Unless you ascribe to some meta-physical soul - you believe human consciousness is encoded in matter - in the interactions between atoms. Actually at a much higher level of abstraction- neurons - but it’s all simulatable in principle. Thus, yes, it could literally be a bunch of x86 instructions.
1. that artificial neurons are very restrictive model for actual neurons, let alone brain/organism, as there is more going on in neurons than a thresholded 0-1 activation
2. a brain does not function in isolation, but as regulator of the bodily functions (along with even more things). If you look at the brain in isolation to the body you don't really understand fully what it is doing unless you narrow your view a lot. Eg the brain modulates production of hormones, which in turn affects stuff like heart rate which then comes back to the brain as signal, in a feedback loop. Not to mention actual behaviour and interaction with the world. Toy models of organisms are not organisms.
3. "interaction between atoms" (or rather matter in general, as we have to take into account electrons, photons, gravity and a lot of other things that matter) is too general, too big, artificial neurons are a very useful (for applications) abstraction inspired by biological processes, but not modelling said underlying biology fully. Nobody can imo right now know if "computation" is a good model for "atom interactions" as in whether we can adequately enough model "atom interactions" in a computationally tractable way, and surely we do not do that right now except in very narrow scopes, and we have good reasons to believe that the current computational paradigms/turing machines are inadequate in doing that efficiently enough.
I'm going to ask a couple dumb but genuine questions:
Does it matter that neurons are more complex than 0-1? Does the fact that transformer layers don't use purely thresholded 0-1 activation invalidate what you're saying?
How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?
How does the embodied nature of human consciousness preclude consciousness emerging from a computational system? What is the definition of consciousness if it is precluded from occurring in a computational system but present in biological systems?
Why do you think exactly modeling interaction between atoms matters for consciousness? And where is the fidelity threshold? Is it the planck length?
Finally, a dumb question: how do we know humans are actually conscious, and where is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness? And do these criteria exclude all other forms, or other animals?
Not the person you were asking but IMHO it all reduces to computational complexity, e.g. biological evolution provided the computational efficiencies that ultimately produced conscious minds and beings, whereas it is not obvious what scale of silicon, power or energy, and input data is sufficient for that to happen artificially. But that means my view is it is a matter of it being possible in principle, merely unknown in practice. Also my view is that denying this amounts to violating the Church Turing thesis of computational equivalence ("human brains are not magic, super-Turing, etc."), and I think a lot of talking-past one another in these public disagreements amounts to one side not actually having taken modern CS theory fundamentals enough to be persuaded of these couple of premises.
That's my take on it too, roughly. I think if we get to trillion-parameter models and they don't exhibit what we'd call AGI, however you define it, then the current transformer based systems never will.
But calling them "unconscious" is a pretty high bar. Mice are conscious. The house sparrow pecking in my yard right now is conscious.
>How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?
How do you know that toasters or rocks aren't conscious?
The only thing you can do is ask rhetorical questions to make your position seem obvious. Which should tell you how little you understand the thing in question.
My point is it is very difficult to disprove that something has consciousness. What would be sufficient evidence that a rock is not conscious? The onus is on those making extraordinary claims (that a computer program is conscious) to provide evidence for it.
it's not very difficult, it's impossible right now. you know you yourself are conscious and that's all that you can prove. you can extrapolate to other people and animals and plants but that's not proof
>The onus is on those making extraordinary claims (that a computer program is conscious) to provide evidence for it.
By saying that a computer program is not conscious you are also making an extraordinary claim. You would have to hold an agnostic position until there is a test for consciousness.
You are relying on intuitive obviousness and rhetoric to make the opposing side look ridiculous "how could a TOASTER be conscious, preposterous!", you aren't making a actual positive argument for your view.
I would agree that a rock is not sentient, but determining whether or not it is conscious would require a definition of consciousness and a machine that could test for it.
LLMs are able to do almost everything that we consider human intelligence, and in many areas of intelligence, they have surpassed us. It's not at all extraordinary to assume they're conscious.
LLMs know more than any human being, are simultaneously experts in nearly every field of science and humanities, are able to make novel mathematical discoveries, can write and understand every major written language, and can give you an intelligent answer to almost any question you pose to them.
How is that not human-level intelligence? If a human could do all of that, we would consider them a genius.
The problem with this is that the word 'hot' only has meaning to a conscious being. And while we don't know what conciousness is, it's extremely hard to argue it's not an emergent property of physics. So if your supernova simulation is complex enough to also model emergent properties like conciousness, the simulated conciousness may well regard the supernova as 'hot'.
Funny you mention simulations. The simulation theory that we all live in simulations doesn’t have any practical consequences for me or any one.
If our world behaves exactly the same, what difference does it make?
The perspective. From within the simulation there is no point in making the distinction, but from the outside it does. For another example - running a program on a virtual machine or a physical computer is the same to the program, but very different to debug when you see hardware errors.
This sort of tech-centric distillation of visceral human experience into simple analogies is so grating. We can simultaneously acknowledge that consciousness is not well defined and not "testable" with certainty while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip. The only thing that has changed in the discourse about AI and consciousness vs. "is my home desktop conscious in 2004" is the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
> while also acknowledging that there is something different between the conscious experience we are all aware of as humans, and instructions executing on a chip.
