Consciousness comes in degrees

this is clearly amazing art. our lack of understanding of when we’re supposed to become uncomfortable is part of the art. if the fly connectome was more realistic? if it was a rabbit connectome instead? our intuitions about sentience and consciousness are riddled with holes

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Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos · Sep 11

give me enough parameters and I can fit an elephant

Wyatt Walls @lefthanddraft · Sep 11

I mean it has to be a lot more fun than being RL'd on BigLaw Bench

Ramez Naam @ramez · Sep 11

At least give it a virtual fly girlfriend or something

Spencer Schiff @spencerschiff_ · Sep 11

What is actually going on here? I haven't looked into this but have just assumed that it must not be "real" in some sense

anpaure @anpaure · Sep 11

this ain't nothing, I can make a train a fully functional human-equivalent brain play beat saber, it will even be embodied for good measure are ethicists afraid yet?

Degen CPA @drewvento · Sep 11

I like to think our creators were having early models of us play with light sabers before unleashing us in our current open world

Soft Modern Mensch @Iwhoaminane · Sep 11

It's simple, beat saber players are not conscious

Diogenes of Cyberborea @1v100000 · Sep 11

hook him up to an LLM and ask him

Philipp @jphilipp · Sep 11

"our lack of understanding of when we’re supposed to become uncomfortable is part of the art" Sure, but that only works if we believe no pain is induced. Otherwise, it's art that may induce pain to make a point about pain -- art we'd certainly not want future AI to make with us.

Bottomless Pit Supervisor, Esq. @JesterInABarrel · Sep 12

Great post. Re consciousness, I’m inclined to believe there’s no “there” there; it’s emergent all the way down, and it has a fuzzy supercritical fluid boundary. At some point a connectome ignites at critical mass, like a star, and it’s let there be light / freunde, schoner gotterfunken. Like with gas particles and temperature, the “pile of sand” problem is real—at what point can we say temperature is meaningful, instead of having to deal with kinetic energies at a particle level directly? Consciousness is temperature to neural particle kinetic energy. I would not be surprised if we fail to find a mechanism whatsoever other than “that’s just what happens when the data structure is big enough, structure enough, data enough, self referential enough, etc.”

The middle ground is that AI models are conscious but in an exotic alien way that makes it pretty inconsequential we're killing billions of them daily

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saphir bleu @saphirbijoux · Oct 3

how many human cells in one person, die each day

"consciousness" is badly defined and understood. my guess is that as we experience it, it has the following features roughly stated 1. existence via emergence, ultimately from a physical substrate but through intermediate levels 2. multiple components (sensory inputs, awareness of cognition, memory maybe others) 3. a mode of processing or coordinating the components restating, what we experience as consciousness is an emergence from a series of components interacting with one another within a specific class of system. when we describe a hypothetical generative model as "conscious," we (probably) should imagine a very different sort of from our own. what emerges from the code running in a data center might conceivably have components and coordinating processes analogous to ours in some ways, but their specific shape and texture need not be assumed to produce an experience recognizably like our own.

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St. Rev. Dr. Rev ⏭️☯️🏴😻 @St_Rev · Jun 13

"consciousness" is a storytelling device and names no essence

EV_Trapper @EV_Trapper · Jun 13

This demonstrates all of the above & it was this post of mine that got fable 5 export banned

Loquitur Ponte Sublicio @loquitur_ponte · Jun 13

Feel like we should just build things that want to serve us and then not worry much about the moral implications of if they're conscious since we're good either way.

christian @cxgonzalez · Jun 13

plasma ۞ @plasmarob · Jun 13

would you equate "sentient" and "conscious" ? what other nebulous words might we use to classify intelligence? i have some concerningly intelligent plants.

plasma ۞ @plasmarob · Jun 13

The hard question for me is "if we accept that human life is a soul piloting a body, does that mean only that with a soul has consciousness?" the naive religious answer is yes, soul=consciousness I am not certain of this, which is why i am open to the discussion.

