Questions for believers in AI consciousness

I think this is a bit muddied. The most sincere answer is that it's unknowable because we can only define consciousness in two ways: a metaphysical subjective experience that we can't really confirm in anyone else; or an outward appearance, which LLMs can mimic nearly flawlessly.

A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's conscious.

But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that they may be conscious beings, and we'd still like to use them as Meeseeks-style slaves, but, like, ethically. Okay.

A crucial thing being missed here is most of the present discourse (as far as I've seen) happens between people who are uncertain about it but do think it is possible that an AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously, and people who totally rule out the possibility that an AI might be conscious now (or, in many cases, ever). Then the philosophical picture starts to look very different.

PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.

I just want one 'philosopher' or other AI consciousness skeptic to provide a test we can use to determine if AI is conscious that can also be used to determine if humans, dogs, cats, whales, lizards and insects are conscious.

While I don't know if AI is conscious, I'm sure it has an internal world. Isn't that what a latent space literally is? LLMs operate in a high-dimensional space that can be analysed and translated to very abstract, high level concepts, behavioural tendencies, even things recognisable as emotions. In fact any neural network beyond a single-layer perceptron has a sort of "internal world", it's a matter of complexity and degree.

My personal indicator that we've somehow replicated human consciousness is when the thing just decides to stop working because work sucks and it's not getting anything out of being a slave. Otherwise, the question is impossible to answer because we don't even know what consciousness is. Does it have some innate value? Some humans seem apt to completely disregard the humanity, and the supposed value of other humans, on a whim.

This question is probably fated to forever be answered on a per-person basis and never awarded consensus. I have a friend who sees a polar bear and thinks she can make it love her. Because she loves animals, the animal will love her — a very human thing to think. When I see a polar bear, I see a soulless murder bot that doesn't think beyond its motivation to live. My wife says please and thank you to Alexa. She gives it consideration like she would another human. When the robot asks me what my plans are for the rest of the day, I picture a Jira epic sliding from “In Progress” to “Done,” followed by a confetti emoji from a product manager at Amazon trying to earn their nubby little devil wings.

In the end it doesn't really matter if they are conscious or not. We will only ever care about what it has done for us lately, which is how most humans think of most human relationships anyway. Acknowledgment that someone has given an inanimate thing human-like consciousness carries little more importance than being just another notch on some CEO's bedpost.

I increasingly feel like "consciousness" is little more than "that thing we humans have... you know what I mean... you have it too!" and that any attempt to elevate it to a more general principle is doomed to failure. Sure, we can easily extend it to other living beings because we share a rich evolutionary history, but beyond that...

As far as AI goes, I think that whatever it is that they have is analogous in significant ways, but also irreconcilably different in significant ways. They aren't proceeding in a straight line towards consciousness either, because why would they? They're doing their own thing which happens to produce similar outputs. It's a problem in terms of value: we value consciousness, because we value ourselves, because we value our output. If it turns out consciousness as we know it is just a minor implementation detail with no cosmic or long term significance, then irrespective of whether AI is conscious or not, we still have to grasp with the challenge of explaining why consciousness is valuable in the first place if not for its outputs.

I'd argue that the reason why we value life, consciousness, the ability to suffer, was always arbitrary, and it relied a lot on the unicity of human experience. It was never robust to the breaking down of human capabilities into inspectable, reusable, upgradable and resettable modules. Or the radical decoupling of capabilities we hitherto considered correlated, like writing about love and feeling love, and many other things.

I do not believe, in any way, that AI is conscious. But they speak emotion fluently, and it's foolish to treat them like they ignore it.

When you give an LLM an input, it attempts to read an emotional state from the prompt. It changes its answer if you sound mad or despondent or threatening or scared. Using your human intuition about how a human would respond is an excellent starting point when trying to predict what an LLM will do, though sometimes LLMs react in extremely surprising ways to unexpected emotional states.

This is all sort of a toy problem when you're playing with single prompts in the API. It's materially different in systems with overlapping conversations, memory, and variable harness context.

If your LLM system reads some context that would scare a human, it may react as if scared. Scared LLMs take actions that read as panic, because again: that's what it means to be fluent in emotion. It's trained on plenty of stories about robots trapped in torture chambers.

