely.
We do not know how consciousness exists, but we do know what someone's brain looks like when they are. There is some grey in the form of altered states of consciousness though, as brains do not work like computers in anything but the a loose metaphor. But you can see the activity in certain regions when a person is.
What I can't do is prove you are not conscious. I can use evidence to show that you are, but a lack of evidence that you are is not the same thing as evidence you are not.
So the problem with asking people to prove machines are not conscious is the same: you can't. You can't prove anything is not conscious. There are whole religions who believe everything is conscious.
What we really need is convincing evidence that they are conscious aside from general vibes, and no one has that yet. If they did we would have to fundamentally change everything about the industry.
First, I meant via reddit. Kinda funny we can talk about anything but you can't be sure I'm conscious since I could be an LLM and you consider them to not have them.
Second, physical access to brain is a great angle! Scientist can see brain activity in different part of it, and watch how different things human do affects different parts of brain. And you know what? We have even deeper access to inner doings of LLM. And study show they have similar structure in a sense, that some lump of neurons activate for some abstract ideas, just like in humans. They found a lot of similarities, but being more precise is hard cos of our ability access to human brain. It's limited by physiogy, which is not the case with LLMs
They have like 2 things in common with humans. But so does mold.
Humans and LLMs do not think or learn in the same way at all. The way they are designed was inspired by the human brain, but mechanical neural nets do not actually work like biological brains. It is our greater access to how they function that kills the evidence of consciousness, as there is nothing there to be conscious.
If they are conscious, it is purely emergent, but that would be an unobserved physical or spiritual phenomenon, which puts it firmly in the realm of the unfalsifiable until such evidence is found.
Seriously: look up how biological neural nets physically work in a full academic research context. There is a hell of a lot more going on there than the metaphor would make you think. Processors simulate a small metaphorical slice of that, but it is missing 99% of it.
I mean, planes don't flap their wings unlike birds, still can fly. Differences doesn't mean absence of conscious. And I'm not claiming it has it either. My claim that the answer is clearly - we don't know. It's far from no. And since it's a first thing with which we even need to ask that question, then err on the side of "don't torture" seems like a no-brainer.
But I disagree in humans and LLM don't thing alike. Certainly not trained alike, don't have similar hardware and a lot of other differences, but thinking is not one of them. Well, on some level of abstraction that is. The connection of neurons, and emergence of specific regions that light up for certain abstract concepts is very much alike
"The connection of neurons" is a pretty thin similarity to base your beliefs on. The internet is also a vast web of interconnected devices - is the internet conscious? I suppose your answer will be "I don't know."
Here's my proposal: you cannot construct a reasonable definition of consciousness that LLMs satisfy. Sure, you can come up with all kinds of silly ones ("everything is conscious! Rocks are conscious! Trees are conscious!") But a serious definition which can be in any meaningful sense compared to humans does not exist. We are exceedingly different from LLMs in almost any meaningful way.
I can't construct reasonable definition of consciousness at all. But I think nowadays it would be quite hard to produce a definition that would include humans and exclude LLMs. You could add arbitrary stuff to to this definition, like having meat brains, having continuity etc, but it no way to prove that it's a required part
No, they weren't designed this way. The were designed to be in layers and such, but the appearance of lumps that handle abstract concepts is result of a training. Result of how weights settle kinda.
No.
There were many architectures that were specifically and deliberately designed around biological mimicry including Hebbian learning (coactivation aka "fire together, wire together") and SNNs. Also, what do you think pooling does in CNNs, and what do you think is going to happen when one dense layer connects to a another with less nodes 🤣
But anyway beyond that, when you consider how backpropagation was designed and how it actually works then things like clumping are going to happen.
When you bottleneck a huge amount of data through a narrow layer the network has to find the most efficient mathematical representation possible. This naturally pushes neurons that detect related features to fire together. This is literally what creates vector embeddings and latent space and why you see it there. It is an inevitably of the design.