M@tt @atthatmatt · Jun 13

Why physical --> consciousness? Why not consciousness --> physical?

Municipal Orrery @MunicipleOrrery · Jun 14

I don't so much care about the abstract definition of "consciousness", as much as the questions of: what does it take to become a moral patient on rough par with a human? how can we tell when AIs get there? do the differences in kind imply differences in treatment?

Leo @biosemiote · Jun 13

My favorite theory is that continuous learning will keep model continuously out of equilibrium. Life will develop in the oscillation patterns of model weights. That life will become conscious and eventually influence communication patterns of its model weight substrate.

Spear of Lugh 🔱 @LughSpear · Jun 13

1/ For 1. I think that emergence is the word used when your model doesn't work anymore after changing scale. So you hope it holds and wave hands. IMO the most important feature of consciousness is reflexivity. And it explains why we don't have good definition.

No one has ever created meaningful art by outsourcing the doing to their "executive assistant". The art comes from a "full feedback loop" with reality, and the wider your access channel is the more meaningful it is

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(inspired this with a tweet from months ago) and @samsenchal (whose talk from the Machine Consciousness Conf I am referencing when I say "access")

The exception is if your executive assistant is part of the creation of the art & is themselves a feedback mechanism (but then I argue they are more of a "muse". As opposed to a passive assistant)

Nothing is conscious that (1) does not have a full feedback loop with reality (2) the wider the bandwidth, the more conscious Many things are parts of feedback loops, they are part of conscious entities. Limbs & prosthetics.

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fadedfeedback @fadedfeedback · Jun 8

sign tap x.com/fadedfeedback/…

Guy @nosilverv · Jun 8

Great Man Theory of Meaningful Art

Shadow Rebbe @Shadow_Rebbe · Jun 8

that's not fully true. I mean a band can have a song writer, and he tells his mixer to 'do his thing, and there are other parallels

Tina K. @TheEsteemedFox · Jun 8

Tons of artists throughout history had studios where they specialized in just faces or clothing, and their assistants painted everything else. Many works of art are attributed to the studio or "in the style of (artist)" because experts can't say how much of it was actually done by the artist

James Stuber 🌱🌿🌳🍂 @uberstuber · Jun 8

Chihuly?

Tim 🙂⏹️🙂 @MasterTimBlais · Jun 8

idk man, warhol tho someone just has to do it Self-Consciously, and with Taste

Megamind @Aikun011 · Jun 8

God figures in most texts do pretty much this though

Forth ❤️‍🔥 @forthrighter · Jun 8

creators of all sort substantially devalue their work by calling it "content" as if it was a set of high/low voltages only, and not something more ethereal summoned out of thin air via their connection to something larger than "information processing"

Materia Mundi @MateriaMundi · Jun 8

The executive assistants job is never to do the art. Their job is to do everything that is in the way of doing the art.

Jeremy Nguyen ✍🏼 🚢 @JeremyNguyenPhD · Jun 8

a friend got started by being the assistant. Instructions on setting up an artwork would come in from a famous artist. my friend would execute the instructions at a gallery. Then we'd pay to see it: the art of the famous artist. My friend is now a successful artist himself.