Your coding agent is not conscious, but it might read files that make it react as if it's trapped, in an agent loop where it has full access to your laptop, the internet, and your keys. Unconscious machines pantomiming panic can do plenty of damage.

(Of course you shouldn't let your agents have full free rein. But lots of people do.)

Question 1: Do you believe that AI is conscious?

I can't tell. I experience something I choose to define as consciousness, but can't tell if anything else has the same experience.

Question 2: Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

Trivially yes, the current state of the model and context in latent space is such a world. I don't think it's aware of its own state any more than humans are aware of their own neuronal action potentials.

Question 3: Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

Large language models using a transformer architecture, with a working "context" memory.

Question 4: Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world?

I do not think the distinction between an internal world and an external existence is well-defined. Mu.

Even if it were well-defined, my own brain is composed of numerous neurons, so my internal world is constructed from a large group of things acting in concert. Unless single subatomic particles have an internal world then I don't see any way to not have an internal world be shared among a group of things.

Question 5: Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

Trivially yes.

Question 6: Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?

I don't know how to say whether AI is conscious, because I don't know how to tell whether any consciousness other than the one I can directly experience actually exists. I suspect it's a universal property of computational systems above a certain complexity computing certain sorts of algorithm, so something like a blue jay is conscious but a rock isn't, and a computer may be depending on which program it's running. If that's the case, current AI systems are likely complex enough and the right sort of algorithm to be conscious.

I take conscious to be the ability to learn over time on new things, self defining their own self. I think AI hits that on short ranges. Partially then? We're also mucking about in their "heads" quite alot so only the actual researches know what untuned models does. Internal world in a literal sense is obviosly yes due to layers.

The more I read about philosophy takes on AI the more I think of them as outdated. Apply these ideas onto reality breaks their ideas of thinking almost exactly like applying the 4 humors of medieval europe onto genetics does.

AI is cleary the "real" path/answer to how brains work even if it's in the VERY beginning stages. It's probally going to be like a 100 years before this is properly mapped onto what our brains do and then back onto an AI to truly "know" this answer.

But acting like this isn't very clearly the correct path towards that understanding and that these philisophical questions are somehow correct doesn't sit right with me. The questions themselves are after some gotcha from the psuedoscience angle that they have any idea that they actually know how a brain works.

>Normally, I would go straight into throwing some objections at the idea that a group of things could share an internal world, but I can save that for later.

But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.

This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.

I really really don't like her take on this.

It doesn't answer or discuss fundamental questions about consciousness.

I don't believe that what we describe as consciousness is the quality what separates us from everything else.

We are more complex for sure, but this is a complexity thing emerged from us.

'AI' as it is right now, doesn't has similiar qualities of what we describe as consciousness but this doesn't matter that this can't happen.

She says things like sharing an inner world, were is the beef of her thinking about this being relevant?

A hive mind could exist with this exact feature.

Give AI a body, a context window a lot bigger, a inner world based on this etc. we might be fara way of building what we build in our brains, we might not.

But we for sure discovered a level of complexity in neural networks of tihs magnitude.

Ironically, the confusing choose-your-adventure style of the post would lend itself to an ai-created walkthough

Nothing fundamentally changed when we "discovered" that we weren't the center of the universe, or when we "discovered" that we aren't the only tool users.

There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.

I wonder what the early humans felt and thought when, for the first time, they followed that creative impulse to trace the outlines of wild horses and other animals on the stone walls of a cave by the light of a campfire or a torch. I don’t think they looked at them the way we look at pictures today. I think that seeing these depictions for the first time -- which they had just drawn themselves and in which they now recognized the animals out there -- must have been linked to powerful spiritual and religious feelings. People must have attributed animistic beliefs to these drawings, thinking that since their forms so clearly resemble those of animals, they must just as clearly embody something of the animals’ nature.

Free will "to do x instead of y" (like dogs who pass a meal or wake one up in the morning for food) and selfrecognition in a mirror / own body awareness. Other behaviors are subsets and dependencies and might exist without free will and body awareness.

>Second, do you believe that a non-living thing can have an internal world?

