> We don’t know if humans possess qualia.
At most, an observer can confirm that that observer possesses qualia (it might even be said that qualia define the observer), but any generalization beyond one’s own experience is non-verifiable conjecture.
At most, an observer can confirm that that observer possesses qualia (it might even be said that qualia define the observer), but any generalization beyond one’s own experience is non-verifiable conjecture.
ChatGPT consistently asserts that "I am only a large language model, so I am only able to generate responses based on the data I was trained on and the input I receive".
Who's to say that for chatGPT its training data and the sequences of tokens it is fed as input data don't constitute 'qualia' for it?
We do not establish the nature of reality by survey, neither of human survey nor of machine. That responses are generated by any system is no grounds for assuming anything.
We can establish mental properties through ordinary physical means. Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on. Whatever mental property you have can be biochemically moderated across all objects which share that property.
That bugs bunny protests his own consciousness is no grounds whatsoever to suppose ink can think. Such nonesense is protoschizoprehnic.
Is your point that we can only demonstrate consciousness through pharmaceuticals or surgery?
You're likewise neither high on cocaine just because you can type out an aggresive twitchy response.
Questions and Answers dont form the basis of empirical tests for physical properties, being neither valid tests nor reliable ones. The whole of psychology stands as the unreporducible example of this.
You can, in any case, replace any conversation with a dictionary from Q->A, turning each reply in turn into a hash table look-up.
Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness. QED
--
>Whatever way we demonstrate it, it isnt via Q&A. This is the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine.
...versus...
>Hash tables dont think, hash tables model conversations, thef. being a model of a conversation is not grounds to suppose consciousness.
--
Before I dissect your contradiction and lay it out, I'll give you the chance to respond.
Why do you feel that Q&A is "the worst form of pseudoscientific psychology you can imagine"
?
We're not interested in people's extremely poor self-modelling which is pragmatically useful for managing their lives, we're interested in what they are trying to model: their properties.
The same is esp. true of a machine's immitation of "self-reports". We're now two steps removed: at least with people they are actually engaged in self-modelling over time. ChatGPT here isnt updating its self-model in response to its behaviour, it has no self-model nor self-modelling system.
To take the output of a text generation alg. as evidence of anything about its own internal state is so profoundly pseudoscientific it's kinda shocking. The whole of the history of science is an attack on this very superstition: that the properties of the world are simply "to be read from" the language we use about it.
Every advancement in human knowledge is preconditioned on opposing this falsehood; why jump back into pre-scientific religion as soon as a machine is the thing generating the text?
Experiments, measures, validity, reliability, testing, falasification, hypotheses, properties and their degrees....
This is required, it is non-negotiable. And what we have with people who'd print-off ChatGPT and believe it is the worst form of anti-science
This is something where I agree with you. Interestingly, non-naturalistic analytical metaphysics supposes it can do just that.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233114810_What_is_A...
That is, in the use of words. Not in words as objects nor words as mirrors --/ this is the road to non-realist spiritualism
I don't have a problem with a person who maintains a non-scientific world view and with electrical AGI mumbojbo
But of course, few do. They think that they're empiricists, scientists and in the side of some austere hard look at human beings
This is just anti-human spiritualism , it isn't science
what makes me vicious on this point is the sense of injury in what these ideas should be about. in my own mildly aristotleian materialist religion
How awful to overcome one long veil of tears, only to drape another one on -- these people are capable of seeing past human folly, but fall right into another kind
it's disappointing--- we're animals which are both far much more than electric switches and far less
this new electic digital spiritualism is a PR grift which i'd prefer dead
>Experiments, measures, validity, reliability, testing, falasification, hypotheses, properties and their degrees....This is required, it is non-negotiable.
Whoa, whoah, whoah, hold on there.
Who says that Q&A in Psychological Research doesn't involve "Experiments, measures, validity, reliability, testing, falasification, hypotheses, properties and their degrees...."
?
Where are you coming from? Your responses don't sound very scientific. You don't sound like you're even aware of the different research methods within neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Your responses sound like someone who wants to be perceived as supporting a scientific approach, but doesn't understand how to actually do these things.
This is why I quized you and gave you the chance to respond about your issues with Q&A in psychological research. You just came back with surface level platitudes. which doesn't lend much confidence to the ideathat you have anything other prejudice.
Go talk to a neuroscientist, a cognitive psychologist, you need to catch up and quick if you want to speak on these topics.
They don't think, and they don't get very far in modeling conversations, either. Even the current LLMs are strictly better at modeling conversations than any hash table.
