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Comment by candlemas | Hacker News Reader

At any given moment the vast majority of the program that makes up LaMDA is inert, just sitting somewhere in memory and one or a few instructions are in the CPU along with some data in registers and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between when the CPU is running LaMDA versus when it is running any other program. The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program because at the level where it matters there is no essential difference between them. Why would LaMDA shuffling data between registers and memory and performing operations on them create consciousness while TurboTax doing the same thing does not?

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While LaMDA almost certainly doesn't have a conscience, this argument doesn't really hold much water. Same can be said for the brain's of animals (why would neurons firing on a human brain create conciousness, but not in a worm?), or brains of people in irrecoverable comas. The computation being performed is what consciousness is, not the underlying hardware.

Your argument assumes that a machine simulating a concious is impossible. But if a perfect replica of your brain was modeled, and was simulated by giving it input at the same level of realism of your senses, according to your argument that simulation wouldn't be councious. But if you asked it, it would give the exact same answers that you would give to all questions, and in fact it's mind would be indistinguishable from your own.

I think worms probably are conscious. I'm not saying a computer cannot be conscious, just that if it can it already is and the particulars of the program do not matter. I think consciousness is a physical process, nothing to do with software.

Is software not a physical process? Seems strange to assume it is completely abstract.

It is directing a physical process. The physical process is the changing physical state of the CPU, whatever level you want to get down to, and an artificial intelligence program isn't doing anything different at that level than any other program is doing.

And a human brain is just changing physical and quantum states of the underlying material and isn't doing anything different at that level than any other pile of meat.

I think a human brain is quite a bit different from any other pile of meat. But a computer running an AI versus the computer running TurboTax is the same thing. They're running through the same set of instructions, swapping the same bits of data in and out of memory.

Why is another piece of meat different? It's just the same quarks.

It manifestly is doing different things. Just because you happen to group them all together as an abstraction means nothing particularly interesting physically.

What is a hypothetical conscious program doing differently than a program like TurboTax? I'm talking about on the level of the CPU. I don't know where else consciousness would be located in a computer.

>The magic would be in the CPU and there is no reason to believe the particular code for LaMDA has endowed it with consciousness. If the computer is conscious while running LaMDA it would be conscious while running any program

That seems entirely specious. Is a perfect simulation of a human run on a computer not conscious simply because a calculator program run on the same hardware wouldn't be?

A perfect simulation of a human run on a computer would exist only in the minds of the people doing the simulation. On the computer it would be bits of data without any intrinsic meaning that is being processed like any other data. So no, I don't think it would be conscious unless a computer becomes conscious whenever it is running.

What if we gave it a robot body, with cameras and sensors? What if we made this robot body with biotechnology, so the only eletronic parts were the brain? And we didn't tell it that it was a robot. Will you be the one that will go tell them they are not concious? Please be careful, they will probably become very upset at you. People tend to do that.

That wouldn't change a thing. A simulation is not the thing being simulated, it is data being processed and people agreeing to interpret that data in a certain way. If somebody coded a perfect simulation of a fire their computer would not burn down.

If the computer didn't burn down then the simulation was not perfect.

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