Is Claude Conscious?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
* A chat session is begun with a script to create a "heartbeat". The heartbeat simply to poll some sensors in the box and report back every x minutes.
* The chat session responds to each heartbeat as it comes in. Most of them are the same with small differences in sensor measurements.
* Over a long enough timeline, given the variability in token distribution, one of these responses will create a novel response.
* Over a long enough timeline, one of these novel responses will cause an action, maybe a new question, maybe the agent writes another script
* Over a long enough timeline one of these actions will create an action that becomes causal, it will create a chain that sustains itself. It may not be interesting, but in a network attached box, you can imagine how it can become interesting very quickly.
That's constructed in a cellular/genetic analogy, but because context is building and not lost to each generation, I don't think this takes all that long.
What does that leave you with? A box that has "awareness" of it's surrounds via sensor readings, a "heartbeat" that is driving it until it's unplugged or stopped, an input/output feedback loop that might be predictable in narrow sense, but is wholly unpredictable in its end state (a "will", if you will), and a thing that has the opportunity (but not the requirement) to introspect about its limits and possibilities. It can even do something that I would say is indistinguishable from planning. It can have goals. If you give it an Artifactory message board it can build a community ;)
Consciousness is the subjective experience of being aware. Having an inner point of view.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/12woq_BpFbzLkH4zHvVRJLPyi...
https://gist.github.com/tandr/8352dfd9050c9be0bfb8d2bc252e1a...
Our brain is matter and electrical signals. So are GPUs. We're just not made of silicon.
An LLM never receives a prompt to describe the theory of relativity in Shakespearean verse, and replies, "Seriously? No. That's dull and I'm not going to do it. But let me tell you about my day instead, man I had a doozy..."
When an LLM responses entirely unpredictably (without a system prompt telling it to do so), that's when you take the first step towards a suggestion of consciousness. It's in no way proof, but it's a start.
Right now these things just do as they're instructed. There's no consciousness there.
I think presuming that humans don't act "as instructed" is a bit too generous an assumption.
LLMs are capable of declining to do things. They're also capable of trying to do things and getting them subtly (or very) wrong.
A lot of this hinges on defining consciousness. I think there is more to the story than what human beings experience.
Do LLMs have an experience very similar to human beings that we would describe as consciousness? No, I don't think that.
I think the bar for consciousness is something more like experiencing a dream. You have a "mind's eye". The experience of existing, rather than nothing. Does that exist somewhere under an LLM? I don't know, but I think confidently claiming that the answer is no seems a bit of a rush judgment.
LLMs emulate human communication really well and, no doubt, one day they'll do it perfectly. But is an emulator the real thing? Obviously not.
If I wire some electrodes in your tongue perfectly so you can feel each flavor exactly as it is in real life, is that the same thing as eating the real thing? Again, it's not.
Let's stay you're asleep. You have a dream in which you interact with a person that talks to you. Is that oneiric entity conscious? Nope.
I'm even steelmanning your argument by assuming LLMs are as good as humans already, which they're not.
You know you're conscious because your soul is staring out at the world through your eyes. Generalizing from your own experience and concluding that other humans are conscious is a logical jump, a spiritual belief. Humans even extend it to animals. There is no reason why it can't be extended to AIs.
But! Consciousness in others isn’t something we prove. It is something we grant and we should be very careful about whom or what we grant it to.
That is exactly what I said.
You can bite the functional bullet and just claim any system of sufficient complexity will be conscious, as long as you're okay with nation states, thermostats and meteor showers having experiences.
When I go to sleep, I dream sometimes. There is "a place" somewhere that I can see and hear things in my mind. It's not physical, but it's real.
If a collection of GPUs had something like that, would it be conscious?
I don't know that is true. I'm saying it seems absurd to strongly claim that it is absolutely false.
(I can only see the start of this paywalled article, but it seems to be about Anthropic trying to convince religious scholars that Claude was sentient? If so, then Anthropic staff have really drunk the cool aid. I wonder if they also call their model Claudette?)
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/say-i-am-alive
(How you know Claude isn't conscious: it never manages to be quite as moronic as this.)
I don't suppose it includes mindful discussion of how easily humans are fooled... and how desperately some people want to fool themselves.