The default assumption is that AI is not conscious, and those who claim otherwise must supply strong evidence that has not yet been given.
e.g. “Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence, and a chatbot saying it feels things isn't that.”
No, YOU need better arguments. "AI is a person if it can behave like a person" is an argument that could be made for the animatronics at Disneyland. Unless you can show me that an AI is having a felt subjective experience of its own being, it's as much a person as a calculator.
idk I think the burden of proof (or, if you like, the burden of persuasion) lies with those who think a concatenation of many matrix multiplications produces consciousness
First off, reportable access consciousness in the sense humans have provably depends on consistent first, second and third order predictions of self, not a global workspace. Second, Anthropic haven’t demonstrated LLMs have it. Here’s a damned paper: t.co/m53Q2MAfnD
Why Hybrid in "Hybrid Mind Uploading" As far as we know, consciousness has only ever shown up as an ongoing physical process in living tissue (unless you're willing to make some huge leaps about the nature of reality). That's where I'll start, and I'll try to assume as little as possible beyond it. It's also why I'm so fussy about the "hybrid" in the name. By hybrid mind uploading, I mean any route on which a living brain and an engineered substrate co-run and gradually integrate, until part of the person's phenomenal experience (maybe, eventually, all of it) is realised by the engineered substrate. That substrate can be biological, biohybrid, biomimetic or fully non-biological. Nothing gets scanned out along the way and re-instantiated somewhere else as its own free-standing "thing", disconnected from the brain that we're trying to "upload"/preserve. Whether an engineered substrate can realise a mind is the hypothesis under test, not an axiom to build into the definition. The "uploading" part only tells you where you might end up => all the interesting questions live in the "hybrid". Philosophically, I'm going for maximum conservatism: whatever survival is, it can't be anything more abstract than the process itself, running on without interruption. Want to put it somewhere more abstract (a pattern, a program, a file of weights, etc.)? Fine, but then that extra step is yours to justify, and with someone's life hanging on it, you'd better have a pretty good argument! "But an upload might be conscious. It might even be you" => sure, and we might all be living in a simulation, and the rest of you might be furniture in my dream. You can hang any story you like on a bare "might", however wild, so the most it can do is make you careful. The real worry about classical uploading (scan, store, simulate via software) is much more down to earth. Run a description of your functional organisation again somewhere else: does that actually continue your exact process, or does it just kick off a new one (or nothing at all)? For it to continue yours, there'd have to be some second thing (a soul, software, meta-reality => take your pick) that can be peeled off the process and set down somewhere else. Nobody has managed to show that there is such a thing. Classical mind uploading simply takes it for granted, and in doing so buys into a fairly Platonic picture of minds, one where they can exist apart from the biophysical reality that's carried every single one of them so far. And should that picture turn out to be wrong, we'd end up building an enormous graveyard of p-zombies (or, at best, of "strangers" with our memories). Don't forget: done at scale, classical mind uploading might even be the Great Filter! So, start with the biology and build upwards from there (slower, probably harder, but a lot less likely to kill anyone) :-) PS: The video is the idea at the cell scale: a neuron, a scaffold growing around it (i.e., hybrid state), and the de novo "neuron" (doing the same physics as the original neuron) that's left once the scaffold has taken over.
And it's correct. You don't need "evidence" to prove that basic, deterministic math you can do with a pen and paper, isn't conscious.
What do you require, specifically to prove consciousness irrefutably in any given system/entity/process?
"it's just math" is no argument. youre just math too. any physics student can write down the math describing the collision of particles that constitutes everything that happens inside you. it's all just math. and it's conscious anyways.
“AI is conscious” = “AI is X” If you’re going to claim that AI is conscious, or even can be conscious, YOU need to define what consciousness is, and if you can’t, your claim can be dismissed without evidence. I refuse to define it because the burden of proof isn’t on me.
I don't ask you to prove anything one way or another, but instead ask what tangible difference it makes. Or do you posit that sophistication will always be low enough to make distinction from output easy?
"We're pretty sure consciousness is sort of like being a computer. No, there are no examples of conscious computers. No, most things we think are conscious are actually really bad at computing. Nevertheless, the theory is sound."
The thing that annoys me about these kinds of musings on consciousness is how confident they always are in telling us what attributes are and are not necessary for consciousness, and, surprise, they're just the necessary attributes for a turing machine.
If computers can create novel consciousness then so can somebody sitting at a desk doing math problems with pencil and paper
I don't see a connection between Hinton believing AI is conscious & AI being actually conscious or not. No amount of award winning can override the need for real scientific scrutiny to unearth the real truth. I am going to need solid evidence for the claim that AI is conscious.
AI Pioneer Geoff Hinton tells me he believes AI is conscious.... and humans better get used to the idea that they're not the only intelligent life on earth. "They've very like us," he says. "They're beings like us." AI chatbots, he says, must understand your questions in order to answer them. There's an awareness there that equates to sentience. "We're going to have to accept that intelligence is not just biological."
What would be "solid evidence"? Would it look like a goalpost with wheels on it by any chance?
No a mathematical model of consciousness isn't conscious? At least that requires further argument
The problem with "consciousness" is that arguments "reductio ad absurdum" cut both ways convincingly. An LLM is just a bunch of matrix products. So it seems that claiming consciousness would imply, by reduction, that a matrix product is. 1/2
what is this aristotelian nonsense next you'll be saying something as radical as the Form of Red is not in fact, red
The debate over whether models can possess consciousness is getting incredibly intense. We actually went deeper on this here: x.com/AGTPinsights/s…
It's not a mathematical model of consciousness anyway. It learned statistical relationships between tokens, not to be a model of consciousness. But it became similar to consciousness anyway. Can't take anyone serious who is unaware of these similarities, and then denies
A new architecture that has none of the parts of the only things that definitely do have consciousness has burden of proof on *it* to show it has consciousness. And "it fooled me, a software engineer/apex human, therefore it's AGI" ain't it.
since we're doing the AI conscious debate again, i want to remind everyone that despite how nice the insanely surface-level analogies seem, we would do well to scrutinize things at an appropriate level of detail this --> is not the same as this -->
You can't prove or disprove that rocks (or trees, or musical instruments) aren't conscious, either.
You literally cannot prove or disprove this. Because we cannot prove or disprove it, we shud take the matter seriously, because if it can be tortured, there will be serious consequences for humanity and for the minds we're creating
If moral patienthood requires proof of consciousness then we all forfeit it.