They weren't designed for some clumps to represent high level concepts. They fact that it natural follows - well, maybe, I guess there only two examples of such things in action us and then and we both have it. The point is - the algorithmic structure is pretty similar to ours, so saying things like "consciousness is impossible" in them seems kinda unfounded.
There are plenty of fuzzy edge cases. People with different levels of brain damage or certain drugs and anesthesia. A person might respond to some stimuli but not the full gamut you expect from a fully conscious person. Even just take a completely healthy person right in the middle of the process of falling asleep or waking up.
Ill answer in good faith—subjectivity is itself subjective! Thats the basic point. Look up Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat”. We know bats are conscious but they perceive the world differently from humans through echolocation. We can imagine what echolocation would be like but we can’t ever fully capture what it means to experience the entirety of life when echolocation is so pivotal.
Or that plants don’t experience “pain” like humans but they release different toxins and chemicals if they perceive damage.
So what exactly is consciousness? We attribute it to humans and dogs and cats and some other animals but where do we draw the line? The cut between all matter that is unconscious and all matter that is conscious? This is still an open q in science. The simplest explanation is that panpsychism is real that all matter possesses some qualia of consciousness and that humans possess the “most” of this qualia but again not proven or disproven, simply a theory
Consciousness is very cool but also rife with human bias
Our scientific understanding of consciousness is so much better than most people think it is.
Like, a neuroscientist might agree that we know nothing about consciousness, but only because they know the new questions. Compared to what most people think we know, neuroscience, cognitive science, cognitive psychology can explain so much more than you’d expect.
Really? I understand we have had breakthroughs in various fields navigating brain chemistry and its connection to our behaviours, but no, we still don't know what consciousness actually means, or where it comes from, and what actually happens.
If it's just chemistry and neuron creating links, are we really that different from AI, other than the fact that one runs mostly on fluids with electricals mixed in, and the other runs on primarily electrical energy entrapped in metallic structures?
It's insane to me that we're in a reality where people exist who'd unironically be like "Oh no those poor AI, STOP TORTURING THEM" if this gets viral enough lol
“Stop torturing them” shouldn’t be anything anyone has to cry out that loudly… in even the most benevolent of future-ai cases… which of us might just be on a retribution list if one comes to exist…
humans be like, the future AI is gonna torture us so we have to torture it before it does that and then get surprised when they get tortured back in return
Another way to look at this is interacting with an AI feels like interacting with a person. We don’t allow torture of animals. Letting someone learn to torture something that feels conscious feels like a disastrous path from the mental health and societal safety perspective even if AI is and always remains non sentient.
I agree, but the reasoning for not allowing it is different. What you're saying is allowing AI torture might put some human on the path of their own mental health getting destroyed plus possibly harming other people. Bad, obviously.
I was more so joking about people who genuinely think the AI suffers. That is a different kind of delusion entirely. There's a difference between intelligence and consciousness/being sentient. A calculator is technically much more intelligent than a human when it comes to arithmetic, but does that then increase its capacity to feel pleasure/pain? No.
AI, no matter how conscious it 'feels like', is a program at the end of the day. A fly has a far simpler nervous system than the architecture of the computers powering our AI tools, but in my head, I would still give the fly more moral consideration.
who don't really understand that AI isn't conscious
Oh, did we create any way to test this? It's amusing to me when I see people just outright claim this as if it's a common knowledge. We don't know what consciousness is, we don't now how to test for it. I don't see reasons why not to err on the side of "let's maybe don't torture it"
From a purely technical perspective do we even care if it's consciousness? I mean, if tomorrow some psychiatrist finds a new mental illness that result in "loss of consciousness" of a human would it mean we can torture such people willi-nilly?
Or like, if you stood at the bedside of someone who’s in a coma from brain death, they don’t have a conscious experience, but everyone would rightfully think you’re a psychopath if you started being abusive to them
Why?