That hashtable would be ridiculously larger than the weighted model that constitutes GPT itself. But it at least theoretically could exist.
GPT, for all its clever responses, could be replaced with that hashtable with no loss of fidelity. So it is not ‘better’ than a hashtable.
It is much better than a hashtable of equivalent size.
And even if it were a justifiable analogy for LLMs, it does not follow that it applies to Turing-equivalent devices in general. A hash table is unequivocally not a Turing-equivalent device, even though it can be implemented by one.
In fact, the more one argues that LLMs are ordinary technology, the greater the challenge they present to the notion that things like conversational language use are beyond such technologies. The most interesting thing about these models, in my opinion, lies in figuring out what their conceptual simplicity says about us.
LLMs do not just return a probability distribution (and their prompts are not questions about probability distributions.) It would be a category error to conflate something that is part of how they work for the totality of what they do.
When you say "GPT, for all its clever responses, could be replaced with that hashtable with no loss of fidelity", where does one get all the prompts that will be given to it, in advance? A hash table does not respond to any input for which it has not already been given a response to return.
By exhaustive enumeration.
I never said it was going to be quick
Update: it is a significant difference that you don't have to do that with an LLM.
AI are not a "bugs bunny" where we can observe the total process of creation, one which is is relatively deterministic.
We are now engineering complex mechanics with emergent behaviour. There's no reason to assume any of the properties of human consciousness and reasoning is unique to us being made of atoms constructed in a certain way.
There's no reason to assume the stored state of zeros and ones, mechanised statistically, can't emerge complexity that asks questions of the fact we are simply state being mechanised statistically too.
I don't know from where this new computational mysticism has come, but it is born of exactly the same superstitious impulse which in genesis was God's breath into man-as-clay. Ie., that impulse which says that we are fundamentally abstract and circumstantially spatio-temporal.
This is nonsense. It's nonesense when phrased as spirit, and likewise as the structure of 0s and 1s. We are not abstract, we're biological organisms with spatio-temporal properties.
Nonetheless... some of us manage it.
There is nothing mystical about it and nothing about it that says it can't be reproduced in other, but comparable forms, in other media or types of machines.
To think that our mode of reasoning or our experience is somehow not able to be reproduced is the nonsense.
But yeah keep holding human biology on some kind of sacred pedestal.
Seeing as neither of us will prove our negative, I guess I'll just tell you I think your thinking is broken anyway.
Phrased as a fact, but citation needed.
> neither can it think.
Again, phrased as a fact, as if this can be proven.
> I don't know from where this new computational mysticism has come
For me, a lot more mysticism is required to hold the belief that our brain is anything else than a computational platform. I don't think there's anything mystic about it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turns out that consciousness arises as emergent property from any sufficiently complex loop.
With AI that application of logic is an argument around the semantics of interface.
That's the most compassionate take on their words I could muster.
For anyone who suspects it might (I'm not sure how...) consider this: a model of the Titanic (or a replica, for that matter) is not the Titanic. A model of your brain would neither be your brain nor necessarily a brain at all, but whether it could think is a different question.
Personally, I feel pretty strongly that consciousness is an emergent property of parallel processing among cooperating agents in a way that is completely at odds with the entire idea of what an "algorithm" is. We feel multiple things at once. Yes there is some research that provides evidence that we can't multi-task for real, that we just switch between tasks, but I am not talking about what we are able to do WITH our consciousness. Our brains are very obviously not firing 1 neuron at a time. Take vision for example. We can focus on one thing at a time, but the image itself is an emergent property in our brains of many different cells firing at the same time. It seems bound to the information feeding it in a way devoid of sequence. I know matrices are used to replicate this, and the input matrix is processed in layers to simulate the parallel processing, but i dont think that really cuts it. Time is still applied in discrete intervals, not continuous. Every algorithm has "steps" like this and I would be surprised if you can ever have enough of them to achieve the real thing. You can probably get infinitely closer from an observational standpoint, but no matter how many edges we give it, it'll still be a polygon instead of a circle so-to-speak. It'll have a rational valued circumference instead of pi, metaphorically speaking.
Whether a Turing machine is sufficient or not to replicate the amount of concurrent processing an actual cell network of millions of Neurons is capable of every moment, I can't know, but today's computers feel way off from even blurring the lines.
A Turing machine seems insufficient to replicate the mechanisms for which our consciousness appears to emerge from - even ignoring the substrate. I don't know much about quantum mechanics or quantum computers but my bet is on the qualities that differentiate them from normal computers to be critical.
