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Comment by mebutnotme | Hacker News Reader

The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience. There is a counter argument though that the way we access our past experiences is via the neural pathways we lay down during those experiences and that with the new neural networks AIs now have we have given them those same pathways just in a different way.

At present I don’t think it is yet at the same point but when the AI can adjust those pathways, add more in compute time (infinite memory like tech) and is allowed to ‘think’ about those pathways then I can see it gaining our level or better of philosophical thought.

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The difference is that when we experience something, we experience it first hand.

When a model is trained, it sees a discrete representation of information.

It’s like only being able to see 2nd hand sources of information.

I think the first hand distinction is questionable, e.g https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing-in-itself We can also only perceive through our sensory and neural pathways.

And with multimodal LLMs there is also some ability for multiple sensory inputs.

I don’t think it is.

To oversimplify, our input system takes a continuous stream of raw input. We can’t stop it, really.

We get our input directly from the source. Even if it’s aliased by our neural pathways, when they receive that info initially, it’s unadulterated.

LLMs take fixed amounts of discrete tokens which must be modified before it even reaches the training routine . Even multimodal models take in discrete tokens.

Information is lost when recording reality to video and even more is lost when converting that video into tokens.

And LLMs only learn in fixed steps. We take in information while we generate our whatever it we generate (movement, sense of self, understanding of our surroundings and place in those surroundings, next sentence, etc.)

Talking specifically about the most popular transformers models.

It has wheels like a truck, a seat for the driver, a steering wheel, and two pedals, but a go-kart is much different from a truck.

Similarly, a "neural network" for an LLM is much different from the human brain and nervous system, plus all of the other systems that work alongside and affect it.

The danger is not that the AI is elevated to that of a human by the "they're so similar" reasoning, the danger is that the average human will be degraded to AI-level status and not thought of as anything but a tool.

> The argument here seems to be AI can’t become a mind as it does not experience.

Er, no, I don't think that is the argument.

You apparently have a better sense of what the argument is than I do [0], would you explain?

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42484852

I think the primary points that I took away were:

* LLMs provide a mirage: there is really nothing there at all, but they sometimes can look like they are exhibiting intelligence but that's because they are repeating statistically-remixed intelligent input.

* However, the tech-bro culture that has fermented in Silicon Valley has resulted in a large bunch of people who are irrational, have no concern for logic or truth, but who feed on each other's groupthink, and from that culture, a religious-like mindset has emerged -- strongly reflected in some of the comments here, for what it's worth -- that is basically a sort of messianic cult. It preaches:

- greed is good, etc. (Wall St, Gordon Gekko etc.)

   - disrupt, automate humans out of the loop, etc: these are good things, desirable goals in and of themselves, the ends justify the means, etc.
 
 - truth is negotiable and not really important; cf. "the reality based community" (https://archive.ph/pvkxE etc.)

 - thus they honestly don't know and can't care if LLMs are smart, because LLMs manifest the dogma: the machine will evolve and replace us, etc.

Summary: it's an economics-driven religious movement now, with True Believers, and mere facts do not matter to them, and what to sane people would be horrifically disastrous outcomes are to these guys desirable outcomes, prices worth paying on the path to the Singularity.

Those are positions, but you need arguments to back up your positions. I know this is an advertisement, but couldn't she put in at least a few so we can sample her reasoning quality?

Um.

Well, it's not my article, so I have no particular position on this, but it seems to me that her assessment largely agreed with my own, so perhaps I am merely parroting her views through mine.

To me, the article seemed to express her position pretty well. YMMV. But maybe that's because I agree with it, and you presumably do not.

It's just woolly. Don't philosophers talk about causal models and mental states and simulations and China brains and aspects of externalism instead of just saying "I think AI researchers are wrong, I think it's like this instead"?

I honestly don't know.

It seems to me that the field lacks a solid definition of what consciousness is. Merely defining it seems to be the core of "the hard problem".

https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/

If the field accepts that it can't describe or define what consciousness is then any competent practitioner in that field will go out of their way to avoid saying that an entity, or class of entities -- such as LLM bots -- do not possess it.

To do anything else would be to lay themselves open to attack. It would be a career-threatening move.

Not being able to say "this type of software is not conscious" makes it necessary to beat around the bush somewhat in trying to say what amounts to "this type of software cannot think".

I don't know what you perceive as "woolly" here, but it could be due to that.

The person who defined the Hard Problem researches LLMs and is a lot less woolly about it.

Being woolly isn't the best that can be done if others are making actual arguments, the kind that aren't in the article.

David Chalmers?

Can you give some specific examples of what you consider wooliness in the article?

Yes, David Chalmers.

For the article itself, phrases like "a naïve and toxic view" and "a debased version of what we are" are statements that need to be strongly backed up.

"For me, thinking is a specific and rather unique set of experiences we have." yes, okay, but what experiences?

What do you mean by "concepts"?

She talks about behaviorist reactions, but fails to back that up at all. Why does she think e.g. mechanistic interp. is behaviorist?

"there’s nothing on the other side participating in this communication." I think this is currently correct, for some definition of "nothing", but give an argument.

"new moral claims in the world" give a good physics-based account of this process in humans.

But this efficiency, Vallor continues, “is never defined with any reference to any higher value, which always slays me. Because I could be the most efficient at burning down every house on the planet, and no one would say, ‘Yay Shannon, you are the most efficient pyromaniac we have ever seen! Good on you!’” -- ever heard of E/ACC?

"Vallor tells me she once tried to explain to an AGI leader that there’s no mathematical solution to the problem of justice." -- not currently, but this is peak woolly. Maybe she doesn't know it, but a mathematical solution would need to contain incredibly horrible things. If you stay away from the math, you can avoid thinking about that sort of thing.

Mainly though, it's what the article does not contain. That's tricky to enumerate. I can try if you want.

I think I'm out.

I do not find the argument that the Hard Problem is a problem convincing. I don't think it's hard or even really a problem; it's people arguing about Peano derivations when discussing how many angels are dancing on the heads of how many pins.

It's irrelevant and it's not just missing the point, it's actively spreading smoke clouds around the area of the point so that nobody can see it any more.

For me, Douglas Adams nailed philosophy:

« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else. Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life. Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on. »

I recognise that some people find these issues significant and important. I do not. If that's what interests you, I have nothing more to contribute.

I'm not saying I disagree. If a philosopher rejects the Hard Problem, they need to come out and say it, especially if they are disagreeing with the computer scientists and Turing.

That's not the most usual position.

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