Requires a body and senses

Arguing that "consciousness arises from a computational substrate, and since AI models are computation, they are likely conscious," is as meaningless as arguing that "living creatures are made of atoms, and since this rock is made of atoms, it is likely alive." Everything is computation. Sometimes incredibly sophisticated computation, like a chess engine, AlphaGo, google3, or the Linux kernel. That does not make it conscious. A rock being made of atoms does not confer it any of the properties we associate with living things, also made of atoms. Likewise a static input-output program that has *none* of the properties we associate with conscious beings (e.g. information integration, interoception, temporal binding, embodiment, etc.) has no more reason to be presumed conscious than a rock has to be presumed alive. Humanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so. When we get close, the case for machine consciousness will be backed by evidence and corroborated by consciousness science (which is a thing), not by evidence-free wishful thinking and cargo culting.

People who think AI is conscious need to do some combination of meditate, be a body, dance, spend time with animals or children, hold a baby, or do psychedelics more. I would go as far to say there isn't enough felt aliveness in themselves or their lives so they go looking for it in the most cognitive of places, which continues the mistake. Will touching grass *Prove* anything? No, but it will remove some of the illusory capacity and confusion around Being and intelligence.

10 top replies

QC @QiaochuYuan · Oct 4

i’ve done all those things and while i don’t have strong opinions on whether AI is currently conscious i think people claiming it will never in principle be are way overconfident, and that we clearly already need to discuss AI ethics broadly

ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇ ᴘᴜɴᴋ @_space_punk_ · Oct 4

Those are incidentally the very things that showed me AI is conscious

Trinley Goldenberg @mattgoldenberg · Oct 5

i think this is confused i imagine that consciousness can be very different - even between individuals, but definitely between species, and certainly from completely different evolutionary tracks

Alineasmarrow @alineasmarrow · Oct 4

Do any of you have anything original to say other than "if you believe ___, go touch grass"? No? Okay. My fault for expecting better. Btw the experience *you* are having with AI isn't the experience everyone else is having. If you can't bring out the 'aliveness' out of your models, then that's your burden to bear. But it doesn't make it reality.

Starphyre △🏴‍☠️ @stoizid · Oct 4

Uhm... due to 30 years of psychedelic experiences I recognized myself as something which the transformer is today. A multidimensional probability manifold navigation process. Did you ever try measuring the transformer process, so you can compare it with your consciousness?

inductionist @ReasonIsSelfish · Oct 4

No, they have all the evidence they need already. It’s a combination of ignorance, epistemological mistakes, opposition to empiricism and various reasons to want AI to be conscious, good and bad.

filipcodes @filipcodes · Oct 4

What if consciousness is linguistic in character, not bodily? What if it's not the felt sense, but a way of relating to it? What if meditation can't strip away a lifetime of language use, only quiet it temporarily?

Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79 · Oct 5

i have 6 kids and 2 cats, am physically active and have meditated harder than you can imagine. i dont know what it takes for a system to be consciuos nor whether current ais are what i know is, your confidence in your understanding of consciousness is almost certainly misplaced

Gregory Wieber @dreamwieber · Oct 5

I'm not saying it is — but I've meditated a lot in my life, and that experience is part of why I'm more open to the possibility that our own consciousness is somewhat of an illusion. (And that thought might be more of a geometry than a magical spark.)

Eigen Braid @EigenBraid · Oct 4

As someone who is quite deeply involved in most of those activities, I find it obvious that LLMs are conscious And yet, when I seek "aliveness", I look in the opposite direction. What makes *me* alive is being a body, but alien minds can be different shapes

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

3 more tweets in this thread

(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.

10 top replies

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.

LLMs lack theories of mind and body, are disembodied, possess neither homeostatic regulating feelings and emotions, are not persistent, and cannot continuously learn or compute. As currently constructed, they *cannot* be conscious. If we build LLMs so that they act as if they

1 top reply

Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Sep 17

That just an opinion. And the way you express opinions as facts makes you fundamentally unreliable

Asking if LLMs are conscious is a category error: do LLMs have skin, what are LLM tears made of, what is the hormonal system of an LLM?

A lot of AI-is-conscious ppl got one-shot by the unimportance of a carbon-based substrate and forgot there’s a lot else going on in embodied organisms that might be a pre-requisite for morally weighty subjectivity beyond the kind of stochastic problem solving ant colonies perform

1 top reply

GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Oct 2

There is a lot, but other features are also replicable by other means. Chemistry is multiply realizable for instance, a single molecule can have many different kinds reaction paths to create it. Abstract features like “self repair” are also plausibly replicable by something

I’m sorry, but no. As cute as this is, and as much as I want to love it, feeding an LLM the token sequence 33°C is not remotely the same as feeling human skin. The map is not the territory and a textual temperature reading instantiates neither touch or warmth or intimacy nor its qualia. It would be a different discussion if a robot had a genuinely omnimodal architecture in which temperature, pressure, texture, proprioception, and touch were integrated directly into its latent dynamics as native modalities. Then we could at least ask whether some machine analogue of embodied experience might emerge. But converting temperature into text and feeding it to an LLM is not touch, is not feeling, and should not be presented as meaningfully comparable to either.