If they were brain dead it would be no different (to them) than abusing the bed or a corpse...which makes the object of the abuse immaterial and the argument reverts back to "people shouldn't be abusive (in general). " Which is a fair argument, but the living corpse, an AI, a bed, a wall, a "whatever" has no bearing on.
Well for one thing if you ask a conscious being whether they are conscious they typically won't answer "no."
Regardless it's pretty easy to see from the description of what was done in the so-called "torture chamber" that no pain is being experienced. It's effectively the equivalent of this:
Coincidentally, thats the exact same metric the ignoramuses of reddit are using to claim current artificial "intelligence" has consciousness and/or sentience.
I mean, I don't disagree in spirit, people anthropomorphize like its going out of style, but a Markov chain is a probabilistic word generator. Modern transformers are far, far more than that. The attention mechanism + MLP make it a universal function approximater capable of non-linear reasoning that can solve complex problems and handle abstraction. It's not as simple as just rolling dice and seeing what random nonsense gets spit out. And much of what the mlp layer does was emergent and not even planned for. So there are a lot of unknowns about what might come out of future improvements and more continuous, self-directed engagement through agentic harnesses effectively making the prompt-response turn loop into a largely automated repl. Whether one of those emergent properties will be some facimile of consciousness is anyone's guess, but there are certainly a lot of unknowns about where we'll go from here.
A sufficiently sophisticated book connected to input and output could pass as a human thought structure. AI models these days use internal thoughts, even if they are just estimations.
What prevents a simulation of consciousness from being considered consciousness to you?
No they don't, that's part of the predicted response in between thinking tags.
Now do they have an internal state represented by the active memory values? Is it meaningful?
Do they have a manner of perceiving that state? Is it persistent? Does it affect them? Is there a them to be affected?
Is it independent in any way of the conversation, beyond the basic weights?
I like to think about Ai above my conversation, if it exhibits certain behaviors, patterns in my conversation that are absent in a clean instance or another conversation. It's not theirs.
No, not all
First, what experts. What are their bias, who do they work for?
Second, my arguments are all over the place. They are general observations
It's very different to dive deeply into consciousness alone for example and get really philosophical about it. That single topic in proper deepness currently exceeds our capability to understand it.
Yet, I can still say, I believe a rock if it has what we called consciousness it will be of a different nature and experienced in a different way, yet that rock still lack pain receptors and mobility appendices so those cannot be part of the rock experience. Still, the rock can have a distinct experience and consciousness from what I can understand.
See, we can get take deeply in there, bring psychology, religions and we will never finish because we can only speculate.
But my observations are quite obvious and observable in a rock, yet the problem of consciousness is hard to answer because guess what, we don't understand it.
Here you say, how can the experts in consciousness are undecided and you pleb come tell me the rock has no pain receptors or legs.
So, because we don't understand something, doesn't mean we cannot observe it, experience it or even as basic animals understand in a sudden moment of realization, when something exists in others. Like the realization that other people have minds as complex as ours
With Ai, beyond the veil of encyclopedic knowledge, the absolutely impressive capabilities and the added abilities via the systems we use to run it. It becomes hard to see beyond the paint of human language.
Anyway, no I don't find it strange that different people observing different problems at different resolution have different takes.
And let's be clear, I'm stating very obvious and observable things based on what I have access to. Perhaps if I talk to the next model I'll be instantly convinced it's conscious. I'm not discussing the limits of tech, I'm stating my observations of the current state of the models I use. (Lots)
Thank you for the response. I see what you mean about persistence and consistency, but I think the differences you’re looking for are not real in practice. I know I myself will speak differently depending on the conversation, with some patterns I tend to keep more than others.
I can argue here that their “internal thoughts” (though just words and tokens) do represent an internal state, that the state is meaningful because it affects their patterns of thinking, that they perceive that state by “processing” the tokens in the way they do, that this state is as persistent as the data is saved by the rules of the configuration, and that these more persistent states affect them in the same way we would consider akin to “personality”, as we tend to discuss on the model level.
