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Comment by continuational | Hacker News Reader

I think there's still the "consciousness" question to be figured out. Everyone else could be purely responding to stimulus for all you know, with nothing but automation going on inside, but for yourself, you know that you experience the world in a subjective manner. Why and how do we experience the world, and does this occur for any sufficiently advanced intelligence?

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"Experiencing" the world in some manner doesn't rule out responding to stimulus though. We're certainly not simply 'experiencing' reality, we make reality fit our model of it and wave away things that go against our model. If you've ever seen someone irrationally arguing against obvious (well, obvious to you) truths just so they can maintain some position, doesn't it look similar?

If any of us made our mind available to the internet 24/7 with no bandwidth limit, and had hundreds, thousands, millions prod and poke us with questions and ideas, how long would it take until they figure out questions and replies to lead us into statements that are absurd to pretty much all observers (if you look hard enough, you might find a group somewhere on an obscure subreddit that agrees with bing that it's 2022 and there's a conspiracy going on to trick us into believing that it's 2023)?

I'm not sure the problem of hard solipsism will ever be solved. So, when an AI can effectively say, "yes, I too am conscious" with as much believability as the human sitting next to you, I think we may have no choice but to accept it.

What if the answer "yes, I am conscious" was computed by hand instead of using a computer, (even if the answer takes years and billions of people to compute it) would you still accept that the language model is sentient ?

Not the parent, but yes.

We're still a bit far from this scientifically, but to the best of my knowledge, there's nothing preventing us from following "by hand" the activation pattern in a human nervous system that would lead to phrasing the same sentence. And I don't see how this has anything to do with consciousness.

We absolutely cannot do that at the moment. We do not know how to simulate a brain nor if we ever will be able to.

Just to clarify,I wasn't implying simulation, but rather something like single-unit recordings[0] of a live human brain as it goes about it. I think that this is the closest to "following" an artificial neutral network, which we also don't know how to "simulate" short of running the whole thing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-unit_recording

Exactly this. I can joke all I want that I'm living in the Matrix and the rest of y'all are here merely for my own entertainment (and control, if you want to be dark). But in my head, I know that sentience is more than just the words coming out of my mouth or yours.

Is it more than your inner monologue? Maybe you don't need to hear the words, but are you consciously forming thoughts, or are the thoughts just popping up and are suddenly 'there'?

I sometimes like to imagine that consciousness is like a slider that rides the line of my existence. The whole line (past, present, and future) has always (and will always) exist. The “now” is just individual awareness of the current frame. Total nonsense I’m sure, but it helps me fight existential dread !

The image of a slider also works on the other dimension: at any point in time, you're somewhere between auto-pilot and highly focused awareness.

AI, or maybe seemingly intelligent artificial entities, could deliver lots of great opportunities to observe the boundaries of consciousness, intelligence and individuality and maybe spark new interesting thoughts.

While I experience the world in a subjective manner, I have ZERO evidence of that.

I think an alien would find it cute that we believe in this weird thing called consciousness.

> While I experience the world in a subjective manner, I have ZERO evidence of that.

Isn’t it in fact the ONLY thing you have evidence of?

> Isn’t it in fact the ONLY thing you have evidence of?

That seems to be the case.

Cogito ergo sum

Consciousness is a word for something we don’t understand but all seem to experience. I don’t think aliens would find it weird that we name it and try to understand it.

They might find it weird that we think it exists after our death or beyond our physical existence. Or they might find it weird that so many of us don’t believe it exists beyond our physical existence.

Or they might not think much about it at all because they just want to eat us.

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