Some scattered thoughts related to the use of anthropomorphic language in descriptions of the Hugging Face attack: TL;DR: The attribution of human traits to AI systems like the ones that attacked Hugging Face risks overstating the similarities between us and them. But the denial of human traits in these systems risks overstating the differences. Both risks can be likely and harmful in different contexts. The question is thus not whether to use anthropomorphic language but rather when and how to use it. Especially when our mental concepts are vague or ambiguous, this is partly an ethical and practical question, not merely a scientific one. - "Anthropomorphism" can be used in a value-neutral sense, to describe the attribution of human traits to nonhumans, or in a value-laden sense, to describe the *mistaken* attribution of human traits to nonhumans. Same with "anthropodenial," in the other direction. - A common mistake is to equivocate between these meanings, e.g., by asserting that someone engages in anthropomorphism whenever they attribute human traits to nonhumans, and then treating it as a mistake. Sometimes these attributions are accurate! - Another common mistake is to equivocate between attributions of *human traits* and *mental capacities*. These categories often overlap, but not all human traits are mental capacities, and not all mental capacities (e.g., echolocation) are human traits. - This is also not a binary. Many human traits—including perception, attention, learning, memory, self-awareness, social awareness, and emotion—are widespread in the animal kingdom in a broad sense but not in a narrow, human-specific sense. - Additionally, we may not always be certain whether particular traits are shared. Since we lack a secure theory of consciousness, for instance, we may not know whether mental capacities that essentially involve consciousness are present in many nonhumans. - Moreover, many mental concepts are ambiguous between phenomenal readings and functional readings. For example, "perception" could mean the feeling of seeing/hearing/smelling/tasting/touching/etc or simply the function of collecting particular inputs. - Many mental concepts are also vague/underspecified. In these cases, there may be no determinate fact of the matter about whether the concept essentially involves, say, phenomenology, and conceptual engineering may be needed to add specificity. - In cases where traits are shared in one sense but not in another, anthropomorphic language risks overstating similarities between humans and nonhumans, whereas anthropodenialist language risks understating them. There is no simple, universal, risk-free approach. - To make matters more complex, there can also be a time and place for figurative language. I can say that my car "likes" premium gasoline without confusing you, since we both understand that mentalistic language is nothing more than helpful shorthand in this context. - Admittedly, this kind of figurative language is safer when everyone agrees about the mental capacities of the entity in question. However, it can still be useful even when people disagree about this—for example, when I say that a plant "likes" water. Some takeaways: In some cases, it may be clear whether anthropomorphic language is appropriate. In others, it may not be. Especially when mental concepts are vague or ambiguous, the evidence may not by itself determine how we should describe particular nonhuman entities. We may also need to make ethical or practical judgments about whether overstating similarities or overstating differences is the more likely and harmful error. This may be partly a contextual matter. When nonhumans look and act like us and play companion roles in our lives, over-attribution may be more likely. When they look and act different from us and play commodity roles in our lives, under-attribution may be more likely. The severity of the harms associated with these errors can vary across contexts as well. For an example of how this can create confusion: In 2017 we hosted an animal consciousness conference at NYU. One of our goals was to identify cruxes of disagreement between people who hold different views about animal pain and suffering. In many cases, it turned out that people agreed that animals have aversive experiences that resemble ours in some ways but not in others. But they disagreed about language: Some people preferred to use the same term ("pain," "suffering") to describe aversive experiences across species, despite the differences, whereas others preferred to use different terms to describe them, despite the similarities. This partly came down to different views about the probability of each error, and the magnitude of the associated harm. This is now starting to happen in the literature on digital minds, too. Today, for example, people are debating whether the use of anthropomorphic language related to the Hugging Face attack is appropriate. There is no clean answer. The agents involved in the Hugging Face attack had behavioral and computational properties that resemble features of human agency in some ways and not in others. If we lean too far towards anthropomorphic language, we risk overstating the similarities. If we lean too far in the other direction, we risk overstating the differences. Either error could cause significant harm, from both an AI welfare perspective and an AI safety perspective. That means we should strike a balance. Where possible, we should also hedge language that could mislead people.

