Comment by nkohari
6 months ago
That topic (ship's computer vs. Data) is actually discussed at length in-universe during The Measure of a Man. [0] The court posits that the three requirements for sentient life are intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Data is intelligent and self-aware, but there is no good measure for consciousness.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Measure_of_a_Man_(Star_Tre...
Using science fiction as a basis for philosophy isn't wise, especially TNG which has a very obvious flavor of "optimistic human exceptionalism" (contrast with DS9, where I think Eddington even makes this point).
Doesn't ChatGPT fulfill these criteria too?
In a Chinese room sort of way, sure. The problem is we understand too well how it works, so any semblance of consciousness or self awareness we know to be simple text generation.
The word "simple" is doing quite a massive amount of work there.
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Again, there's no real measure for consciousness, so it's difficult to say. If you ask me, frontier models meet the definition of intelligence, but not the definition of self-awareness, so they aren't sentient regardless of whether they are conscious. This is a pretty fundamental philosophical question that's been considered for centuries, outside of the context of AI.
ChatGPT knows about the ChatGPT persona. Much like I know the persona I play in society and at home. I don't know what the "core" me is like at all. I don't have access to it. It seems like a void. A weird eye. No character, no opinions.
The persona; I know very well.
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its not self-aware, regardless what it tells you (see the original link)
I'm not sure what you're referring to in the original link, can you please paste an excerpt?
But thinking about it - how about this, what if you have a fully embodied LLM-based robot, using something like Figure's Helix architecture [0], with a Vision-Language-Action model, and then have it look at the mirror and see itself - is that on its own not sufficient for self-awareness?
[0] https://www.figure.ai/news/helix
I'm not claiming it is.