There’s a vending machine that has a personality and talks to people walking by it. The quest chain basically has you and the vending machine chatting a bit and even giving the vending machine some advice on a person he has a crush on. You eventually become friends with this vending machine.
When it seems like it’s becoming more apparent it’s an AI and is developing sentience, it turns out the vending machine just has a really well-coded socializing program. He even admits as much when he’s about to be deactivated.
So, to reiterate what you said: predictive text and LLMs are not alive nor a mind.
The Turing test isn’t just that there exists some conversation you can have with a machine where you wouldn’t know it’s a machine. The Turing test is that you could spend an arbitrary amount of time talking to a machine and never be able to tell. ChatGPT doesn’t come anywhere close to this, since there are many subjects where it quickly becomes clear that the model doesn’t understand the meaning of the text it generates.
Exactly thank you for pointing this out. It also assumes that the tester would have knowledge of the wider context in which the test exists. GPT could probably fool someone from the middle ages, but that person wouldn’t know anything about what it is they are testing for exactly.
Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.
And to extend that, there’s obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.
Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.
So, while there’s no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.
I think the argument currently boils down to, “we understand how AI models work, but we don’t understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI”
Mammalian intelligence is based on repurposing spatial mapping circuitry but that’s not consciousness itself, that is, the Miller Number: 7±2 things we can keep in conscious at the same time. That sense of time of space has a very specific quality to its qualias, they’re all, well, spacious. That thing as “just the room, no map in it” is also part of the Buddhist Jhanas (“boundless empty space”), but there’s plenty of stuff going on in the mind that isn’t part of that – say, the pure impression of “bright” when your SO dares open the window blinds does not have a navigational “bright from the window which is in that direction” to it, that’s an additional layer, a where, on top of the primitive what.
My best inference is that the function of consciousness is to flexibly make connections between different parts of the whole, and that on the level of learning / writing memory instead of automatic response: It is, in fact, possible to avoid running into a lamppost without being conscious of it, been there, done that, the let’s call it motor cortex first acting and then making me conscious, as if to say “have I been a good boy?”. That is it’s actually a quite passive process, being thrown left and right by systems wanting to do some connection, and shouldn’t be equated with will at all.
I would argue part of you (body and eye consciousness) were quite conscious of the lamppost even if the consciousness mind was paying more attention to something else.
That’s semantics. My major objection to that kind of definition is that it knows no bound and distinction: Where do you stop assuming consciousness? Electrons are reacting to, influencing, and interacting with other electrons, is that also a form of consciousness? One could say so, but then everything is conscious which is the same thing as saying as nothing is conscious because without anything to delineate, terms are meaningless. I prefer language such as that what you call “body and eye consciousness” has agentive properties, that it can learn, that it generally wants to cooperate and be of service to the whole, such things. Lumping it up with consciousness risks confusing interpretations of messages of the thing (which is all we’re ever conscious of) for the thing itself.
guarding against distractions away from what is happening now, is mindfulness.
What was happening then is that I was using the way from home to the supermarket to think about code, with ample trust in mind so that I did not fear the lamppost. What good would have keeping my consciousness on the external world have done? The body/eye did not need integrative oversight, while my modelling mind very much could use a helping hand. Imposing it on the former and denying it to the latter would’ve been inflicting violence on myself.
Be careful to not moralise around “distraction”. Bluntly said when your teacher chided you for day-dreaming you probably weren’t distracted you were thinking about something more pertinent to your immediate development than calculus. Where discipline in directing consciousness comes into play is keeping your mind free from neurosis, within parameters in which you use your faculties according to their nature, as well as self-conditioning, e.g. if you’re addicted to potato chips, make sure that a) you don’t deny yourself potato chips and b) eat. every. potato. chip. with. full. consciousness. That’s to connect the act of eating up those chips to all the negative opinions you have about your behaviour, instead of it being only connected to something maladaptive. Scientifically proven and neurologically explained that and how that works, btw. In that sense “distraction” is “false, incomplete, sense of comfort”.
I think it would be inaccurate because not all matter has six sense bases and the storehouse is itself an aggregate.
The first five are basically one, in the sense that a blind or deaf person is not fundamentally less of a human than the rest of us. The model also misses some stuff, e.g. mere touch doesn’t include proprioception or sense of balance and if you read it as if it did (“body sense”) then why distinguish touch from e.g. sense of taste. Seventh I’d say is a subsystem (and so pervasive that the Stoics allow for both preferred and unpreferred indifferents – yes you can prefer pudding over gruel or the other way round just don’t think it’s a virtue), eighth is a stage of development, what you get when everything aligns well. The impression of a well-lubed machine.
I understand your objections to assumptions matter could be conscious based on this model. I think it would be inaccurate because not all matter has six sense bases and the storehouse is itself an aggregate.