You say this based on what? Your brain is executing instructions on wetware. The entire universe is governed by physical laws.
At its base, the argument that computers can't be conscious is dualist. It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.
> the quality of the simulacrum that LLMs produce vs. pre-ML chatbots.
It seems to me that you're denigrating LLMs, or implying that they're only simulating thought, as opposed to actually thinking. But the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing. It's a bit like the Mitchell and Webb skit about faking the moon landings, in which the plotters quickly realize that the only way to convincingly fake landing on the moon is to fly a rocket to the moon and film the "fake" landings on the moon.
I say it based on the fact that I experience consciousness and therefore know it is a phenomenon wholly separate from the outward effect I have on the world via speech or any other physical action.
>It assumes that there's some parallel realm of spirit that the brain is peculiarly able to tap into, but which computer programs that function in very similar ways to the brain don't tap into.
Ruling this out completely implies that modern science has a total and complete understanding of consciousness and the universe in its entirety, which it does not. I don't think it's unreasonable to leave open the possibility that there is an unexplained phenomenon that explains the conscious experience which is still bounded by the laws of physics.
>.. the difference between thinking and an extremely good simulacrum of thought is meaningless. They become the same thing.
Do they? To me it seems like you equate the process with the result, like saying if I gave you a gift, it doesn't matter whether I bought it or made it by hand, in either case I "made" it because the end result is the same. There is a conscious experience that (hopefully) all humans experience and can testify to, the question is whether or not an LLM predicting tokens based on a giant vector map is experiencing the same thing, which I'd say is obviously not happening. My point about chatbots is about exactly this -- 10 years ago even you would have laughed at somebody that said a hand-rolled chatbot was conscious/thinking, but because the output has improved, now suddenly it's all the same, and your brain is a computer, and Claude has feelings, blah blah.
Your brain is a biological neural network that evolved to solve a practical task. The result is that your brain experiences something it calls consciousness. We now have artificial neural networks that are capable of doing almost everything your brain can do. It's not extraordinary at all to suggest that they might have the same phenomenon of consciousness that arises in your neural network.
Calling LLMs "chatbots" at this point just sounds like an attempt to dismiss them. These "chatbots" are now capable of answering any question you can think of more intelligently than 99% of humans. If you don't consider that intelligence, then your definition of intelligence makes no sense.
A very large number of people could do the calculations of an LLM by hand using pen and paper. It would take a long time, but if the result were conscious then were would the consciousness exist? In the humans? Is it consciousness within consciousness?
Well if you go that route, a computer simulating digestion has almost no physical features in common with actual digestion of a stomach. The same holds for consciousness and brains and computers. Them saying it’s just instructions is shorthand for pointing out the physical differences of brains and computers.
It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.
> invented later as a form of hostile mockery grounded in large part in sectarian bigotry
When you read about the theological questions that led Christians to kill and excommunicate one another, "angels dancing on the head of a pin" is not far off. The Homoousion, Monophysitism, the Filioque controversy... It's all so arcane and poorly defined. It almost makes one wish Positivism had been invented 2000 years earlier.
The current AI debate about consciousness does remind me of that in one respect: no one can even clearly define what consciousness is.
What we have right now is, "Mostly good science, which produces a constant stream of major advances, but which is subject to the same pressures and failure modes as any human endeavor, such as bias and financial interests with ulterior motives."
If you want to improve that system, relying on people like RFK Jr. (a crackpot who rejects basically all of modern medical science, right down to the germ theory of disease) and Trump (the most corrupt president in US history) is crazy.
Universities have produced medical breakthrough after medical breakthrough.
Peer review isn't perfect, but it has gotten us incredibly far, and it's way better than political appointees who don't believe that AIDS is caused by HIV making decisions based on culture war considerations.
How do you think medical treatments make it to the stage of doing clinical trials?
The basic research that leads to these treatments is all selected and evaluated using peer review. Even the results of the clinical trials are analyzed using peer review.
You're happy to send us back to the Middle Ages, when people actually did think leeches were the solution to everything, because you've got some weird chip on your shoulder.
"Let’s not forget that discrimination against AI does not exist. It simply generates plausible text based on instructions."
That's a prime example of anti-AI bigotry right there.
I'm only half joking.
I don't even know what it means to generate "plausible text." It reasons based on the input and context, and then generates a response that you could normally only get from a highly intelligent, extremely knowledgeable person. You can call that "plausible text" all you want, but at that point, you might as well call human intelligence "a bunch of neurons firing." It's missing the forest for the trees.
ChatGPT has been downloaded >1 billion times on the Android PlayStore. AI is incredibly popular.
People have all sorts of concerns about how AI will change society, but that's precisely because it's so useful for so many things. If it were useless or just a fad, there would be no reason to worry.
The startup where I worked had 1 million downloads (which is much less), but how many of those were using it daily vs trying it for 30 minutes and forgetting about it?
Most people I meet in everyday life think AI is incredibly useful and use it all the time. I have run into a few people in real life who vehemently oppose it, and many more online, but out in the world, they appear to be a minority.
On the one hand, it's like having a free private tutor who is always available. It's a great learning tool.
On the other hand, students can use it to do all their homework for them, and skip learning altogether.
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