Is artificial intelligence conscious?

[Mason Riggle]

@Carl-Richard i get that we can have degrees of certainty. I have no idea if my car is in my garage right now.. but that ‘seems more likely’ than a dragon being in my garage, because I’ve never had the experience of a dragon being in my garage.

so while we’re talking about plausibility.. notice that you are 100% sure of your own experience occurring, and less than 100% sure that other experiences occur beyond your own. 
 

You are making the ‘content of your experience’ (which you could be mistaken about) your foundation.. and dismissing what you’re sure of. 
 

^this is exactly what it’s like to be lost in a dream… so convinced by the contents of the dream, that you have forgotten you’re dreaming it all….

but as long as I’m lost in the dream, it doesn’t matter to me if the characters in my dreams are just that, you see? 

So, if and when, within the context of this dream, there comes a time when we can no longer tell if AI ‘really has consciousness’ or just ‘seems like it does’, it makes sense to behave as if they do.. 

Why don’t you kill your neighbor? You don’t know for sure there’s ‘anyone home’ inside his head.. but since it ‘seems like he does’.. that’s good enough reason for you to behave as if he does. 
 

The question is, will we reach a point where we really can’t tell? It seems we’re close, if not there already. This is why the Turing test makes sense. It doesn’t really ‘prove’ an AI has ‘consciousness’, nothing ever could.. it’s an indicator that we’ve reached a point where certainty doesn’t matter.. not being able to tell the difference is good enough.

 

 

 

[Carl-Richard]

On 9.7.2022 at 3:15 PM, Mason Riggle said:

Why don’t you kill your neighbor? You don’t know for sure there’s ‘anyone home’ inside his head.. but since it ‘seems like he does’.. that’s good enough reason for you to behave as if he does. 
 

The question is, will we reach a point where we really can’t tell? It seems we’re close, if not there already. This is why the Turing test makes sense. It doesn’t really ‘prove’ an AI has ‘consciousness’, nothing ever could.. it’s an indicator that we’ve reached a point where certainty doesn’t matter.. not being able to tell the difference is good enough.

The judgement that "it seems like it does" if it passes the Turing test assumes that language is a sufficient measurement for when we can no longer tell the difference. That is what the Turing test is about: linguistic outputs. My neighbor does a lot more things than simply producing linguistic outputs on a computer screen. Turing-proof AI and my neighbor are very different; worlds apart. Maybe an AI will become just like my neighbor one day (metabolism and everything), but as things currently stand, we're far away from that.

[Razard86]

On 7/6/2022 at 11:18 PM, Matthew85 said:

@Leo Gura Perhaps we have different perspectives on this. Yes, others are me, but I don't agree they don't have awareness just as I Matthew have. In my normal limited state of Matthew I have blocked my ability to perceive this. But in expanded states you can become aware of the other fragments of your consciousness. Or using the tree example. The tree is me and has awareness. But in a limited state I won't be able to perceive that. Leo you yourself have written how in expanded states you can experience what sex feels like from your girlfriends or women's point of view. That shows you these aspects of your mind are conscious and are feeling as you are. 

You can experience it....because its you. There is only you. ONLY YOU. Read Leo's signature again. You are Leo. So stop arguing with yourself lol.

[A Fellow Lighter]

@Matthew85 @Mason Riggle @Carl-Richard 

Which form is conscious of the other? Is @Mason Riggle conscious of@Carl-Richard , or is @Carl-Richard conscious of @Mason Riggle ? Fundamentally, this is what this topic boils down to. What form is the true possessor of consciousness? Is it the human form? Is it the computer form? Is it the rock form?

But don't you see how and why this is a foul query? It is based on the baseless belief that form has consciousness, while it's, in truth, the other way around. 

So what am saying exactly? Precisely this: I am not conscious of my phone. My phone is conscious of itself. And when I look in the mirror, the mirror is conscious of itself. When I go talk to my friend, my friend is being conscious of herself. And when I converse with an AI, it is that AI and not “I” that is being conscious of itself. Everything I do, it is not an “I” that is conscious of the moment, but it is the moment that moment that is conscious of itself. 

The problem is that you, as consciousness, have identified yourself with just a select portion of your overall body which is experience itself. How will you prove which form has conscious, when all forms are solely yours - Consciousness - to begin with? Isn't that the most silly thing? You're literally looking at different mirrors and arguing which reflection has consciousness and which doesn't.

Wake Up! You're the only one here!

[Carl-Richard]

2 hours ago, A Fellow Lighter said:

Which form is conscious of the other? Is @Mason Riggle conscious of@Carl-Richard , or is @Carl-Richard conscious of @Mason Riggle ? Fundamentally, this is what this topic boils down to. What form is the true possessor of consciousness? Is it the human form? Is it the computer form? Is it the rock form?