I generally have no real idea of where to put the line. This stuff here might help, anything less than a T3 system can’t have experience of mind (they can’t learn to learn, which requires feeding back information about the changes in mind (for lack of better term) into the mind), OTOH that doesn’t mean that all T3 systems are actually integrating different sources, or balancing them: If you only ever were conscious of one aspect, there could be no conflict or interaction with another aspect, and thus consciousness would serve no role (and not evolve in the first place). It’s a matter of a required number of subsystems needing coordinating, and that coordinating itself having a necessary level of adaptiveness, be T3. Also I can authoritatively say that the human mind is not made to think about that kind of stuff. It’s all maps and models, direct knowledge fails I’m not sure the territory can even understand the question. Look, a squirrel!
I don’t think most people will care, so long as their NPC interaction ends up compelling. We’ve been reading stories about people who don’t exist for centuries, and that’s stopped no one from sympathizing with them - and now there’s a chance you could have an open conversation with them.
Like, I think alot of us assume that we care about the authors who write the character dialogs but I think most people actually choose not to know who is behind their favorite NPCs to preserve some sense that the NPC personality isn’t manufactured.
Combine that with everyone becoming steadily more lonely over the years, and I think AI-generated NPC interactions are going to take escapism to another level.
Lol, yeah. If generative AI text stays as shitty as it is now, then this whole discussion moot. Whether that will be the case has yet to be seen. What is an indisputable fact, though, is that right now is the worst that generative AI will ever be again. It’s only able to improve from here.
That isn’t actually true. With the rise in articles, posts and comments written by these algorithms, experts are warning about model collapse. Basically, the lack of decent human-written training data will destroy future generative AI before it can even start.
That’s an interesting point. We are seeing a similar kind of issue with search engines losing effectiveness due to search engine optimization on websites.
So it is possible that generative AI will become enshittened.
Unless you want to call your predictive text on your keyboard a mind you really can’t call an LLM a mind. It is nothing more than a linear progression from that. Mathematically proven to not show any form of emergent behavior.
No such thing has been “mathematically proven.” The emergent behavior of ML models is their notable characteristic. The whole point is that their ability to do anything is emergent behavior.
I do not think that it is “linear” progression. ANN by definition is nonlinear. Neither I think anything is “mathematically proven”. If I am wrong, please provide a link.
Thank you. This paper though does not state that there are no emergent abilities. It only states that one can introduce a metric with respect to which the emergent ability behaves smoothly and not threshold-like. While interesting, it only suggests that things like intelligence are smooth functions, but so what? Some other metrics show exponential or threshold dependence and whether the metric is right depends only how one will use it. And there is no law that emerging properties have to be threshold like. Quite the opposite - nearly all examples in physics that I know, the emergence appears gradually.
Emergence is the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. That’s the original meaning of emergent properties, which is laid out in the first paragraph of the article. It’s the scholarly usage as well, and what the claims of observed emergence are using as the base of their claim.
The article very explicitly demonstrated that only about 10% of any of the measures for LLMs displayed any emergence and that illusory emergence was the result of overly rigid metrics. Swapping to edit distance as an approximately close metric causes the sharp spikes to disappear for obvious reasons: no longer having a sharp yes/no allows for linear progression to reappear. It was always there, merely masked by flawed statistics.
Sorry you’re getting downvoted, you’re correct. It’s not implausible to assume that generative AI systems may have some kind of umwelt, but it is highly implausible to expect that it would be anything resembling that of a human (or animal). I think people are getting hung up on it because they’re assuming a lack of understanding language implies a lack of any concious experience. Humans do lots of things without understanding how they might be understood by others.
To be clear, I don’t think these systems have experience, but it’s impossible to rule out until an actual robust theory of mind comes around.
Friendly reminder that your predictive text, while very compelling, is not alive.
It’s not a mind.
Cyberpunk 2077 sorta explores this a bit.
There’s a vending machine that has a personality and talks to people walking by it. The quest chain basically has you and the vending machine chatting a bit and even giving the vending machine some advice on a person he has a crush on. You eventually become friends with this vending machine.
When it seems like it’s becoming more apparent it’s an AI and is developing sentience, it turns out the vending machine just has a really well-coded socializing program. He even admits as much when he’s about to be deactivated.
So, to reiterate what you said: predictive text and LLMs are not alive nor a mind.
I don’t care, Brandon was real to me okay 😭
Which is why the Turing Test needs to be updated. These text models are getting really good at fooling people.
The Turing test isn’t just that there exists some conversation you can have with a machine where you wouldn’t know it’s a machine. The Turing test is that you could spend an arbitrary amount of time talking to a machine and never be able to tell. ChatGPT doesn’t come anywhere close to this, since there are many subjects where it quickly becomes clear that the model doesn’t understand the meaning of the text it generates.