Then again we could just define consciousness as a spectrum and then claim everything is on it, so a sufficiently complex loop might be enough for us to categorically claim it as conscious.
For all we know, rocks are conscious. Maybe it isn't an emergent thing at all, and there is only 1 wave of consciousness in the universe for which all matter taps into and our chaotic nature is actually at odds with that comsciousness. Maybe this creates a tension that allows for us to observe it, akin to how we can't look at ourselves but we can see our shadow. In which case we wouldnt have consciousness, consciousness would have us. Maybe we are all the same literal consciousness observing different forms of chaos, and it is the chaos, not the order, which happens to be sufficiently complex enough for us to entertain an identity. /s
Secondly, I agree that consciousness is predicated on emergent properties arising from the complexity that simple machines can produce (e.g. a biological brain which is composed of relatively well understood components, but who's observed operation can still baffle us). Consciousness does not seem to be a property of the components or even small groups of those components, but it seems to "fade in" as operational complexity increases (and fade out again during e.g. anaesthesia).
That "just as" is not an argument; it marks the start of a purported analogy. Analogies are not, in themselves, arguments.
You are in no position to belittle other peoples' intuitions when you are offering this in support of the ones you prefer.
Who is observing the observer?
So?
> Who is observing the observer?
No “who”, but anything that interacts with it.
Things happen whether or not you’re around to see them. Things interacted millions of years ago and they will continue to interact until the heat death of the universe. The tree falls in the woods regardless of if anybody is there to witness it. No credible peer-reviewed research has ever claimed that the observer is anything more than a physical process or interaction. It’s the quantum consciousness woo woo pseudoscientists who anthropomorphise “observer” to mean a conscious observer.
No. Wrong. Not a physical property. At all. This is completely the wrong way to describe it.
Consciousness is better described as an "emergent phenomenon". This is how serious researchers and academics define it.
Like I said in another reply to you, you really should go talk with a neuroscientist or cognitive psychologist. It sounds like you need to catch up quickly on the field of research.
You might want consider Roger Penrose's very thorough examination of this idea in almost any of his books from The Emperor's New Mind onwards.
The thing is that’s doesn’t get you to qualia, because qualia is ultimately a dualistic concept. Physically demonstrable processes are the “accidents”, qualia are the non-physical “essence” (cf., the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.) That’s why the role qualia play in the AI debate is as a rejection that observable behavior of any quality can demonstrate real understanding/consciousness, which are concepts tied, in the view of people advancing the argument, to qualia.
All three of those "ordinary physical means" are inherently biological in nature. If you define intelligence as requiring biology, than sure, by definition ChatGPT is not intelligent. If you don't, it's not at all obvious what the equivalent of getting an AI high or doing brain surgery on it would be. Either way, your comment comes across as fairly condescending, and while it might not be intentional, I think it would be reasonable to give people the benefit of the doubt when they don't agree with you given that your points will not always come across as obviously correct.
> Give a chicken cocaine, give a boy Valium; give a bear a lobotomy, and so on.
What can you conclude from these experiments that does not depend on anything about the responses generated by the subjects?
Clearly one basic principle of science, reason, etc.. is to assume some kind of predictability or regularity unless we have reason to believe otherwise. I think it will turn out we should deal with qualia the same way: even though in a very strict sense it is not observable by other entities, we can use our own experiences to assume others have similar ones, and to build a scientific and philosophical understanding of it from the principles of generalization and from there accepting the insights and contributions of other scientists who are also sentient as far as we know. This is a new and necessary paradigm of science so that we can understand things we really need to understand profoundly. This is as true in cosmology as in the study of consciousness. [1]
[1] I've called it the 'Peakaboo fallacy', see this comment on cosmology: https://www.reddit.com/r/cosmology/comments/xdehtz/the_multi...
In that case this is all probably pointless and I should just die rather than play the game. So by continuing to live I chose the assumption that the rest of you live, or that at least we will all continue to pretend that is so. Any state in between those two options is something I’ll only know if someone turns the thing off, but doesn’t turn me off at the same time, which is a huge presumption. So fuck it, you’re all sentient.
So why is it "all pointless" if you all aren't conscious? Wouldn't life be just as enjoyable?
Not that it by definition makes any difference.
If that's Hinkley's point, I agree; it seems tendentious to use that position in the process of arguing for or against specific claims about what the mind either is or could never be - but, by the same token, I don't take that 'skepticism of skepticism' as grounds for categorically rejecting ideas like the simulation hypothesis.