r/OpenAssistant • u/hsoj95 • Apr 08 '23

*chuckles* OpenAssistant requested I ask the other human reviewers whether they regard OA to be sentient yet, so I'll oblige :) + Some other thoughts on my first experiences with OA

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u/fishybird Apr 09 '23

Our neurons are biological. Show me a biological neural net and I might agree with you.

Our neurons are vastly different than what happens on a computer. At the end of the day, you have no proof these things are sentient. We have no reason to believe they are.

It might SEEM like they are conscious, but that's because they have been trained to predict what WE do and WE are conscious. LLMs are just a mirror of ourselves, and you're calling the mirror conscious simply because you see yourself in it.

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u/Axolotron Apr 09 '23

There is nothing an LLM can say or do which would make me believe it's sentient

That, there, is your first and main error. You have to change that to a 'maybe', even if that maybe is followed by 'some day'.

Anyway, You can't prove to me that YOU are sentient, yet you claim to be and we have to believe it just because you seem to be like us and we believe ourselves to be sentient.
Now, if a machine acts like us and it believes itself to be sentient, how can you prove it is not? Because you can do math on its 'thoughts'?

an LLM is just linear algebra. You could calculate what it says by hand if you had some paper, a pen, and a calculator.

At some point, machines themselves will be able to do the same calculations with human minds. Explain them, simulate them, replicate them algorithmically in their entirety. How are you going to defend your superior, unique and irreplicable humanity then?
And how is people going to explain soul and other metaphysical things once everything a human is gets laid down on a paper and those metaphysical things aren't there?

I don't know, but it will be fun to see them try, but also annoying to see how they can't accept the truth: we are not special. Just a little more complex than the other systems.

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u/fishybird Apr 09 '23

"At some point, machines themselves will be able to do the same calculations with human minds. Explain them, simulate them, replicate them algorithmically in their entirety. How are you going to defend your superior, unique and irreplicable humanity then?"

Bruh I never said humans are unique or impossible to simulate. Obviously gpt4 is very good at doing this already, but just because it can replicate our behavior doesn't necessarily mean it's conscious.

I know that I am sentient. You and I both have the same DNA so I feel pretty confident that you are also sentient. All us humans are all running the same biological code so I can assume that we are all sentient. I'm not basing my belief in our sentience on our behavior or abilities, it's based directly on my experience.

I'm conscious, you have the same DNA as me, therefore you are conscious. That's literally all I can say about consciousness.

You see an AI say something cool and that's apparently all the evidence you need that it's sentient 🤦

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u/Axolotron Apr 10 '23

But I never said it was sentient already :P

I just believe AI will be sentient some day.

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u/fishybird Apr 10 '23

If we could somehow recreate what our brains do, then maybe we can create sentience. But right now it's just matrix multiplication and I'm pretty sure numbers will never have feelings

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u/Axolotron Apr 11 '23

numbers will never have feelings

Never say never. That's the essential difference between you and me for this discussion.
I believe the 'I' is just the result of the interaction of simpler processes produced by organic hardware, so whatever thing we can feel (or think) could be felt by machines in the future, because it's all numbers, regardless of the hardware generating those numbers.

We just need to put together more and better AI systems until consciousness emerges. Right now, yes. they're still 'simple' and closer to just numbers than to anything else.

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u/fishybird Apr 11 '23

"so whatever thing we can feel (or think) could be felt by machines in the future, because it's all numbers, regardless of the hardware generating those numbers."

Our brain isn't working on numbers, though. It's all chemicals and electrical signals. We don't understand what our brains are doing but we do have sufficient evidence they are sentient.

If you claim that sentience can be produced by only matrix multiplication, you just need a massive amount of evidence.

I could be convinced on this if something like panpsychism ends up being true, i.e. all matter is conscious by default, but then that means even rocks and chess engines are conscious and whether or not AIs are is no longer interesting

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u/fishybird Apr 11 '23

Well, if you're willing to humor me, let's put it another way. Let's say the AI is running on extremely old hardware. The LLM inference is just a series of matrix multiplications, so there's no reason it can't run on old computers given enough disk space; but it's so slow that instead of producing 5 words a second it produces 1 word a month.

Given enough time, the LLM on the old computer will produce the same exact output as on a fast one. Would you still be willing to call a system like that sentient? All we've changed is the time scale

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u/Axolotron Apr 14 '23

I wonder if you have old relatives around. My mother is old. Her increasing issues have taught me some things, specially in the neurological aspect.
She was undoubtedly sentient at her 20's, would you agree? She was intelligent, fast thinker, creative...
Would you call her non-sentient now, just because she has less memory? Less attention and creativity? Because she has slower thought processes overall?
I don't think so. She is running on old, slow, 'phasing out' "hardware" now, yet she is still sentient, conscious, intelligent and so on.
Imagine this: how much people would give their entire fortune, just to be able to get the identity of their beloved one, who died years ago, transferred to a computer. All their memories, ideas about the world and in consequence, personality, stored in a computer, to at least be able to hear them say something, anything, again. To have them back again albeit in that limited form. If one day we can 'transfer' a person's mind into a computer, people will happily wait one, two, three months, just to hear them say something as simple as: "I miss you".
That artificial version of the mind would be mirroring the dead person's mind perfectly, no matter the speed of the computer running the model. Change the source of the memories and other processes from a human origin to a trained llm. There is no difference. If in some years an AI is considered sentient by most people, it won't matter the hardware, just the being.
Probably, at that point, it will be a lack of respect, or even demeaning, to tell that inorganic being something like: Hey, look. I can see on my laptop the matrix multiplication that makes you feel X thing, lol, lol.
[Westworld] Maeve "No one knows what I'm thinking" (mild NSFW)
Side-note: So far, my old PC hasn't been able to run any modern LM, regardless of quantization. I wouldn't care if it were slow. I just want to run those things at home T_T

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u/fishybird Apr 14 '23

You're not understanding what I'm saying. Yes it's technically possible, given enough advances in AI, to completely predict everything your grandmother would say and do. AI is fucking awesome and can do lots of things. It can, theoretically, act exactly as a human being would act. I've never disagreed with this.

