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