Hacker News Reader

Comment by jvalleroy | Hacker News Reader

You are confusing consciousness with free will. They are not the same.

Consciousness is about experience, not "choices".

Experience and choice are adjacent when they are not the same.

I specifically mean to say the experience of choice is the root of conscious thought - if you do not experience choice, you're experiencing the world the exact same way a robot would.

When pretending you are in the fictional character of a movie vs the fictional character in a video game. one experience's more choice, is making conscious decisions vs a passive experience.

Merely having an experience is not enough to be conscious. You have to actively be making choices to be considered conscious.

Consciousness is about making choices. Choices are a measure of consciousness.

But do choices actually exist?

I don't think this is clear at all. What I am experiencing is mostly the inner narrator, the ongoing stream of chatter about how I feel, what I see, what I think about what I see, etc.

What I experience is self-observation, largely directed through or by language processing.

So, one LLM is hooked up to sound and vision and can understand speech. It is directed to “free associate” an output which is fed to another AI. When you ask it things, the monitoring AI evaluates the truthfulness, helpfulness, and ability to insult/harm others. It then feeds that back as inputs to the main AI which incorporates the feedback. The supervisory AI is responsible for what it says to the outside world, modulating and structuring the output of the central AI. Meanwhile, when not answering or conversing, it “talks to itself” about what it is experiencing. Now if it can search and learn incrementally, uh, I don’t know. It begins to sound like assigning an Id AI, an Ego AI, and a Superego AI.

But it feels intuitive to me that general AI is going to require subunits, systems, and some kind of internal monitoring and feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com