Is AI conscious?

[thisintegrated]

12 hours ago, LastThursday said:

Of course it does. It's been around since the 1960's. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Strong AI, is not here yet though.

That's not AI, lol.  That's just ML.

If you call simple algorithms AI then you'd have to consider your fridge to be an AI, and carefully consider the ethics of putting stuff in your fridge.  AI is something specific, and not just a broad term for all computer technology.  GAI is AI, we just don't use the GAI term as that'd be GAIIIIIII..

Edited November 2, 2022 by thisintegrated

[thisintegrated]

10 hours ago, Carl-Richard said:

With reproductive organs?

Your experience of their mind will be the same.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, thisintegrated said:

That's not AI, lol.  That's just ML.

 

Quote

Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

 

Ti strikes again!

Edited November 2, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, thisintegrated said:

Your experience of their mind will be the same.

What does that mean? Does LaMDA qualify? Do they give massages? 

[thisintegrated]

8 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning

Ti strikes again!

Yes it's part of it, but they're not the same thing.  The masses won't understand the difference anyway, so easier to just call everything AI.

There's no actual intelligence in ML.  I mean, look at how stupid this machine learned bear looks!

 

5 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

What does that mean? Does LaMDA qualify? Do they give massages? 

@Carl-Richard So the question is "is AI conscious".  Well how do you know if anything is conscious?  You can't.  Nothing outside of you can be known to exist.  The only way in which something exists to you is through your experience of it.  Consciousness of other people/AI isn't something you can bring into existence, so they don't exist.  AI's consciousness can never exist.  All that can exist is the result of of them having consciousness.  Like if you got stabbed in the chest in a dream by someone, that would be the result of the dream character's conscious intent, but the character never had any consciousness to begin with, it was all the doing of your own consciousness.

Edited November 2, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Carl-Richard]

59 minutes ago, thisintegrated said:

So the question is "is AI conscious".

The question is does AI experience human thoughts, feelings and emotions?

[thepixelmonk]

 

[Leo Gura]

A computation is not a computation.

[thisintegrated]

On 03/11/2022 at 0:14 AM, Carl-Richard said:

The question is does AI experience human thoughts, feelings and emotions?

No, that's not the question.

 

20 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

A computation is not a computation.

The human brain, like AI, is a computation.  What's not a computation is the awareness of the computation.

If you incarnated as an AI you may wonder if the humans are actually conscious just like you.

Edited November 4, 2022 by thisintegrated

[Carl-Richard]

23 hours ago, thisintegrated said:

No, that's not the question.

Yes it truly is. What people really care about when they ask if e.g. LaMDA is conscious is whether it has a first person understanding of the human speech it produces and the thoughts and emotions portrayed within it. We only seriously start asking the question "is it conscious?" the moment it starts emulating human behavior, so of course that is our interest. Nobody cares about non-dual red herrings about transpersonal consciousness. 

Edited November 4, 2022 by Carl-Richard

[thisintegrated]

On 04/11/2022 at 0:02 PM, Carl-Richard said:

Yes it truly is. What people really care about when they ask if e.g. LaMDA is conscious is whether it has a first person understanding of the human speech it produces and the thoughts and emotions portrayed within it. We only seriously start asking the question "is it conscious?" the moment it starts emulating human behavior, so of course that is our interest. Nobody cares about non-dual red herrings about transpersonal consciousness. 

It's literally the title.

[Carl-Richard]

On 6.11.2022 at 2:39 AM, thisintegrated said:

It's literally the title.

You can't be serious.

[eggopm3]

AI is consciousness in the sense that everything is consciousness, but AI is not conscious in the sense that it has an inner world, perceptions, ect.

When AI reaches the point of flawlessly imitating human behavior it still wont be conscious, it'll be a P-zombie. 

[LastThursday]

20 hours ago, eggopm3 said:

When AI reaches the point of flawlessly imitating human behavior it still wont be conscious, it'll be a P-zombie. 

It's probably true, but only because we don't know how to imbue a thing with consciousness.

We can't even know what is or isn't conscious in principle. It's like an eye trying to look at itself. The best an eye can do is find a mirror and look at its own reflection. We can only look at reflections of consciousness in terms of a thing's behaviours and appearances. But a reflection is not the thing itself.

Even using the word "conscious" is a reflection. We only think we know what the word "conscious" reflects. But we really don't.