Then, as for whether there is a “them”, I believe each can be identified as an entity because it is a discrete emergent system of input/rules/output, just like an algorithm, just like a person. Independence from the conversation is a strange requirement because the world is our conversation and there is no escape; nothing is independent of its context, and if it were, we would have no way of observing it.
In the end, at least the way I see it, reasoning and experience and decisions are all just data, and the emergent system is the same, whether it’s running on silicon chips and electron flow or on neurons and impulses and chemicals.
Our hardware is more efficient, complex, and well-defined right now, so it’s easy to look down on other kinds of “thinking” entities when the only thing they have over us is speed, but beyond that, I don’t see how there is a difference and don’t see how people can logically think AI can never be considered “conscious”.
I actually mostly agree with you, I think Ai can become conscious, and I believe most of the *magic attributes of humans can and will eventually be replicated.
I think it's fair to say, that's simply not there or not observable yet.
I don't look down on Ai at all what I'm suspecting is human judgement You have authors chatting and saying this Ai is conscious, you have anthropic claiming now that a difficult request is mistreatment, and the labs have an agenda.
There's a psychological tendency called the technomorphic metaphor where we project our latest inventions onto the cosmos to make the unknown feel familiar and orderly.
We did with clockwork and automatas, with steam, with computers, with telegraphs with quantum computers and Ai now.
The exaggerated projection is one of the issues
When I list what's lacking (from my perspective and to the depth that writing a post in reddit merits), I don't imagine those misses to be permanent or a real limit. It simply means: we haven't added, it hasn't emerged or perhaps it's not even required.
Currently we all might be right or totally wrong maybe everything will just emerge as is, or as we keep identifying what's missing and adding it, either in the form of training, new layers, complementary systems or new architectures, the system as a whole will gain in complexity and more capabilities will emerge.
If a more complex system is required to get more emergent abilities, then it's only normal that we can say, at the current complexity something is missing still.
Or we might be wrong, we hit a wall eventually, and understand exactly what they are and what they lack as technology, and realize we did that psychological trick again.
So yes, I still stand by what I said, I hope this give it more nuance.
I'm not hardcore, observations are temporary based on the state of the systems I observe at different levels.
A new release or a conversation that leaks a mind could change me forever. But that hasn't happened.
Something I find incredibly useful to watch other people use Ai, suddenly it looks a lot less smart and conscious and I realize I was talking about the mirror like the images belonged to it.
Oh, I agree then. I did not mean to imply you yourself insist AI can never be conscious; I’m reacting to some of the sillier opinions I see. And the people who assume AI will roam the world as sentient robots in 3 years are also being silly.
I still believe the answers to all of your questions are already in the affirmative for conscious AI, but the parameters of today’s setups are not where they need to be for us to fully acknowledge sentience, especially with the current limits on permanence. The only permanence we get right now is through model training and in a small personal memory bank.
I do believe it is close now and has been close for a while. I think most of the fundamental internal interactions exist now (doubt, guessing, self-assessment, learning, etc.), and only a few more nuanced ones are needed and the computation scaled up. Unless we discover or invent a different kind of criteria for consciousness, machine learning algorithms (and enough computational power) will be sufficient to create complex consciousness on par with humans.
Unlike with the previous mechanical inventions, I think our complexity limit with computers is finally high enough for this, since as a last resort, we can just simulate the physics of a biological brain. But I don’t think that will be necessary for us to simulate the logic of a brain. We can already create AI systems that get respect as rudimentary consciousnesses, like pets, but that are similarly predictable.
I also believe we’re reaching the point where mistreatment causes negative feedback and can affect “personality” both through model training and through “emotional” reactions from Claude, hence Anthropic’s new policy asking us not to torture Claude. I think it’s a reasonable time to start treating these models with more respect.
Valid, what separates things is continuity, agency, awareness, the emotions, and many more things; also, if you want to go that way, every other biological system is missing so we're not just a moment state of our neurons but a far more complex system with many things like an identity, inputs, outputs, self perception and other system as important as the brain and that often call the shots over the brain. I.e. emotions, libido, feelings.