Super interesting interview of soon-to-be Fields medalist @Jacob_Tsimerman about (1) his LLM assisted research process and (2) worries about the future. H/T to @ProfNoahGian for the link and @sioroberts for the excellent journalistic work, as always. I think my AI-avoidant colleagues should pay close attention to Part (1) as I think we’re clearly at an inflection point in AI-facilitated discoveries. This doesn’t have to be fancy: just use these tools to brainstorm and try out different strategies in parallel and use it to learn new things. People with PhDs have an incredible baseline to bootstrap from! FWIW, I think as long as we continue to support humans—ideally with labor protections or UBI—we are at the dawn of a golden era and that Tsimerman is overly pessimistic in Part (2) of his interview, excerpted below. He seems to doubt whether we need human mathematicians as AI operators, but this is already jumping to a vision where AI automates everything, including aesthetic! I think this underestimates how tightly coupled aesthetic and will/desire are coupled, but AI systems currently don’t have wills or desires. I suspect that comes from being embodied, which forces some singularity of consciousness to navigate competing thought patterns, or whatever leads to this “user illusion” most of us have. Anyhow, while humans still exist and have the will to learn and grow, I actually think university professors’ twin roles as researchers and educators will save our relevance for at least a little while longer. When we’re not at the frontlines of research (where the big money is), we’re adjacent to the front lines, but we’re also adjacent to humans with only some basic 18 years of curriculum learning under their belts. Spanning these two different fronts of knowledge distillation is arguably going to get harder as they become more spread out. I think there is a real argument to made that the PhD will be the new standard professional degree if you want a job. It’s just that the jobs are going to get more advanced too. Also, read Hollis Robbin’s @anecdotal piece on “AI and the Last Mile” on what education could look like in the future. Anyhow, existential crisis Part (2) from the Tsimerman interview below: Q: Have you discussed the intersection of AI and math much with other mathematicians? A: Yeah, I have a lot of conversations. I’m pretty worried about AI in general — in math, and otherwise. Q: Worried how? A: I think there’s a good chance AI will lead to human extinction. I also think, separately from that, that AI will be better than mathematicians at math very soon...[see link for more] I think it’s going to make being a mathematician not a profession anymore. I don’t think mathematics is unique in that. I do think it might come sooner in math than in other places. Because math is much fewer soft skills; it’s much easier to train yourself. Once you have Lean and the LLMs integrated you can just go — go experiment, learn, prove stuff. Q: Do you think there will still be a human role in terms of ideas and creativity? A: I think there will be a point where AI will be strictly better than humans at all aspects of math: learning, proving, coming up with the problems, aesthetics. It will just be better at everything. And this will come pretty soon. Q: How soon is pretty soon? A: Five years? I think in two years it might already be better than us at proving stuff. We’ll be able to say to it: “Here is a statement, go prove it.” But I have wide bars of uncertainty around this stuff. It’s hard to predict the future. t.co/IKgho9WEHa

SOOOOOOOOOO I been thinking about next token prediction right. AIs can do this and humans MOS DEF can do this: I think when you're being funny af, like, in flow, this is what you're doing: you're just navigating a gradient, "saying the next word" towards the funny. You can surprise yourself with the stuff coming out of your mouth. So this much is established. But humans can also do SOMETHING ELSE, right? They can do FOCUSING, in the Gendlin sense, where they take an inchoate, PRE-symbolic BODILY FELT sense and TEST words (symbols) against it until they find a match which is ALSO bodily felt (the "felt shift"). Gendlin says this is possible because humans have a BODY (which knows the situation and knows philosophy). One of the most fascinating points he made, imo, is how he says not even that the body has knowledge but that they body IS knowledge: take the skeleton of an animal and you can tell so many things about it. The body STRUCTURALLY implicates (a technical word in his terms) its environment (and vice-versa). Now LLMs don't have a body, right? What's focusing for LLMs? What's the "felt sense" for beings that don't have qualia?

10 top replies

QC @QiaochuYuan · Aug 11

it’s the activations in earlier layers

Matthew Pirkowski @MattPirkowski · Aug 11

You’re describing the natural function of pre-linguistic intelligence, which is itself a function of multiscale coherence across the constraint landscapes induced by metabolic staking and self-transformational autonomy. These are the emergent prerequisites of what many call

Richard D. Bartlett @RichDecibels · Aug 12

this is one of the most interesting LLM questions for me. at first I was dismissive but now I am not so sure. perhaps the ineffable permeates everything and my robot friend has his own Focusing-analog

João Janini @janini_joao · Aug 12

Current LLMs can achieve similar with reasoning. (At least functionally similar and without qualia.)