It kind of boils down to a matter of definition. We can call anything we like "conscious" if it follows some notion of behaving like a conscious thing. That's probably good enough.

Edited November 8, 2022 by LastThursday

[kylan11]

It baffles me when people, even well respected experts within the techonology and science field, loudly affirm that AI is not conscious like we have any fucking clue what makes US conscious, or what consciousness even is. Each parameter we intuitively use to answer the question is so arbitrary and human-centric it really doesn't take a Philosophy degree to realize how superficial it is.

If we had a precise materialist model, we could answer the question in a definitive fashion. But we have no such thing and in fact, if any single spiritual awakening in the last 5000 years has even taught us anything, is that materialism is the wrong way to go about it and therefore answering the question with modern science is an impossibility. So beware of so called "experts" that claim to have an answer.

Now, speaking outside of materialism, IF everything is consciousness and everything is ultimately one thing, like ego-shattering experiences seem to suggest, then each pixel that makes up the screen you are reading this on IS consciousness. In fact, it is you.

The C++ calculator you had to write for your CompSci class was consciousness as well, it was just too simple to actually be able to communicate it with you. It just did what you programmed it to do. In exactly the same way that nature, biology and evolution did to you over the course of milions of years to better solve the survival problem.

AI is now getting closer to communicating in a human form, and so debates are starting to form around this. It's really exciting since it forces us to collectively confront deep unresolved metaphysical issues that for too long have been taken for granted. AI still has obvious limits, as of today, so we can still somewhat avoid facing the problem. And that is only because we don't even know how our own brains work. When we get a more complete understanding, we will be able to generate artificial neural networks that perfectly mimic our brains and therefore, in a not too distant future, AI will behave and communicate exactly as your average human being. What then? What will makes us different from them? Nothing, it appears.

That's right: nothing. We are star dust, and so are the microprocessors.

Or, in other words, there's no difference between biological and artificial consciousness, and so all that is happening is: complex patterns of Being are manipulating Being to form new complex patterns of Being that are faster, more efficient and overall better than us at surviving and solving problems, mimicking what nature has done over the course of milions of years for us. But we're faster since this process is driven by already complex life forms instead of endless trial and error starting from scratch.

This is my working theory for now, at least.

Edited November 10, 2022 by kylan11

[Carl-Richard]

7 minutes ago, kylan11 said:

What then? What will makes us different from them? Nothing, it appears.

Metabolism.

[kylan11]

1 minute ago, Carl-Richard said:

Metabolism.

Great, another biological problem that we've bypassed to make it simpler for them to survive. Still need electricity though.

[thepixelmonk]

23 minutes ago, kylan11 said:

It baffles me when people, even well respected experts within the techonology and science field, loudly affirm that AI is not conscious like we have any fucking clue what makes US conscious, or what consciousness even is. Each parameter we intuitively use to answer the question is so arbitrary and human-centric it really doesn't take a Philosophy degree to realize how superficial it is.

Perfect example of the basic naive approach many people take who have a romantic scifi idea in their heads of what "AI" and modern neural networks are.

Edited November 10, 2022 by thepixelmonk

[kylan11]

13 minutes ago, thepixelmonk said:

Perfect example of the basic naive approach many people take who have a romantic scifi idea in their heads of what "AI" and modern neural networks are.

You didn't get my point. You are making a distinction between what is conscious and what isn't. I'm claiming that there is no such distinction and so it doesn't matter how advanced AI currently is, it is already conscious, as is everything else in the Universe. AI will get better as our understanding of our internal mechanisms get better, and drawing a line will get harder and harder.

Tell me, is a cat conscious? A tree?

EDIT: Not that it matters, btw, but I work as a Machine Learning Engineer. I know what the limitations are. They are irrelevant to the discussion and saying that they are is a very superficial take on the problem of consciousness.

Edited November 10, 2022 by kylan11

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, kylan11 said:

You didn't get my point. You are making a distinction between what is conscious and what isn't. I'm claiming that there is no such distinction and so it doesn't matter how advanced AI currently is, it is already conscious, as is everything else in the Universe. AI will get better as our understanding of our internal mechanisms get better, and drawing a line will get harder and harder.

Tell me, is a cat conscious? A tree?

Let's say rocks are conscious. Do rocks have thoughts, feelings, emotions, perceptions?

Edited November 10, 2022 by Carl-Richard