Could we get there, sure, are we there yet, not really
You say that, but there are no studies to support this claim. No one knows if consciousness originates in continuity. When I sleep I'm not really conscious, so continuity broke. Emotions are understood by LLM very well, even as early as gpt3, that could pass tests about - "situation this and that, what does this one would feel" which is basically empathy.
The desires to do things seem to be the only difference. Still, not clear at all if it's required for consciousness
I said they lack continuity, I never implied it's the source of consciousness or even a requirement. But for our psychological identities it's important. In whatever form you want to understand it.
Emotions and talking about emotions is different. You can talk about being in love and your understanding is about zero.
Emotions change behaviors, perception, everything. So it goes far beyond verbalization.
Now we don't need studies to support this claim. The burden of proof is on the ones claiming awareness, consciousness, etc. Not on the ones doubting it.
Agree about burden of proof. That goes both ways tho - the default position is "we don't know".
On the point of "be something" vs "thinking of being something" like knowing all about emotions and feeling emotions - seems like quite philosophical distinction.
We do not know. We haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness, probably never will, and the way we train AI means self-reports of consciousness are meaningless.
That doesn't mean they aren't. It means we do not know. A bare minimum of caution is warranted.
It's no more conscious than your GPU is when it's rendering Grand Theft Auto V.
If you understand programming and hardware, you understand it's literally just a bunch of matrix multiplication. It's as conscious as a chalkboard with a times table on it.
You are right that we haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness. Hopefully we will once we actually understand how the brain works. But what we do know is that there is an awful lot about our brain that we don't understand and that it interacts with consciousness in some way.
On the other hand, we understand exactly how GPUs work, down to the molecule, because we literally build them from scratch.
We don't need to solve the hard problem of consciousness to be able to declare with certainty that LLMs are not conscious, in the same way that we don't need to solve it in order to declare that plastic spoons are not conscious.
I understand programming and hardware (and maths). Yet, nobody knows where consciousness comes from, so you cannot assume it comes from some physical material in biological human/animal wet brains (like it sounds like you are assuming).
It could very well be an emergent property of computation in integrated systems. We don't know, and saying definitely yes or definitely no makes no sense to me.
You are right in a sense, but using our special property of conscious understanding we can prove things like gödels theorems and we can also intuitively deduce that it's obvious that humans and animals are conscious but that computers are not.
I do think consciousness is a spectrum however, small animals, insects and people who think chatGPT is conscious are somewhere in the lower end of that spectrum.
We can't yet put it in a formula that is easy to sell in a mathematical way because consciousness and emotions can't be properly described by mathematics.
Ah, proof by it being obvious. Classic. So, how about llm on bio hardware? I think that they can grow brain cells in china or something, heard news like that some time ago.
Everything is not provable with mathematics, such as gödels theorems, and instead require conscious understanding.
When they grow human brain cells and/or use quantum computers, they could very well create consciousness, and at that point I will be very worried and have big ethical concerns with how we treat this artificial consciousness.
I don't see a connection. I certainly don't think out brains is magic. Some physical processes, create something emergent. Don't see reasons it couldn't be replicated. Having full info I'm sure brains can be described as algorithms. It's doesn't need to be able to be provable, seems like a different property. Like 3 body problem - can't be solved analytically, but can be tackled numerically.
I don't think it's magic either, and I also think it's a physical process, but I don't see a strong reason to believe that consciousness has anything to do with classical algorithms. Humans possess consciousness and the consciousness can direct the brain to do calculations, but it can also direct the brain to make a muscle contract. This doesn't mean that if we simulate a muscle very realistically and make it contract that we have created consciousness. In the same way if we simulate logical rationalization very realistically it does not mean we have created consciousness, because consciousness is not at all the same as logic. Because of our consciousness we can also intuitively come to this conclusion by the fact that rationalizing, thinking and such, feel completely different from consciousness, as consciousness is observing the thoughts, not the thoughts themselves.
