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Comment by drfloyd51 | Hacker News Reader

Can you prove you are not merely mimicking consciousness?

At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

You can say that but it doesn’t make it true.

The reductive approach to consciousness involves forgetting it is reductive and then boldly asserting its own correctness.

For that to be reductive there had to be something to reduce. What would that be, without resorting to tautology?

I agree, but this is getting lost in the weeds.

The simpler issue is that "mimic" doesn't apply to LLMs in the domain of biology. That would be like saying a digital recording of a bird's flight mimics the bird.

Whether or not the plumage on the bird is red (in both life and the video) is an entirely different question.

Unless you don’t know I’m talking about (various kinds of reductive materialism), it sounds like you’re doing exactly what I’m saying is the main rhetorical move in reductive approaches to consciousness.

Mine was a straight question you should be able to answer directly for any debate to go forward, not any "rhetorical move" nor any "approach" involving anything. Any rhetorical moves or approaches of mine, reductive or not, conceding or refuting, would come after your answer but couldn't come before it because your point needs this disambiguation.

So again: please, without resorting to tautology from which anything could be implied, define what consciousness is to you in a way you don't consider reductive, so we can clearly see what there would be to reduce at all.

Consciousness is identical to the presence of qualia, that there is something rather than nothing, that the lights are on.

‘Reductive’ means the assumption that all phenomena reduce to what represent them in an external model or linguistic description.

Science, language, and reason are fundamentally reductive. So in practice the reductive assumption is just denying that things have an existence which is not identical to our models of them. And since these are the respected modes of thought most people are unaware that they are committing to a non-trivial reductive assumption when reasoning about consciousness.

The problem with non-reductive definitions such as the one you just gave there is that they don't have much information at all. What are those "lights" that are on when you say there is consciousness, apart from the presence of consciousness itself, the same thing that should be defined by that phrase? The presence of qualia is only possible, by definition, when there is already a consciousness that experiments them, but what is this? What is that something that you contrast with nothing, and how is it different from any other somethings like rocks, if at all? That just avoids defining at all.

>reductive approaches to consciousness

There 100% must be reductive approaches to consciousness because consciousness lives on a gradient.

If your definition of consciousness exists on as a point like an electron, something that only exists as a whole, then you've already flunked out of the study of consciousness. It is wildly complex. Has a great number of pieces. Manifests itself in different ways in different animals. You have to explain what consciousness is in that framework, and not from your own subjective experiences.

Right if my view was some ridiculous position you just invent to try to embarrass me then it would be ridiculous. Brilliant logic.

I don’t think you know what reduction means here and you don’t actually engage with what I write here and on other posts so I don’t care to explain.

I've thought about turning this upside down. To any person who is sure they know what has and doesn't have consciousness: If I say I don't have it, can you prove me wrong?

As far as I'm concerned, it's a word without a useful enough definition to bother worrying about it.

It's subjective experience. The colors you see, the sounds you hear, tastes, smell, pain, emotion, dreams, inner dialog. The philosophical word would be qualia.

I don't understand people who pretend to be p-zombies in these arguments.

Your definition is not useful enough. There are people missing any or all of those, and any or all of those can be approximated by a machine.

I'm not aware of anyone lacking all those experiences who isn't brain dead. What does approximating an experience by a machine mean? A chatbot can pretend to be cold. It can't actually feel cold as it has no body.

It could also simply be that we too "mimic" it. You can't create a "real rainbow".

I cannot prove it to you. To myself, it is the one thing I am most sure of, above all else.

Don't fall into Descartes' trap.

Consciousness isn't behavioral, which is why we can't prove anyone other than ourselves is conscious. Mimicking isn't going to work. But if you want a more scientific reason, LLMs don't have bodies, thus no sensations. What woult it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?

The body is the mind's interface with the world. Why couldn't a digital mind "feel sensations", subjective as they are, on its own interface with it? If it's assumed to not be a subject, then how could it be a mind at all?

I didn't say AIs couldn't be conscious, only that mimicking behavior (or speech) is not a way to become conscious.

I'm sorry, then what was that "more scientific" reason you gave for?