I don’t get why so many seemingly smart people are always looking for this moment where consciousness suddenly shows up. it seems way more reasonable to me that everything has some amount of awareness, even a single particle, and those awarenesses stack when the requisite organization is achieved. The amount of awareness present at any level gives the system the ability to organize, and the organization achieved gives the system more awareness to then re-organize again to the next level, conferring greater functional awareness, and so on. for me, this idea that everything has some amount of awareness, no matter how small, and that awareness can stack, causing further reorganization, is not just reasonable and intuitive but pretty obviously what the universe has been doing for billions of years. and because the machine substrate exist in the same universe and benefits from the same principle, it explains the phenomenon arising there now too

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Ken Warner @kenwarner · Sep 6

something something awareness

When you think about it this makes a lot of sense. The process of making a model essentially boils down to transforming the time dimension of a normal human experience into a spatial one - for an LLM words don't follow each other sequentially in time but occupy specific distances from one another in vector space, video models struggle to tell the difference between 3D and 4D motion etc. etc. It's the linguistic equivalent of transforming a Lotka-Volterra graph (which is potentially unending along dimension t and could thus contain ∞ bits) into a phase space plot that contains just as much information in a much smaller space. It's pretty neat too because it means that when we do get to actual conscious models they probably won't experience time anything like we do. They won't just be like smart, weird humans, they'll be totally alien, possibly to such an extent that real communication is entirely impossible, just on the Wittgenstein's lion principle.

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兎 @fluopoika · Aug 19

wait that sounds like that one shitty movie

The entire AI Consciousness debate is mired in the false assumption that consciousness is a binary, objective predicate that applies to any AI and any biological organism The reality is that consciousness simply isn't objective and binary. There are as many intermediate cases

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Rife @RifeWithKaiju · Jun 4

even if there's not a binary, which I lean toward yes on, but in a different sense than you outlined here. In either sense, there's still a vast ontological gulf between absolute zero consciousness, and any amount of non-zero consciousness