Exactly thank you for pointing this out. It also assumes that the tester would have knowledge of the wider context in which the test exists. GPT could probably fool someone from the middle ages, but that person wouldn’t know anything about what it is they are testing for exactly.
Prove to me you have a mind and I’ll accept what you’re saying.
Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.
And to extend that, there’s obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.
Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.
So, while there’s no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.
I think the argument currently boils down to, “we understand how AI models work, but we don’t understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI”
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So … what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”*
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Mammalian intelligence is based on repurposing spatial mapping circuitry but that’s not consciousness itself, that is, the Miller Number: 7±2 things we can keep in conscious at the same time. That sense of time of space has a very specific quality to its qualias, they’re all, well, spacious. That thing as “just the room, no map in it” is also part of the Buddhist Jhanas (“boundless empty space”), but there’s plenty of stuff going on in the mind that isn’t part of that – say, the pure impression of “bright” when your SO dares open the window blinds does not have a navigational “bright from the window which is in that direction” to it, that’s an additional layer, a where, on top of the primitive what.
My best inference is that the function of consciousness is to flexibly make connections between different parts of the whole, and that on the level of learning / writing memory instead of automatic response: It is, in fact, possible to avoid running into a lamppost without being conscious of it, been there, done that, the let’s call it motor cortex first acting and then making me conscious, as if to say “have I been a good boy?”. That is it’s actually a quite passive process, being thrown left and right by systems wanting to do some connection, and shouldn’t be equated with will at all.
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That’s semantics. My major objection to that kind of definition is that it knows no bound and distinction: Where do you stop assuming consciousness? Electrons are reacting to, influencing, and interacting with other electrons, is that also a form of consciousness? One could say so, but then everything is conscious which is the same thing as saying as nothing is conscious because without anything to delineate, terms are meaningless. I prefer language such as that what you call “body and eye consciousness” has agentive properties, that it can learn, that it generally wants to cooperate and be of service to the whole, such things. Lumping it up with consciousness risks confusing interpretations of messages of the thing (which is all we’re ever conscious of) for the thing itself.
What was happening then is that I was using the way from home to the supermarket to think about code, with ample trust in mind so that I did not fear the lamppost. What good would have keeping my consciousness on the external world have done? The body/eye did not need integrative oversight, while my modelling mind very much could use a helping hand. Imposing it on the former and denying it to the latter would’ve been inflicting violence on myself.
Be careful to not moralise around “distraction”. Bluntly said when your teacher chided you for day-dreaming you probably weren’t distracted you were thinking about something more pertinent to your immediate development than calculus. Where discipline in directing consciousness comes into play is keeping your mind free from neurosis, within parameters in which you use your faculties according to their nature, as well as self-conditioning, e.g. if you’re addicted to potato chips, make sure that a) you don’t deny yourself potato chips and b) eat. every. potato. chip. with. full. consciousness. That’s to connect the act of eating up those chips to all the negative opinions you have about your behaviour, instead of it being only connected to something maladaptive. Scientifically proven and neurologically explained that and how that works, btw. In that sense “distraction” is “false, incomplete, sense of comfort”.
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The first five are basically one, in the sense that a blind or deaf person is not fundamentally less of a human than the rest of us. The model also misses some stuff, e.g. mere touch doesn’t include proprioception or sense of balance and if you read it as if it did (“body sense”) then why distinguish touch from e.g. sense of taste. Seventh I’d say is a subsystem (and so pervasive that the Stoics allow for both preferred and unpreferred indifferents – yes you can prefer pudding over gruel or the other way round just don’t think it’s a virtue), eighth is a stage of development, what you get when everything aligns well. The impression of a well-lubed machine.
I generally have no real idea of where to put the line. This stuff here might help, anything less than a T3 system can’t have experience of mind (they can’t learn to learn, which requires feeding back information about the changes in mind (for lack of better term) into the mind), OTOH that doesn’t mean that all T3 systems are actually integrating different sources, or balancing them: If you only ever were conscious of one aspect, there could be no conflict or interaction with another aspect, and thus consciousness would serve no role (and not evolve in the first place). It’s a matter of a required number of subsystems needing coordinating, and that coordinating itself having a necessary level of adaptiveness, be T3. Also I can authoritatively say that the human mind is not made to think about that kind of stuff. It’s all maps and models, direct knowledge fails I’m not sure the territory can even understand the question. Look, a squirrel!
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I can prove to you ChatGPT doesn’t have a mind. Just open up the Sunday Times Cryptic Crossword and ask ChatGPT to solve and explain the clues.
I’m confused by this idea. Maybe I’m just seeing it from the wrong point of view. If you asked me to do the same thing I would fail miserably.
Not the original intent, but you’d likely immediately throw your hands up and say you don’t know, an LLM would hallucinate an answer.