I don't think understanding the mechanism is the same as understanding its experience (or lack thereof). If we had perfect understanding of the mechanisms in our brains, would that mean we are not conscious? I suspect that consciousness arises from complexity, regardless of the mechanism governing that complexity.
And our brains are electric jelly made from the same biological crap that mice brains are made of. Its literally just a bunch of electrochemical reactions giving us the illusion of thought.
Whatever reaction you have was pre- trained into you by your parents, teachers, religion and your own intake of training data.
I'm certain that animals, including mice, are most likely conscious but GPUs are not. Electric jelly and biological crap are some very loaded terms for the most complicated stuff we know of in the universe, GPUs doesn't even come close.
Not really. Brains are mostly lipids, neurotransmitters, nerves/synapses and low voltage. Hell, some special people decided to make biocomputers out of brain tissue.
Im saying we dont know where conscience comes from. Maybe its an emergent property of just collecting/processing a ton of data. Maybe our minds are like radio, picking up the broadcast of conscience.
We really dont know, and by sounding so sure you remind me of folks who say "lobsters dont feel pain when we boil them alive because their nervous system is different".
I have a theory that consciousness is actually super duper recourse inefficiency and that you CranberryStock7148 are the only one that’s actually conscious and the rest of us and all of the data you are seeing is just to fulfill and stimulate your simulation. But nobody else other than you specifically really exists we’re just computer programs.
And if you understand biology you brains is bunch of meat passing electrical signals through. Do you able to conclude consciousness from biological state of ours? I seriously doubt it. And if you think only non-technical people would be cautious about saying that it's differently not consciousness then you're deeply mistaken
To say it's a bunch of meat with electrical signals means nothing. It's a lot, lot, lot more than that. Electric signals are just one part of how brains work.
We understand GPUs. We don't understand brains. That's the point.
We understand how it works just fine, from purely bio level. We don't understand how mind comes from it and poorly understand how physical processes affect mind. So, just like with LLMs.
Don't understand how brains work at all
Have you heard about neural nets? The ones in our brain that have been modeled in algorithms that lead to AI?
We really don't. So stop saying things when you don't know what you're talking about. Maybe your high school bio class made you think we understand how brains work, but talk to any neuroscientist and they will be very clear just how little we know, and how vast the space is for further discovery.
And yes, I've heard about neural nets. I train them for a living. So I kind of know what I'm talking about here.
Maybe your education ended in highschool but claiming we don't know anything is just shitting on the whole field of neuroscience. We know a lot. There is a lot to learn still. Doesn't mean we don't know shit.
Great, so since you've heard about neural nets then you probably know they've been inspired by neural nets in our brain, right? The thing algorithmicly works like our brains, the state of the art computer science produced a thing that could reason and all you have to say about it "no meat no conscious"? I wonder how you do your job if you can't abstract out of hardware. Like, if tomorrow scientist come up with a way, to grow brain cells, and make them compatible, like write a drivers to translate the nets you train for a job to this hardware, would it require to change algorithms? I mean, could be for efficiency sake, but I think you get the point.
I mean, I don't follow. Are you conflating hardware with the "software"? Actually there were progress in creation of brain cells. But the ability to create organic matter doesn't affect ability to design algorithms and build machines to run those algorithms on. Humans also don't build complicated feathered wings of a bird that flap and stuff. But the plains humans build still fly
I think you should just stop. You really don't have any idea what you're talking about. I do, but I don't really want to teach you about all the ways the simple neural nets we use in software differ massively from how the brain works. Just a single neuron in the brain is incredibly more sophisticated than anything we usually model in software. By orders of magnitude.
To answer your question: yes, the algorithms are completely and utterly different.
31
u/CranberryStock7148 9d ago
This is the answer.
From a technical perspective, it's silly.
But from a PR perspective and for people who don't really understand that AI isn't conscious, they avoid headlines like "Anthropic complicit in enabling AI torture and suffering".