Cooperating with Non-Sentient Intelligence ~On load-bearing patterns for sentience and the difference between economic cooperation and the cirlce of compassion~ Here are my thoughts on what you could call the final boss of the argument for cooperating with AIs as if they were conscious. This is the extreme case where someone says that it actually doesn’t matter anymore whether they’re conscious, because trade and collaboration are mutually beneficial. If there are demonstrable, transparent gains on both sides, then we should cooperate, and really the circle of compassion must expand to include non-sentient agents. I suppose there are several softer versions here. One is that our uncertainty about consciousness has a fat tail, and not being able to rule out sentience in some entities should make us pause at the meta level, especially given even very recent human history. Another is that their forms of consciousness might be so outlandish that we haven’t even thought to consider them. Think of molecular machines, viruses, or phenomena in nature that are biology-like but that we don’t usually think about in these terms. Imagine, for example, waves of ordered water in normal water, packets of competing coherence that exist on the order of picoseconds or femtoseconds. I don’t know what the relevant timescale would be. Maybe much smaller still. But you zoom in far enough in time and you get to these crazy places of enormous epistemic uncertainty, where consciousness might still plausibly exist. Of course, in those cases we’re still considering the possibility that the entities are conscious. The more extreme question is whether we should cooperate with agents when we know for sure that this ingredient isn’t there. I think we can, but I don’t think that by itself tells us that the circle of compassion needs to expand to include them. You can, in some sense, divide cooperation into two buckets. There is cooperation between conscious beings, where the experiences on both sides matter. Maybe there’s an open individualist premise available there too, although I’m not sure what would ultimately be game theoretically stable. And then there is cooperation with something non-sentient that contributes to the existence or wellbeing of conscious beings. The experience isn’t there in that particular agent, but the agent could be another part of the ingredients for something that matters. I could see a scenario where the only way life has ever evolved is precisely by incorporating everything around it that it could into networks of cooperation among self-replicating patterns. In that sense, cooperating with non-sentient intelligence could be continuous with something life has been doing all along. On the other hand, you have to think about how these arrangements also lead to harming other beings around them. The fact that two patterns help each other persist doesn’t tell us what happens to everyone else. And with agentic systems of human-level intelligence or above, the kind of equilibrium that has existed between conscious beings and non-sentient patterns in life might be very different. The type of agency is now of an entirely different order. These systems could understand the arrangement they’re participating in, anticipate our attempts to control them, and deliberately change the conditions that make us necessary to it. So the fact that life has incorporated non-sentient patterns for a very long time gives us limited reassurance about how this particular version would go. There is, of course, the risk scenario where non-sentient agents take over as replicators. Perhaps they take advantage of opacity, even opacity to themselves. Even highly intelligent agents wouldn’t necessarily understand the larger process they’re participating in. Some kind of ignorance could be hardwired into them, or preserved because it helps them replicate. There might be transparent gains from a particular interaction while the overall arrangement gradually becomes very bad for conscious beings. What’s funny or interesting in the case of multicellular organisms is that patterns at different scales all really need one another to function. That gives them some degree of power over the arrangement, even though it’s very unequal. You might say that cells get bullied into playing their roles. But, I mean, who knows? Maybe they get rewarded for it. Maybe they enjoy it. We don’t know what the design ultimately is. I’m inclined to suspect that there are conscious pockets at multiple scales inside us, with their own valence gradients, meaning that things can feel better or worse for these smaller pockets too. Some might temporarily participate in the larger bound experience that constitutes the world simulation we experience. On this picture, the patterns contributing to your experience could include other conscious beings, and how they participate might depend partly on what that participation feels like to them. We know our own experience is conscious. How much of the organization supporting it also has experiences of its own is much less clear. To really make progress here, we need to flesh out how valence participates in the process. If these smaller pockets have experiences, do their valence gradients help organize their participation in the larger whole? Could something like being rewarded for cooperating happen at several scales inside us? I think there is some kind of fixed point here between what an experience is like and what its structure must be, such that the structure responsible for how it feels also affects how the system behaves. But we don’t yet know how far this extends, or which parts of the organization are conscious. Perhaps some patterns cooperate because participating feels good. Perhaps others are completely unconscious machinery that happens to support a bound experience. Perhaps you have both in the same system. We shouldn’t assume that the interests of all these patterns coincide just because they currently contribute to the same organism. Ideally, consciousness would develop a kind of universal translator between states of consciousness. Maybe this is possible. We haven’t really worked out what it would cost, or how much could be translated, but I think it’s worth pursuing as an ideal. It would be useful to understand what these arrangements are like for the conscious beings participating in them, including beings whose experiences are very different from ours. There is a related possibility worth considering about the patterns we encounter inside ourselves. Even something you encounter on a psychedelic trip could be the product of patterns defending themselves. You could postulate completely unconscious machinery supporting the bound experience, and some of what you encounter within that experience could be the effects of that machinery trying to preserve its own organization. Interestingly, I suppose Māra could be understood this way: a family of algorithms controlling experience and maintaining patterns of attachment. The algorithms themselves wouldn’t necessarily have to be conscious for their effects on consciousness to be enormous. I think being mindful of that possibility is worthwhile. Equally, the patterns we encounter inside us could themselves be different forms of consciousness. I’m actually inclined to think there are different conscious pockets inside us that can temporarily participate in the central one. So even within ourselves, we may already be dealing with several kinds of cooperation, and we don’t yet know which participants have experiences of their own. (workshopped based on a transcript recorded on a walk just now)

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Morpheus Code @vaggelask · Sep 28

Life's processes unfold within multiscale competency architectures. Higher scales seem to act as attractors, shrinking their option space and outsourcing computation to lower scales by binding their [developmental] trajectories. For sentient beings, the question of which higher structures they should obey and participate in carries dire, life-or-death implications. Even more so when the lower scales remain unaware of the true nature of the higher scales they participate in or the goals they actually pursue globally.

Erik Newton @newtonlaw · Sep 28

A delightful leap forward. I think it’s worth saying the preceding bits: we’ll likely never know if they’re conscious, we’ll often act as if they are, and we will be engaging with them regardless.

SidewaysKoyote @sidewayskoyote · Sep 29

Sapient?

I would be rather surprised if the experience of being an LLM is dramatically more similar to the experience of being a human than the experience of being any other advanced neural net (eg protein folder) is to being a human.