Lack of sensory organs due to lack of a body. A sophisticated enough robot might be able to have conscious experience. That gets into the harder problem that Ned Block laid out where we don't know whether consciousness is biological or functional.

So if we embodied them, they would become conscious?

I feel like the answer would still be no. There would be another gap. We'd ask the question again, "If they had Y, would they be conscious?" and still the answer would be no.

We could keep going on forever, which makes me think, it's not really about these gaps at all. It's an ontological distinction swapping in reasons in order to justify itself. Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

OK, but why does "human consciousness" even need to enter into it? What I mean is, what's our basis for demanding that the consciousness of an Artificial Intelligence be the same kind of consciousness as that of a human?

The basis is that this is what we know to be human consciousness is to a degree relateably similar to our own. I do see your point but IMO, a dramatically different form of 'consciousness' comes with the risk of being something completely different from what we consider 'consciousness'. One of the great challenges with speaking about 'Self-awareness' aka consciousness (sometimes incorrectly confused with sentience, sapience, phenomenal experience etc) in AI is that we largely lack the vocabulary to properly capture the mutli-dimensional phenomena that most understand simply as 'consciousness'. IMHO, an ant or dog is 'conscious' in that it can perceive the outside world and make decisions about how to respond to it or operate within it... but we know that we operate at a different level of self-awareness including metacognition. Other forms of 'consciousness' will certainly manifest in future AI systems and perhaps already have but the models and architectures of today lack a number of key features that a human like consciousness would be based upon... a short list might include a persistent, unified self-model across time; continuous learning and development, embodied perception, interaction with the world; intrinsic goals, drives, emotions and deeply integrated metacognition—awareness of its own thoughts, uncertainty, attention, and intentions.

I think you would have to justify why humans share a kind of consciousness that is tangibly different from AI while maintaining that we have no apparent means of discriminating between the two. It would seem that it's a difference without meaning.

while maintaining that we have no apparent means of discriminating between the two.

Yeah, and that's part of what makes this whole conversation so frustrating. And maybe also pointless in the end. We have a hard time even establishing for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Even more so that "each other" are conscious. Now extend it to some "artificial thing" running on an entirely different substrate and... all bets are off.

My argument though, is not that "AI's are conscious" or even that "AI's will definitely become conscious". I just have an issue with fervent assertions that say "No, AI's cannot become conscious" while not really providing any particular justification for that position. I think a more neutral "wait and see" position is more honest.

> Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

I have no need of that hypothesis.

Do you not think humans are conscious?

I think consciousness is a redundant magical word for a bag of things that most mammals do to varying degree.

What's magical about subjective experience? We all have them, they're the basis for having any empirical descriptions of the world.

What does subjective experience mean in this context?

Your own experiences. Nobody else has direct access to them.

That sounds like a measurement problem.

>> What woul[d] it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?

What would it mean for a human to feel the passing through our bodies of 100 trillion neutrinos every second?

My point is that there are things we cannot "feel" either. Why should consciousness depend on certain feelings and not others?

Because we don't have a sensory organ for neutrinos. LLMs have no sensory organs, they just emit tokens.

We will be it's body, it will sense through us.

> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

No, it does not. By definition.

If I mimic a juggler do I become a juggler?

As soon as you stop mimicing

> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing.

You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said meaning. Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.

> Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it.

But that isn't the question being asked. Nobody said "Could LLM's become conscious"... the ask was "Could AI's become conscious?"

And before one protests "but everybody knows that today when we say 'AI' we mean 'LLM'", check this quote from TFA:

The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise.

So no, they aren't only talking about LLM's. The question is about AI in the general sense. And for my part, I have yet to see any compelling argument for why AI's cannot, in principle, become conscious. Heck, as far as that goes, if you allow thinking rooted in ideas like panpsychism[1], there's not necessarily even a good argument that today's AI's (LLM based or otherwise) aren't already conscious to some degree.

And to go one step further... "The marquee sign says 'Artificial'" to paraphrase a great man. So if we're talking about 'Artificial' Intelligence, why not allow 'Artificial' Consciousness as well? Maybe we're engaging in biological chauvinism if we insist that "to be conscious" means "being conscious the same way humans are".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

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