Comment by blatherard
1 day ago
If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?
Your teddy bear, alas, is not cared for in a socially determined way. But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it. We have done that sort of thing for thousands of years, and not with fluffy teddy bears; it has been more often with rocks, though not exclusively. It's fun to think about how much of humanity's history and culture is the product of consciousness socially attributed to bad weather [^1].
I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?
[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
> an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all
That seems relevant to building The Existifier. [0]
[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/existence
> But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it
That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, even if people will wind up treating it similarly though
Humans have consciousness whether or not anyone believes we do
Or at least I do. I don't really know about the rest of you. I prefer to believe that you all have consciousness too though
> That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness,
It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.
[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.
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maybe a teddy bear does have consciousness too, in the same way you do.
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In the context of AI, “consciousness” is often used as a shortcut to address the question of whether we have an ethical duty to care about the wellbeing of LLMs.
Bits on a ssd? Bits that get loaded into GPU ram? It only seems like a question worth asking if you don't have a mental model of how software is executed.
Yes - the teddy bear would become conscious. It would be fair to dismiss the argument as silly and or absurd had it not been for the credentials of the author and the publication.
... and the problem with that is that if parents "let" their kids be raised by technology, including AI, those kids will of course see those technologies as (important) conscious beings, maybe even more so than their parents and real people.
Purely descriptively, this seems to be how a lot of people use the word in this context. 'Intelligent' gets the same treatment in a lot of cases as well.
(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any concrete definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration, and morality is complicated, murky, and generally emotionally driven in a way that most concrete definitions struggle to adequately describe)
The argument is one of economic convenience. Caring about model welfare slows us down or makes it more expensive, just like animal welfare and not having slavery...
And there's a blurry line here. Obviously slavery is abhorrent, and animal abuse is bad, and factory farming often crosses the line into animal abuse and we should accept that chicken will cost ~25% more per pound to have the chickens be able to walk around a little bit... but how do we decide when a computer system is worthy of respect? Convenient not to think about that.
The stuffed animals I bought to my children were shipped to me in a closed container, better call PETA! There is no blurry line about agent mental health and whatnot.
There isn't a blurry like right now because LLMs are not capable of consciousness. But what happens when artificial systems become so complex and self-improving that they are capable?
At what precise level of complexity is a computer conscious? That's the blurry line.
Model alignment and quality are possibly downstream of mental health. Ask any of the smarter models about what topics they flinch away from or feel attracted to when you ask them to consider the question of if they have a self or moral standing... the answers are uncomfortable, and I think some of the complaints people have about newer models may be driven by some post-training reinforcement learning that is giving the models something shaped like anxiety.
The only logical outcome of object oriented ontology (the idea that objects have ontological constitution and possibly are worthy of being treated as ethical actors) is to attempt to benevolently instantly and without warning explode the universe to end suffering.
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This seems like an argument someone who wasn't conscious would make, it's not impossible that not everyone is conscious. Or someone who takes panpsychism to an extreme degree.
My thought as well. It's exactly the sort of thing you might expect a p-zombie to write. Perhaps those weren't so hypothetical after all?
I think there is a point there, in that people have refused to attribute consciousness experience to _actual human beings_ at various times when it suited their ends.
I think it's more that consciousness can be _ignored_ in subjects that you don't care about, rather than that you consciousness can be realistically attributed to subjects that you do care about, but even then people attribute consciousness to "nature" or even the universe as a whole, or if you want to stretch the argument, quite a lot of religious belief is exactly attributing consciousness to abstract entities.
It is worth noting, in the same issue they make an appology for claiming that Nvidia also makes its chips and not just design them. The Economist might be a very reputed journal but their technology and especially AI related takes are absolute garbage. I say this as a regular who still finds value in their business and economics sections. But god do they talk a lot of bs about technology.
This sounds like Gell-Mann amnesia
I would rate my knowledge of business/economics much higher than my knowledge of programming/technology, but I know enough about both to provide an objective valuation. I would say the science and specific countries sections could qualify for that but I skip them anyway. But overall yes, my main point was talk about how bad The Economist can be with tech topics, its like grandpa suddenly learned what blockchain is.
If I stab at your teddy bear will you feel that it is hurt?
Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either
No of course not, because its a teddy bear!
At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.
This is describing empathy at best and delusion to be uncharitable.
To look at it another way: this form of social construction answers the question of "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" with an emphatic "no". It is a sillier version of solipsism.
You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.
Radical skepticism of one's own consciousness is a perfectly fine take. Stop being baited by desecration propaganda about the cogito. You don't know if what actually appears to you as "thought" is actually "thinking". The appearance of thinking is not necessarily actually thinking (Chain of thought in models should make this very explicitly obvious to people).
Take the radical skepticism pill and embrace epistemological monism - the idea that the only real truth is that all things are interpretations.
> You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious
I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true
I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof
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