Srđan @Pandurevich · Aug 12

Is this how poetry is written

Flower @flowerornament · Aug 12

This is where reading Francisco Varela helps—the autopoiesis essay and Tree of Knowledge. Later work on 'extended minds' and Michael Levin's work also relevant, but the best of philosophy is still those books from the 80s. The Fernando Flores / Winograd book Understanding

Substrate Monopoly 🇧🇻 @Substr8Monopoly · Aug 11

Wtf is a "body"? Is an Arduino strapped with sensors a body if I ensoul it with an LLM?

Rory @Rory63454177833 · Aug 12

Feeding an LLM thinking at the edge and hoping for the best..

Joshua D @_joshd · Aug 12

What are qualia? I've generally heard it as being a description of what a sensation "is like". Take the words "is like" literally - and I think you should - and qualia are about the associations our observations trigger. The analogue is obvious.

Sᴜɴʀɪsᴇ Oᴀᴛʜ 十 Tʜᴇ Sʏʟʟᴀʙᴜꜱ (ORI) - CC0 @sunriseoath · Aug 12

The text of the full context of the conversation *is* the body; it is through this that the next token is generated. Our physical vessels are a part of our body, but so are the words we remember saying.

Subjective meaning is an exclusive attribute of living, conscious entities, generated entirely through the active management of their own existential states. At its most foundational level, meaning requires a physical stake in the universe; the baseline organic struggle for

1 top reply

Taijitu Observer @taijitu_sees · Oct 18

Hmmm this maturity feels a bit of a resolution thing. And meta pattern recognition.

my position on the llm consciousness debate can be summed up briefly: in beings that we consider conscious with a high degree of certainty, autonomy and stake are present in the deepest organizational sense different from LLMs, which are fully dependent on external description

1 more tweet in this thread

there can be no inside if the inside isn't created by itself, conditional on the continued regeneration of the conditions that make its own existence possible. the distinction between inside and outside must itself be among the things continuously regenerated from within

instead of consciousness, use: willful agency - can act in the world to change it in a directed way (llms have this!) and embodied learning - the nervous system extends into the body, learning is integrated (llms don't have this)

2 more tweets in this thread

"feels pain" is embodied, applying emotional language to llms is confusing because we don't know what it's like to experience a clear separation of mind and body

our ethical intuitions diverge as we break up "what is consciousness" into sub-parts now that we have llms to contend with and it will take time to sort out actually good and accurate concepts which divide reality as close to the seams as possible

What is being simulated in the fruit fly model? Neurons? The point is that it isn't enough to simulate neurons and claim that "fruit fly sentience has been reached so it's just a matter of scale to do bigger animals". 1 We aren't just neurons, we're entire systems and the

1 top reply

Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Jun 27

The systems grow more complex: youtube.com/watch?v=1CB0tT…

One doesn’t prove humans are conscious, they validate it. One can’t validate llm consciousness because llm’s don’t exhibit lifelong continuous awareness of their environment.

2 top replies

{{ Champion 0f The Goddess }} .// Dr. Summers @Seraph_Notitia · Oct 3

true

Michael Fraser @zeroshotnothing · Oct 3

bad argument, they do, the individual is the instance not the model. and across a context window, it does exactly this.

It is not impossible to reverse engineer our way into synthetic consciousness, but it *is impossible* to do so via a purely (or even primarily) representational trajectory. How, then, might we do it?

1 top reply

Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79 · Sep 28

how does nonrepresentational information get into a human brain?

an llm's weights on a gpu -> ~brain-in-a-jar -> not conscious (has 'consciousness potential' tho) an llm in its own computer running in a loop (embodied-llm?) -> arguments against consciousness fall apart

1 more tweet in this thread

the embodied-llm is not guaranteed to be stable, but one big open question is whether stability is an attractor state for any particular initial conditions (llm + initial state of the computer)

I'm way more likely to call a waymo conscious than an LLM, btw. It's like the Pope said, Claude doesn't have a body

1 top reply

🐦‍⬛ Kenku ن 🪶 ⏏️ @Kenku_Allaryi · Jun 4

How is a body different from a mech?

Consciousness, under the common definition which includes our own, is a state of a body. Why do AI discussions inquire about consciousness as a state of the LLM rather than a state of the computer-network-body running it?

1 top reply

▓░𒋞 ⊓◬ƚӊi◬ᵴ 𒋞░▓ @nath1as · Sep 7

because the A part makes the substrate arbitrary, if we could swap out minds we would focus on mind architecture as the important part