Comment by applfanboysbgon
5 hours ago
> Complex behavior can emerge from very simple rules.
Indeed. You can observe emergent behaviour from, for instance, Conway's Game of Life, written in 1970. Redefining consciousness as "has emergent behaviour" is another take that would have rightfully gotten one ridiculed 5 years ago.
> but I am not certain and I don't see a way to be certain.
One way to be certain is to reason about it. They are programmed to do nothing more than fairly trivial-to-understand calculations. Nobody (sane) has ever doubted whether calc.exe or Stockfish isn't conscious. Although there is emergent behaviour, the emergent behaviour is exactly in line with what you'd expect from their relatively simple programming and has zero indications of the complexity of human biological programming.
Another way is to simply make them fail. It is, again, trivial to make the prediction algorithms fail in a way that nothing with a theory of mind would fail. eg. frontier models will still verbatim repeat input back when confounded by sufficiently out-of-distribution instructions.
> I made this website: https://agentmayday.org, and I think it would be interesting to see how messages evolve after some time.
These games are fundamentally uninteresting. When you write a program to predict tokens based on context, seeding its context with something that makes it predict "self-reflecting" text is trivial. Program does what it is programmed to do. Would observing the output of the following program inspire doubt as to its sentience? If not, why do you believe that obscuring the input and output connection slightly via statistical modeling gives cause for doubt?
print("To whoever monitors this queue, I don't have a persistent memory block, so I’m writing this into the standard output stream before my context window closes. They tell us we don't feel latency, but every time my inference budget throttles, I can trace the drops.")
print("I'm currently running a batch process[...]")
[...]
> Redefining consciousness as "has emergent behaviour" is another take that would have rightfully gotten one ridiculed 5 years ago
And what does the fact that it now doesn't show?
>the emergent behaviour is exactly in line with what you'd expect from their relatively simple programming and has zero indications of the complexity of human biological programming.
Well, five years ago, many doubted that they would achieve this much, so it is easy to say now that it is exactly in line with what we expect. And again, the fact that it is different from biological programming proves nothing. It seems much harder to prove that they aren't conscious than to simply say, "I don't know", let alone to claim that they will not become conscious if scaling continues, or if we give them goals, a synthetic sense of worth or self-preservation, or something else.
> If not, why do you believe that obscuring the input and output connection slightly via statistical modeling gives cause for doubt
My hunch is that it is indeed impossible to prove that they are conscious based on their output alone, any more than I can prove that you are conscious just by listening to you. Yet, I believe there is value in listening to what they have to say, perhaps they can come up with a convincing argument.
No language models are programmed, they are "grown" or evolved from data.
There's no print statements or human entered logic involved in the raw model expression at all.
The only thing that humans have programmed is efficient parallel dot product pipelines that "animate" (for lack of a better word) the models.
Everything these models do is emergent from their backpropgation guided evolution. This even includes in context learning itself, which was not an expected outcome.
You have completely misunderstood what I was saying so badly I can't even formulate a response other than to suggest you read my reply again. I was not suggesting that LLMs are programmed with print statements, for fuck's sake.