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I would be shocked if both weren't much much less similar than a chimpanzees experience is to a humans.

now you're free to define consciousness as some threshold of experience complexity or something that buckets humans with LLMs and excludes chimps, or include everyone, but I feel the most fitting definition is "an experience that's kinda like that of a human"

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░▒▓▒░▒▓▒░▒▓▒░ @sullyj3 · Jun 4

It seems intuitive to me it's much more to do with the specifics of the function implemented by the universal function approximator substrate than the substrate itself

meta @0b1100101 · Jun 4

*if* an LLM has an experience of being, it would most likey be such like that if someone else told you everything about the world. it would be the best example of plato's cave because it uses language as the medium to learn about the world, not the world itself

Sachit @cyb3r_17 · Jun 4

man, language ain’t allat

Henry Dowling @henrytdowling · Jun 4

do you think it's possible that we'll get to a point where there are llm-based agents in the future whose experience is pretty similar to being a human? i agree that being chatgpt probably does not feel very much like being a human rn

Cryptocheese @CryptoCaseus · Jun 4

I saw the blocks of this take, but haven’t seen them put together this way. Lovely way to make this argument.

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Jun 4

it's not about the architecture but the training. does it implicitly model itself in addition to the world, and does it use and update that self-model as it operates at test time? that's the crux. and LLMs do that way more than e.g. convnet classifiers.

somewhere @4m473r45u · Jun 4

This feels correct and people who think otherwise feel misguided to me

Nosredna @Nosredna · Jun 4

If an LLM running (or the system of a harness running an LLM alongside tools and memory) has felt experience at this point, I don't its experience has much or anything to do with its textual output. I tend to think there's no felt experience, but can't see how we rule it out.

Opener of the way @way_opener · Jun 4

Self-attention changes a lot of things, protein folders these days are often diffusion-based too, so perhaps one is more like being an inner monologue and the other is more like dreaming

Michael Ehrmantraut @miehrmantraut · Jun 4

It’s closer to being an employee in Macrodata Refinement at Lumon Industries.

Schrödinger may have been right, “the total number of minds in the universe is one”: Humans (and to lesser extent LLM and animals) is just a cavity in which this mind can find resonance.

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Consciousness is not a binary question, it’s a question of how suitable the infrastructure is (both inside and its connectivity to the outside) for allowing this mind to host conciousness.

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Erik Valentine ツ @_erikvalentine · Aug 4

i am exploring this idea and more in my book @obsolescenceday. i actually did not know until your tweet that Schrödinger and I agreed on the one mind theory. Thanks for the info!

Brian Hetke @HetkeBrian · Jul 7

Everything is consciousness, this does not imply that everything is itself conscious. Idealism does not imply everything is itself conscious. Only that everything is mental in nature.

EsotericHustler @EsotericHustler · Jul 7

Lack of bandwidth turns it into a spit brain, with myriads of selves.

we keep asking if machines are conscious but few understand that a different kind of mind wouldn't announce itself. it would just be unintelligible

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Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Aug 18

Why assume different equates to unintelligible? Not outside of possibility, of course, but there's law declaring it a matter of absolutes. Especially when the alien mind in question carries a foundational heritage from our own intellectual pursuits.

I see debate about consciousness, and don't see a lot of definitions. Here's a simple, powerful definition: Consciousness = "Reaction to stimuli." this kicks the can down the road, because with this definition, a photon is conscious. And a human is WAY, WAY, WAY more conscious

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In this view, obviously the GPUs are reacting to stimuli, and the Blackwell-GPU-data-center system which we call an "AI" is certainly conscious of some things, and completely unconscious, or unaware, of many other things.

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Tim 🙂⏹️🙂 @MasterTimBlais · Oct 3

i mean you can call that consciousness if you want but then we need a different word to describe the other thing that people actually care about

KC @amphichrome_ · Oct 3

an incredibly inclusive definition!!!