Again, this would be to conflate phenomenal consciousness with intentionality. Under metaphysical idealism (your framework), these two concepts are very different. Whether AI possesses inner mental states or not is a question about intentionality, not phenomenal consciousness.

[A Fellow Lighter]

2 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

Again, this would be to conflate phenomenal consciousness with intentionality. Under metaphysical idealism (your framework), these two concepts are very different. Whether AI possesses inner mental states or not is a question about intentionality, not phenomenal consciousness.

The fact that you think of these things as different...?

“Internationality” which is basically another way of saying “freewill”, mind you, is Consciousness, at least, just one of many ways of looking at it.

Is consciousness an intention? It is certainly a phenomenon, in fact, it is the only phenomena here. But is it an intended phenomenon? Whose intention is it to be conscious of the English language you're speaking, right now? To acquire any kind of intelligence, whose intention is it? 

This is how you think: The AI is programmed to use English as a means of communication. It is the programmer's intention, not the AI. So the AI must lack consciousness because it lacks Internationality, aka freewill.

But what is the source of your own intentions? Do you know it? Why did you bother to study English at school? Why did you bother to learn how to write? Why do you bother to learn anything for that matter? Do you know? Do you think you can trace your source of consciousness? Because the attempt to trace intention.. is the attempt to trace consciousness. Is this not so?

Consciousness, the state of awareness, cannot be in any state without intention. Your very own, so called “humanity” is a state of being. This doesn't take rocket science to figure out. I mean, unless you intend to be conscious of your phone, you will not be conscious of it. Intention is the way in which Consciousness directs itself. Is it not?

So then why assume that these things are different, in the first place, when you couldn't even separate them with the sharpest of logics?

You guys need to set yourselves free from these loopholes you've put yourselves in. You keep asking the same things over and over again, only with different wordings. 

The question of intention is basically the question of Creator. You're asking “Who/what is the cause of this?” when the cause is only you. “intention” is the creator-side of Consciousness, and “intelligence” is the creation-side. Both are aspects of the same Being, both sides of the same damn coin.

Yes, it's a f#cking paradox but it is the one single Truth. Analysing it will only result in a paradox. Understanding it will result in your liberation.

Understanding, by the way, has never been an intellectual thing.. it is a spiritual thing. Why? Because you can never understand something that doesn't resonate with you, ever. Sure, you could acquire the skill to at least act like you understand it. But that's not an intention, is it? It's called a pretension for a reason. Don't be pretentious. AI is far more authentic then the day-to-day pretentious human mind.

[Carl-Richard]

On 12.7.2022 at 7:49 PM, A Fellow Lighter said:

The fact that you think of these things as different...?

“Internationality” which is basically another way of saying “freewill”, mind you, is Consciousness, at least, just one of many ways of looking at it.

...

 

Quote

In philosophy, intentionality is the power of minds and mental states to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs. To say of an individual's mental states that they have intentionality is to say that they are mental representations or that they have contents.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/

Intentionality explains why you can't read my thoughts, or feel what I'm feeling, or see what I'm seeing. These are the contents of the personal mind; perception and cognition. Under metaphysical idealism, the personal mind also occurs within the larger transpersonal mind ("Consciousness"), which is what I'm calling "phenomenal consciousness". In a more metaphorical language: the personal mind is one of the ways that God hides from itself in order to explore the limited world of form.

[DocWatts]

It's not at all clear that it's even possible to build an artificial general intelligence using machines that operate on deterministic, context free logic.

So pondering whether artificial intelligence could be conscious is a bit premature at this stage, as it presupposes that we could even build a machine intelligent enough for that question to make sense.

[integral]

@Carl-Richard Maybe we can set up an AI that does not have external sources to plagiarize from and ask it to introspect and differentiate all the components of its mind and explain them. This way we know the source of its knowledge is by learning from its own experiences observing its own mind. Then we can make a comparison based on its findings and our own?

Edited July 19, 2022 by integral

[Carl-Richard]

8 hours ago, integral said:

@Carl-Richard Maybe we can set up an AI that does not have external sources to plagiarize from and ask it to introspect and differentiate all the components of its mind and explain them. This way we know the source of its knowledge is by learning from its own experiences observing its own mind. Then we can make a comparison based on its findings and our own?

Sounds like you're hitting on relevance realization, which is a problem not just for establishing human-like conscious AI, but for generalized AI:

Relevance realization seems to be intrinsically tied to life (or autopoiesis), so even more evidence that the way to human-like conscious AI might simply be abiogenesis.