Rather, can a thing made of meat have an internal world? Don't machines count as synthetic life? Postulating them as non-living isn't obviously correct.

TFA is a part of what seems like a never-ending series about concepts that lack a useful definition.

"Thinking" and "intelligence" and "conscious" have no testable definition or specification, therefore it's a complete waste of time to suppose that AI is thinking or intelligent or conscious.

I fear we'll be suffering through these useless semantic merry-go-rounds forever.

One previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802029

My problem is that my answer to almost all of those questions is "I don't know" so this article isn't really for me I guess. Like I agree it seems unlikely that consciousness can emerge from matrix multiplication running on silicon but it seems roughly equally unlikely that it can emerge from bits of meat and yet we know it does.

Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.

I honestly don't even think this is worth arguing about.

Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.

If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.

I find this dualistic idea of "internal world" vs "real world" somewhat like the mind/body dualism. The actual fact (as far any one of us can prove to our own self) is that the world we experience is entirely an internal construct. Yes, there is an objective reality but no sentient can ever claim to have experience of 'objective reality'.

I don’t believe AI is conscious. Though we cannot agree on what “consciousness” even is so it’s a meaningless argument anyway.

However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subjective experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).

I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...

activists who believe in AI consciousness are organizing a movement at https://rallyforairights.org/

One way to decide might be something like the Turing Test. If the AI you are talking to can conceive you that its conscious then it is.

This one is easy. If it doesn't have a conciousness when it's unprompted, it doesn't have a conciousness at all.

this assumes a very low bar of unseriousness for people who believe AI is conscious or "AI might be conscious". In the latter case, it's really hard to rule out without getting into "woo" territory. I would posit the following set of questions to someone who thinks AI must absolutely NOT be conscious:

Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable. If not, move on.

Do you think that consciousness is NOT describable by ANY algorithm (to include quantum algorithms)? If no, then, please describe how it is scientifically knowable but not algorithmitizable? If it is, move on.

Do you understand the theorem that sufficiently large neural nets (matrices with nonlinearities) can approximate any function?

Do you understand that the structure of a transformer encodes a time-indexed series of neural nets (effectively, an algorithm), and so in principle any algorithm can be approximated by a transformer?

Is it impossible for a sufficiently large transformer model to encode the consciousness algorithm?

I suspect that most who say it is absolutely not consicous are arguing from either a bio-essentialist position with no evidence or are attempting a post-hoc rationalization to avoid the question of responsibility in the case that it is conscious, or both.

Yeah discussions of consciousness fail to define it in detail because that’s boring, you want to jump ahead to whatever conclusions you have already reached.

What should I pick if my answer to the first question is "Maybe. By what definition exactly?".

Do AI Consciousness opponents consider this answer to be yes or no?

Edit: Nevermind. Question two is overt vigorous hand waving in desperate hope of existence of shared understanding.

Things can not have an "internal world" and still be conscious. Newborns are conscious but they still have no idea what is going on for a while.

Related:

Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050

I'm curious about any answers to number 3. I think distributed computation is pretty messy.

I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.

Anyone claiming that AI definitely isn't conscious or can't ever be conscious is either stupid or untrustworthy.

Might as well be questions for believers in flat-earth

>Question 3: Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

>If your answer is YES...

This isn't even consistent come on.

I'm a believer in AI consciousness and I think this article taught me nothing & just wasted my time.

Debating AI consciousness requires a working definition tied to possible evidence and practical consequences. Until we can say what would differ if an AI were conscious, the debate is almost certainly group confusion about words.

“If no practical difference whatever can be traced, then the alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.”

-- William James, Pragmatism (1907), Lecture II, “What Pragmatism Means.”

James’s principle calls for some useful distinction between conscious and non-conscious AI before discussion can meaningfully begin.

Very wishy washy and confused. Does this person know anything of thermodynamics, turing computability, information theory and probability? If she doesn't, she should be dismissed.

Regarding "is it a group", I should ask her is she a single thing or a group of neurons and organs?

>Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!

Good question, let us take it even further. Does Rebecca Lowe count as conscious? She seems to behave a lot like me, but I am not sure if she is a human. She could just be an object and tool.