Comment by orbital-decay
1 day ago
Meanwhile that's exactly what we see now, do we not? Whether AI is conscious will be determined by the social acceptance of that idea, because how can you prove or disprove it without using a ton of questionable assumptions? How can you prove that I'm conscious, for that matter? Call me ignorant, but I see the entire consciousness debate as pretty irrelevant to what the thing is.
I agree that the article is all over the place, though. (not that my posts are much better)
Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism.
In fact, if you stop talking about consciousness, and go through all the various aspects of consciousness, the whole debate gets very interesting. There are various ways in which AI is very clearly conscious or exhibits / involves phenomena that are clearly involved in certain aspects of conscious, other ways in which AI already very clearly is missing other aspects, and then again some remaining ways which are unclear, and which may forever remain unclear.
Being clear about the different ways in which AI is, isn't, and might be conscious is a useful discussion and we still need to be having it.
EDIT: An analogy would be to recent shifts in whether or not lobsters feel pain, and so by extension, the ways in and degree to which lobsters can be considered consciousness. Research and debate has shifted opinions enough for parts of Europe to regulate certain methods of preparing them. But the ways in which lobsters are conscious and/or feel pain is an objective fact, regardless of what we decide.
>Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism.
Are you saying I need to have certain beliefs (discredited by someone) for something objective to be true or false? That sounds like social acceptance of an idea.
>There are various ways in which AI is very clearly conscious or exhibits / involves phenomena that are clearly involved in certain aspects of conscious
Which ways and how can it be demonstrated experimentally?
>An analogy would be to recent shifts in whether or not lobsters feel pain, and so by extension, the ways in and degree to which lobsters can be considered consciousness. Research and debate has shifted opinions enough for parts of Europe to regulate certain methods of preparing them. But the ways in which lobsters are conscious and/or feel pain is an objective fact, regardless of what we decide.
That's not what the consciousness debate I see is about. The signal propagates and causes the reaction, but do they feel pain? What is the threshold? Is it just the complexity of the state? How complex it needs to be?
> Are you saying I need to have certain beliefs (discredited by someone) for something objective to be true or false?
I am saying that, if you reject radical social constructionism (or solipsisms of various flavours, i.e. we are all just plugged into the matrix or some kind of simulation), then you must believe there is a real world out there independent of our consciousness / awareness of it. There must also be patterns / structure in that world, some of those patterns and structures being essentially constant, and those are what we call "true" (objective) facts about reality. BUT if you are a radical social constructionist or solipsist of some kind, then it can be perfectly coherent to reject any idea of objectivity or truth, except as contingent on social consensus (or personal beliefs, in the solipsistic case). Radical social constructionism being "discredited" is just a recognition that it basically forces you rapidly into incoherence.
> Which ways and how can it be demonstrated experimentally?
Try reading through the SEP article I linked above (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon), particularly sections 2, and then especially section 4. You'll see you don't even need to run experiments to answer certain questions, you can just logically prove there are certain aspects of consciousness LLMs can't have, or clearly already have. Others you'll see immediately need qualifying or more information to answer. EDIT: Or just ask any AI to list the ways in which LLMs can, cannot, and might be able to exhibit the various aspects of consciousness. It will give you a decent answer, likely in a pretty little table.
See e.g. 4.8, Dynamic Flow: LLMs basically can't have this, as their weights are frozen. You'd have to claim that the activations during inference are the dynamic component, but then that means LLMs are conscious only in the few seconds or even milliseconds during inference. Likewise, they don't have memory, so every inference is this consciousness being born anew, as it were, at least in current models.
You can of course go much further on even this specific point, but, the point is, there is lots of useful discussion and thinking to be had when you go through the aspects of consciousness in this way, and definitely at least some clear answers.
EDIT:
> That's not what the consciousness debate I see is about.
I just mean there are some similarities between the lobster consciousness debates and AI consciousness debates. Obviously the stakes and many aspects are different, I was just trying to illustrate why and how discussion and experiments can be useful and consequential here.
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> Whether AI is conscious or not is independent of the social acceptance of the idea, unless you believe in thoroughly discredited and quite radical forms of social constructionism.
Yet all science is social, until you convince other people to take your ideas seriously, you are just another crank/loony.
How is social constructionism thoroughly discredited? Wikipedia shows some people poking with nits that don't look serious to me at all.
Science has little to do with consciousness. If it can't even be defined without using immeasurable concepts like "intentionality" then it's subject to arbitrary interpretation.
Radical or hard or global social constructionism [1] (or perhaps more accurately radical/hard/global relativism about truth [2]) are discredited because both are manifestly incoherent and prevent any serious thought from being possible, since they amount to a total denial of the existence of any kind of observer- or society-independent reality, i.e. they devolve to a solipsism of some form. Solipsism is not a coherent (or workable, at least) worldview, so can safely dismissed.
It is hard to provide a citation for these points because these points are so philosophically obvious that few waste time spelling them out, but searching for "hard/global constructionism" or "hard/global relativism" (on e.g. Google Scholar), or asking an AI about problems with these views I hope will make it clear why they are dumb, if it isn't already obvious to you.
Soft forms are of course totally fine. But to say "conscious is only and exactly whatever we say it to be" is hard constructionism / relativism, so completely unserious. Very obviously there are aspects of consciousness that do not merely depend on what we believe or say about it, even if some social constructionist aspects are also involved.
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/social-construction-natur...
[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/#RelAboTruAleR...
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