This is going to be regarded as alchemy someday - or best case scenario philosophy. It's definitely not "science".
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After a quick skim the issue isn't really whether its alchemic, but overclaiming. Especially the last sentence of the abstract seems to give the impression that more is known than is the case.
> Our analysis suggests that no current AI systems are conscious, but also shows that there are no obvious barriers to building conscious AI systems.
A lot hinges here on "suggest" and "obvious", which the authors can hide behind if put on the spot, and it's vague enough that most readers (especially journalists and hype influencers) will glance over those terms and think science can now detect the presence of consciousness in AI systems.
Here is a thought provoking question:
Of a feral human being raised without language or culture of any kind (perhaps survived from infancy on an island with no mammals)
And a dog, fully wired into a GPT4 level LLM including connections to emotional response
What is more “conscious”? More “human” (in the social sense)?
The dog could clearly participate in society, while the other demonstrably (based of the history of feral humans) probably cannot.
Is it our culture then that makes us “human”?
Is self awareness == consciousness?
Is the moral value of a life form defined by the depth and richness of inner experience of existence? Or by the ability / need / desire to use tools?
It’s entirely possible that the inner experience of being of some animals (elephants, dolphins, whales, ???) might be actually richer and more complex than our own. Animals in aquatic environments especially have little need of tools, shelter, etc so we cannot judge their inner sophistication by external evidence of technology.
Aside from their practical utility, LLMs have highlighted a peculiar state of being in philosophical conversation, the thinking, reasoning daemon.
I mean, when you start driving west from New York, there are no obvious barriers to keep you from going clear to China. You haven't gone far enough that you can even see the barrier yet. (Yeah, I know, nobody actually starts driving west from New York without knowing that the Pacific Ocean is out there...)
We can't see any obvious barriers because we don't know what consciousness is. We don't know enough to know whether there are barriers, let alone what they are.
The thing I find interesting about the idea of the paper (again, haven’t read it, so this is an assumption) is that there are philosophy academics who don’t put consciousness on a hand-wavy metaphysical pedestal. More of that please.
Did Newton get anything resembling an accurate idea of chemistry from studying it? Or was alchemy a horrible distraction for a mind that was entirely capable of making huge advances in chemistry if the well hadn't been poisoned by mysticism?
> A lot hinges here on "suggest" and "obvious"
No, everything hinges on their analysis, which is what they were explicitly referring to. If I tell you that my analysis of my finances suggests that there are no obvious ways for me to buy a new house, I'm not using weasel words.
It's very hard to put ourselves in the shoes of those living in previous eras. If you think you can easily do it you most likely are missing something. Most scientists did stuff that is now considered a bit wacky. Mathematicians were deeply concerned about the theological implications of their work and indeed a lot of the motivation to do it came from a similar place in the first place.
This is not an endorsement to believe any old nonsense. It is just that it's naive to think you could have prevented those detours. If you really think you could have just told Newton which parts are same and which parts are woo, based on some obvious first principles, you probably overestimate yourself. The reason we know that science works is by knowing what didn't work. If the scientific method and empiricism, model building etc was so straightforward, you bet that many smart people would have come up with it earlier. Whenever you actually look at real history, you will see that it's not some stupid superstitious people holding back the enlightened sane and rational scientists. It's humanity grappling with figuring things out, without answers handed down to them from anywhere. It's very easy to look down on quackery today that we have Wikipedia, textbooks, pop science, etc. But when you need to figure stuff out from nowhere it's much murkier.
Liquid is a crucial stepping stone towards solid. So liquid is just half solid.
This kind of paper is very different from ones about already well understood concepts most of us are familiar with as course materials for example. A syllabus on relativity or on information theory will be much more solid and crisp, but that's not a reason to not explore as yet poorly understood phenomena.
Science is a process, not a result.
You just described Chemistry with another name.
> Isaac Newton discover the prismatic nature of light and invent color theory
And this is science. Do experiment, conclude regarding the result, never say shit like "white is pure".
I think one big problem (among many) with science education is that we only learn the end results and take too many things for granted as a result. I find that science can be immensely more fascinating when understood through a historical lens, trying to understand the goals and assumptions and mental frameworks, open questions at the times of important breakthroughs.
It is liquid.
Make a terrible analogy and then pretend it undermines your argument by way of false equivalence.
What's unequivocally not science here is the false belief we understand enough about consciousness to preclude emergence from nonbiological means.
Par for the course I guess, for someone who doesn't understand science to put forth such confusion.
Is that from the old "Intelligent Design" rhetoric?