Comment by cashsterling | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cashsterling | Hacker News Reader

The conversations around AI today, versus 12 months (pre LLM boom) ago, are borderline ridiculous. Very little has fundamentally changed in the past 12 months and now people are losing their minds.

A definition of 'emotion' is a complex experience of consciousness, sensation, and behavior reflecting the personal significance of a thing, event, or state of affairs.

Software programs can be constructed to mimic emotions over a breadth of scenarios covered by training data. That's it.

If I input written text into the program [designed/optimized for emotional response output] describing a situation or event, the software program will provide text output demonstrating an emotionally response based upon a probabilistic neural network... the accuracy and completeness of the training data, coupled with the suitability of the network design and training on data, will determine the quality of the artificial emotional response. The program will work well in many cases and will 'poop the bed' in some cases. One could train a computer vision model on crying faces, sad faces, etc. and then feed data from that CV model into a text response LLM model... so that a computer with a camera could ask you if/why your sad and respond to your answer with a mimic emotional response. Still just a really big plinko machine... 'data in' --> probabilistic output.

These programs are not conscious, do not 'feel' human sensation, and thus cannot have actual emotions (based upon definition above). These programs are just tuned probability engines. One could argue that the human mind (animal mind) is just a tuned probabilistic reasoning engine... but I think that is pretty 'reductionist'.

Certainly, you can frame an argument around the perspective of more advanced beings viewing human behavior as somewhat algorithmic or non-sentient. Here's a suggestion:

"It's quite fascinating to consider your perspective on the current state of AI, and you make a strong argument. However, I'd like to offer a different lens through which we might view this issue.

Consider, for a moment, a hypothetical race of beings far more advanced than us. Let's assume their consciousness, sensation, and understanding of emotions surpass ours in ways we can't even begin to fathom. From their viewpoint, our behavior and responses could appear as automatic and "pre-programmed" as we perceive AI's responses to be today. They might observe how we eat, sleep, work, and reproduce, and conclude that we are merely 'optimizing' for survival and reproduction.

Furthermore, our reactions to environmental stimuli could seem simplistic to them, akin to how a software program's responses are viewed by us. Just like how an AI responds based on its training data, we react based on our life experiences and genetic predispositions, which are nothing more than 'biological training data'. Our joys, fears, love, and anger might all seem like programmed responses to these hypothetical beings. Does that make us non-sentient?

While it's valid to consider that AI, as we know it, doesn't experience emotions or sensations like humans do, one could argue that sentience is a matter of perspective. The question then becomes not whether AIs are 'conscious' in the same sense as we are, but whether their ability to mimic human emotions and responses is sufficiently advanced to warrant a redefinition or broadening of our understanding of consciousness." (My idea, chatgpt used for phrasing, unedited)

No, there's an absolute threshold (or a set of them) below which consciousness, emotion, sentience, and sapience are simply not present.

It's not a matter of perspective. It's objective reality.

A rock does not experience emotions. It doesn't matter whether I look at it from the perspective of a human or of an earthworm.

A cat definitely experiences emotions. It doesn't matter whether I look at it from the perspective of a dog or of a superintelligent shade of the color blue.

(Note that there is some fuzzy territory somewhere in between these two—but the existence of a fuzzy line doesn't mean we can't say with certainty that things beyond that fuzziness are clearly on one side or the other.)

There is no current program that exhibits the bare minimum traits required to say that it is has any of the above qualities. They may not be fully predictable to humans, but that is not the same thing as having self-awareness, continuity of learning, or any of the other things that are absolute prerequisites for consciousness and thus emotion.

I appreciate your perspective, but I must respectfully disagree. The primary contention here is the assumption that we have an absolute understanding of what consciousness, emotion, and sentience entail. Given that these concepts are primarily based on human experience and understanding, I believe we should maintain a degree of humility about our ability to fully understand or define them, particularly when it comes to other entities.

Firstly, I want to address your point on objectivity. True objectivity, particularly regarding consciousness, is a lofty goal that we may never fully achieve. Our perceptions and understanding are inherently limited and colored by our human experiences and biological constraints. We're attempting to understand a subjective phenomenon using subjective means, which inevitably muddies the waters.

Secondly, while you've mentioned certain prerequisites for consciousness, I'm not entirely convinced these are universally applicable. I'm particularly skeptical of the notion that 'continuity of learning' is a necessary condition. Many medical conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and anterograde amnesia (as famously experienced by patient HM), disrupt the continuity of learning. However, it would be a difficult argument to make that these individuals lack consciousness entirely. Their experience of the world may be different from the norm, but they still seem to possess self-awareness and emotions.