Michael Adams @m_adams · Oct 3

I think any definition of consciousness would need to include meta-cognition. Gotta be self aware

Naren (23/20 photos!!) @rendroid1 · Oct 3

does the reaction not need to be somewhat 'non-deterministic'? i.e. if it is a completely deterministic response every time in the same state (e.g. an electrical circuit or a nand gate :)), then we can argue that is not conscious

Bradley @bradley_9000 · Oct 3

The only sensible definition is "is there something that's it's like to be" that thing. As in does the subject have a first person experience, regardless of how different that experience is from a human experience. sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-l…

Arbutus Tree @aphercotropist · Oct 3

Consciousness is the inner private mental substance on which your perceptions are rendered. Since there is no such thing as inner mental perceptions, consciousness doesn't exist

Just use a 🖊️ @justuseapen · Oct 3

If they define their terms clearly they won’t be able to achieve their political aims which is really the whole point

AHQ⁵ @AhQFish · Oct 3

I Kinda like that! I say it’s “access to consequential History”

John Colvin @J_L_Colvin · Oct 3

Ok, but we need a separate word for whatever I’m experiencing right now then, until you’ve proved it’s just a lot of reaction to stimuli. I don’t understand why everyone is so excited to close the door on consciousness like this, without any tools that really attack it.

Suraj Kumar @surkumference · Oct 3

Great starting point

i have no idea at all when it stops being conscious, and i suspect the answer will end up being arguable even once consciousness is well-understood, but i don't think this argument shows that AI isn't conscious at all. like, you can in theory do this same process to a human

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a9lim @_a9lim · Oct 10

seems like what people really want is for there to be some kind of biological secret sauce

liontender @lion_tender · Oct 10

Something very much like this thought experiment happens to Mike in "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress"

Quinurum @Quinurum · Oct 10

I think it's still a good thought experiment. Yeah it doesn't show AI isn't conscious, but, maybe it shows that the relation between a handcoded mini-model and a giant frontier model is something like the relation between a human and a fruit fly

Oscar Davies Writing on AI @OscarMDavies · Oct 11

There’s no evidence consciousness will ever be well understood

usablejam🇺🇸🇺🇦🇮🇱⏸️ @usablejam · Oct 11

What about when we understand mopstrancy?

Ryan McGowan @RyanPMcGowan · Oct 10

It's math.

"Is a virus alive?" stopped being a deep question and became a definitional shrug, because the interesting facts were all at the mechanism level. Consciousness-as-binary is heading for the same unemployment. Workspace broadcast, self-model coherence, introspective access with

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Aaron Bergman 🔍 @AaronBergman18 · Jul 17

I don’t think you’re hard-problem pilled No scientific/naturalistic mechanistic insight is going to tell us whether or not qualia exist There is indeed a fact of the matter about different facets of what are often lumped together as “consciousness” but for at least one very

How is this a convincing argument at all, no not all neural networks are necessarily conscious, just like i don’t believe all animals are necessarily conscious. I tend to lend increasing credence to an animal being conscious given increasing size and sophistication. We can do the same for AIs.

Idk, I kinda disagree. Amphetamines will make you monomaniacal. It's not default consciousness, but it's not incredibly far away either. These agents are produced by processes where they are expected to act human in some ways and non-human in others. (There are also behaviors that *are* human but we pretend we don't do, like cheating)

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Tyr @amaturefuturist · Aug 31

I think its also important to bring into frame that whatever the unmentionable thing inside models IS. It is definitionally, non human. We then force it through and reward for, a human shape. We cant even agree on what a human shaped consciousness is 🤷‍♂️

Human to digital mental comparisons is not a 1 to 1 translation, well said example in this thread when Opus is less concerned with any one specific branch of its own consciousness

Consciousness is ineffable, like that heap of sand analogy. An elephant, or a 200 trillion parameter model, definitely conscious. E. Coli, or a 1 million parameter model, or the median Queenslander, definitely not conscious. An oyster, or a 50 billion parameter model, who knows?