But some humans can, since they require simultaneous understanding of words’ meanings as well as how they are spelled
What should we conclude about most humans who cannot solve these crosswords?
It should be relatively easy to train an LLM to solve these puzzles. I am not sure what that would show.
Can you please explain the reasoning behind the test?
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Well there are 2 options:
Either I’m a real mind separate and independent of you or I’m a figment of your imagination.
At which point you have to ask yourself: why are you so convinced you’re an unlovable and insufferable twat?
I don’t think most people will care, so long as their NPC interaction ends up compelling. We’ve been reading stories about people who don’t exist for centuries, and that’s stopped no one from sympathizing with them - and now there’s a chance you could have an open conversation with them.
Like, I think alot of us assume that we care about the authors who write the character dialogs but I think most people actually choose not to know who is behind their favorite NPCs to preserve some sense that the NPC personality isn’t manufactured.
Combine that with everyone becoming steadily more lonely over the years, and I think AI-generated NPC interactions are going to take escapism to another level.
Poem poem poem poem then the NPC start quoting Mein Kampf and killing all the cat wizards.
Lol, yeah. If generative AI text stays as shitty as it is now, then this whole discussion moot. Whether that will be the case has yet to be seen. What is an indisputable fact, though, is that right now is the worst that generative AI will ever be again. It’s only able to improve from here.
That isn’t actually true. With the rise in articles, posts and comments written by these algorithms, experts are warning about model collapse. Basically, the lack of decent human-written training data will destroy future generative AI before it can even start.
That’s an interesting point. We are seeing a similar kind of issue with search engines losing effectiveness due to search engine optimization on websites.
So it is possible that generative AI will become enshittened.
While it is not alive, whether it is a mind is not a clear cut. It can be called kind of a mind, a mind different of that of human.
What can’t be a kind of mind to you?
Unless you want to call your predictive text on your keyboard a mind you really can’t call an LLM a mind. It is nothing more than a linear progression from that. Mathematically proven to not show any form of emergent behavior.
No such thing has been “mathematically proven.” The emergent behavior of ML models is their notable characteristic. The whole point is that their ability to do anything is emergent behavior.
Here’s a white paper explicitly proving:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004
The field changes fast, I understand it is hard to keep up
Sure, if you define “emergent abilities” just so. It’s obvious from context that this is not what I described.
Their paper uses industry standard definitions
Their paper uses terminology that makes sense in context. It’s not a definition of “emergent behavior.”
I do not think that it is “linear” progression. ANN by definition is nonlinear. Neither I think anything is “mathematically proven”. If I am wrong, please provide a link.
Sure thing: here’s a white paper explicitly proving:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004
Thank you. This paper though does not state that there are no emergent abilities. It only states that one can introduce a metric with respect to which the emergent ability behaves smoothly and not threshold-like. While interesting, it only suggests that things like intelligence are smooth functions, but so what? Some other metrics show exponential or threshold dependence and whether the metric is right depends only how one will use it. And there is no law that emerging properties have to be threshold like. Quite the opposite - nearly all examples in physics that I know, the emergence appears gradually.
It is obvious that you do not know what either “mathematical proof” or “emergence” mean. Unfortunately, you are misrepresenting the facts.
I don’t mean to criticize your religious (or philosophical) convictions. There is a reason people mostly try to keep faith and science separate.
Here’s a white paper explicitly proving:
No emergent properties (illusory due to bad measures)
Predictable linear progress with model size
https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.15004
The field changes fast, I understand it is hard to keep up
As I said, you do not understand what these 2 terms mean. As such, you are incapable of understanding that paper.
Perhaps your native language is Italian, so here are links to the .it Wikipedia.
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comportamento_emergente
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimostrazione_matematica
Emergence is the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. That’s the original meaning of emergent properties, which is laid out in the first paragraph of the article. It’s the scholarly usage as well, and what the claims of observed emergence are using as the base of their claim.
The article very explicitly demonstrated that only about 10% of any of the measures for LLMs displayed any emergence and that illusory emergence was the result of overly rigid metrics. Swapping to edit distance as an approximately close metric causes the sharp spikes to disappear for obvious reasons: no longer having a sharp yes/no allows for linear progression to reappear. It was always there, merely masked by flawed statistics.
If you can’t be bothered to read here’s a very easy to understand video by one of the authors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypKwNrmuuPM
Good. Now do you understand how you have misrepresented the paper?
Sorry you’re getting downvoted, you’re correct. It’s not implausible to assume that generative AI systems may have some kind of umwelt, but it is highly implausible to expect that it would be anything resembling that of a human (or animal). I think people are getting hung up on it because they’re assuming a lack of understanding language implies a lack of any concious experience. Humans do lots of things without understanding how they might be understood by others.
To be clear, I don’t think these systems have experience, but it’s impossible to rule out until an actual robust theory of mind comes around.