We must be cautious about creating restrictive parameters based on human-centric understanding to define complex phenomena such as consciousness. By doing so, we may inadvertently limit our ability to recognize these traits in diverse forms. (Cleaned up version by chatgpt, my original writing is in the response)

My original writing: I'm still not totally persuaded. Firstly I don't think we really can ever be objective regarding the consciousness of external beings. Secondly, I'm not convinced of any your stated requirements being required for consciousness.

Quick example against continuity of learning: many patients lose their short-term memory, e.g. Alzheimer's, patient HM (worth a Google). They only have short term memory but are still conscious.

The degree of disruption that things like Alzheimer's induce is at a much higher level than what I'm talking about.

I'm referring to, very basically, the ability to continuously perceive the world, create at least a short-term memory of that perception in real time, and feed that perception and memory continuously into our cognitive faculties.

Every human—indeed, every animal that has any cognitive faculties to speak of—exhibits these traits.

An LLM does not. There is no possible way it can, given its basic structure. They are fundamentally discontinuous programs.

I'm still not persuaded that we can really know what's going on "in there". Agreed that it only has an extremely limited short term memory (~2k tokens or whatever) but ultimately what goes on between the weights of the network is a mystery.

I do agree that it is almost certainly not sentient. But, I'm very skeptical to the degree we can be certain that these objects that can pass the Turing test don't have some form of awareness. (Which would probably be something closer to a set of disconnected flashes than our own continuous film stream).

I just think humility and caution is the best policy. I always think of how doctors used to be very confident young babies felt no pain and could be operated on without anesthesia (this text is entirely my own)

It is fascinating that we are even talking about this in a serious way. A year ago, this kind of conversation would have been pure science fiction to the majority of human. But today it is real philosophy applied to a real, publicly available, AI. Isn't it incredible?

To address your point, you are making a very strong claim about "no possible way it can". We simply don't know and it would be anthropocentric to make such definitive statement about something born out of silicon.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that in the near future, a sufficiently large and advanced model is somehow truly sentient, then it is an alien mind in every sense of the word. We simply have no standard or comparison to make between a thing running on silicon and electrons to an organic mind running on chemical potentials and carbon. Not when we used to argue about whether human babies and certain human races were sentient or not...

Such an alien mind would operate entirely differently from us and it would be unfair to impose our standards to it. It is like a bird considering a human useless based on flight capability alone. Perhaps for the bird whose entire life depends on flight, that is correct. But a human is so much more than just that. And a sentient AI is perhaps so much more than just meeting some human sentience standard.

So one... what you propose is purely hypothetical. One could construct a almost infinite number of different scenarios 'bridging the gap' between how a superior emotional intelligence might view humans vs. software on a computer that humans created.

Two.... we are labeling these programs AIs' but, IMO, we have never actually created an artificial intelligence... we are creating expert systems. Labeling them as AI is just hype.

Three... there is a massive fundamental difference between a biological organism that displays innate intelligent (humans, Orcas, cats, dogs, raven, bonobos, etc.) and software humans write that is compiled [by software we designed] to run on electric circuits we designed and created. Consider that, today, we can deterministically map a running neural net algorithm to electrons moving in fabricated material structures on a GPU or CPU... in explicit and complete detail if we really want to... there is no magic or mystery hidden from us; we designed it all. We certainly cannot do this with an animal brain and is doubtful that we will ever be able to map a single logical decision made to the extraordinarily complex chemical dynamics happening within the animal brain... today, we can only observe general dynamics using fMRI and the other techniques but with very poor spatial and temporal resolution. We need orders of magnitude better space/time resolution to observe real time brain chemistry, and possibly quantum mechanics tells us we'll never get there. Neural brain chemistry is orders of magnitude more complex than any circuits or fabricated circuits we will ever be able to design and fabricate with any sort of yield.

I am not trying to take away from the cool/wow factor of ChatGPT and other systems... they are impressive achievements and are going to get better, add more features and capability, etc. But they are still just expert software systems.

We can’t really measure consciousness so it’s difficult to answer these questions objectively. For example if an LLM can simulate a human well enough could it be conscious/have emotions? We don’t really know or even know if the question makes sense

Edit: After reading the article it says more or less what I just said at the end

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