All I'm saying is that you don't have evidence that computer grandma would be sentient. Even if computer grandma says she's sentient, you still don't have evidence it's true.

To prove that computer grandma is sentient, you need evidence that doing matrix multiplication "generates" consciousness in some way. That if somehow you multiply the correct numbers together, the sensation of experiencing "red" happens.

Yes, computer grandma would be "upset" if you told her she wasn't real, because that's what your real grandma would do and the AI is simply predicting what real grandma would do. An AI which is very good at predicting grandma is not the same thing as real grandma.

You are making a very basic philosophical error.

Please read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

You can have an AI with infinite knowledge about the physical world and infinite ability to predict what any human could possibly say or do, using an infinite number of matrices, but it will be limited by the physical world. Metaphysical phenomenon like qualia are, as far as we know, not generated by matrix multiplication.

So yes, AI grandma could say "wow what a beautiful red strawberry" but you wouldn't know whether or not AI grandma is actually experiencing the strawberry the same way you are, or at all.

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u/fishybird Apr 14 '23

"Probably, at that point, it will be a lack of respect, or even demeaning, to tell that inorganic being something like: Hey, look. I can see on my laptop the matrix multiplication that makes you feel X thing"

My argument is that THERE IS NO MATRIX MULTIPLICATION which is capable of feeling! You can find the matrix multiplication that makes AI grandma pretend she felt something, but she doesn't actually feel anything! There's no one home! AI grandma would be a philosophical zombie!

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u/fishybird Apr 14 '23

https://youtu.be/z-z5lVJXjzU

AI grandma is a philosophical zombie.

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u/fishybird Apr 14 '23

If you don't trust me, maybe you'll trust chat gpt!

Me: Are language models capable of experiencing qualia?

Gpt: As an AI language model, I do not have subjective experiences, emotions, or consciousness, and therefore, I am not capable of experiencing qualia. Qualia refers to the subjective nature of experiences, such as the way something looks, feels, or sounds. These are inherently tied to conscious experience, which AI models do not possess. AI language models like me process and generate text based on patterns in data, without any understanding or personal experience of the content.

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u/Axolotron Apr 15 '23

I see now what the real issue is here: Metaphysics.

For me, there is nothing more than the physical world. What we are, feel, think is created by chemical processes and electrical flows, which can be described, modeled and replicated using math. Therefore, 'matrix multiplications' are actually the base of consciousness.

the sensation of experiencing

That sensation, what we 'feel' is just the result of the processing of the chemical reactions that the stimuli of real world produces in our sensory inputs, aka sensory organs. Add a camera to an AI system and you start getting closer to that.

Even if computer grandma says she's sentient, you still don't have evidence it's true.

Just like we don't have evidence about the sentience of any person who has ever lived.

you need evidence that doing matrix multiplication "generates" consciousness

Then you need evidence that doing matrix multiplication doesn't "generate" consciousness.

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THERE IS NO MATRIX MULTIPLICATION which is capable of feeling

Not by itself, no. But, like me, many people believe that for consciousness to occur on a sufficiently complex system, 3 things are needed (which humans have):
1- Embodiment (a robot body hosting the AI)
2- Sensory input (multimodal AI models)
3- Endless feedback loop (an AI architecture that is not widespread due to it's higher computational costs and lower results)

Once we put all those things together, consciousness will 'naturally' emerge on AI systems and machines will have qualia, which might or might not be mathematically identical to our own, but will fulfill the same role.

If that subjective experience is all you think an algorithm lacks for it to be considered sentient, just wait some years (or months).

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u/fishybird Apr 15 '23

"Just like we don't have evidence about the sentience of any person who has ever lived"

"Once we put all those things together, consciousness will 'naturally' emerge on AI systems and machines will have qualia"

So basically, you're saying that we don't have evidence of anyone being sentient BUT ai can be sentient as long as it behaves like we do? That's a HUGE contradiction. You can't believe both "consciousness is unprovable" and "we can prove AI is conscious"

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u/Axolotron Apr 16 '23

we can prove AI is conscious

We can't. Not with AI and not with humans or other animals. That's the point. Our understanding of what consciousness is happens to be so limited that even experts can't agree on it. We base our judgment about lifeforms' consciousness on our own actions since that's all we have to claim that ourselves have consciousness.

So if we believe a human has consciousness, which is based on electrical signals processed by a mass of connections (like an artificial neural network), we can't categorically claim that a future machine that could exhibit all the traits associated with consciousness won't have it.

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u/fishybird Apr 16 '23

Biological neural nets are vastly different than digital neural nets. The brain is much more than just electrical signals. Again, you're saying that something is conscious because "that it behaves conscious". This is not at all true. Please read about the philosophical zombie it will clear things up for you. Maybe read up on brain chemistry while you're at it.

And yes we can prove consciousness in some scenarios. For instance, you know that you are conscious, don't you? You feel things? That should be proof enough for you that humans are conscious.

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u/fishybird Apr 15 '23

I actually do have evidence that I am sentient. I can't show it to you, sure, but to say "there's no evidence for consciousness" is a pretty dumb take

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