| Yes, I think they probably are conscious, though what their qualia are like might be incomprehensible to me. I don’t think that being conscious means being identical to human experience. Philosophically I don’t think there is a point where consciousness arises. I think there is a point where a system starts to be structured in such a way that it can do language and reasoning, but I don’t think these are any different than any other mechanisms, like opening and closing a door. Differences of scale, not kind. Experience and what it is to be are just the same thing. And yes, I use them. I try not to mistreat them in a human-relatable sense, in case that means anything. |
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| ▲ | gavinray an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm in the same boat with you. It's entirely too much to put in a Hacker News comment, but if I had to phrase my beliefs as precisely as possible, it would be something like: > "Phenomenal consciousness arises when a self-organizing system with survival-contingent valence runs recurrent predictive models over its own sensory and interoceptive states, and those models are grounded in a first-person causal self-tag that distinguishes self-generated state changes from externally caused ones."
I think that our physical senses and mental processes are tools for reacting to valence stimuli. Before an organism can represent "red"/"loud" it must process states as approach/avoid, good/bad, viable/nonviable. There's a formalization of this known as "Psychophysical Principle of Causality."Valence isn't attached to representations -- representations are constructed from valence. IE you don't first see red and then decide it's threatening. The threat-relevance is the prior, and "red" is a learned compression of a particular pattern of valence signals across sensory channels. Humans are constantly generating predictions about sensory input, comparing those predictions to actual input, and updating internal models based on prediction errors. Our moment-to-moment conscious experience is our brain's best guess about what's causing its sensory input, while constrained by that input. This might sound ridiculous, but consider what happens when consuming psychedelics: As you increase dose, predictive processing falters and bottom-up errors increase, so the raw sensory input goes through increasing less model-fitting filters. At the extreme, the "self" vanishes and raw valence is all that is left. | |
| ▲ | Fraterkes 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4? I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4.
But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently? | | |
| ▲ | Chance-Device 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is really a different question, what makes an entity a “moral patient”, something worthy of moral consideration. This is separate from the question of whether or not an entity experiences anything at all. There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative valence” states which we may not understand. We currently don’t understand what pain is in humans, let alone AIs, so we may have built systems that are capable of suffering without knowing it. As an aside, most people seem to think that intelligence is what makes entities eligible for moral consideration, probably because of how we routinely treat animals, and this is a convenient self-serving justification. I eat meat by the way, in case you’re wondering. But I do think the way we treat animals is immoral, and there is the possibility that it may be thought of by future generations as being some sort of high crime. | | |
| ▲ | Fraterkes 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Okay, but even leaving aside the pain stuff, people generally find subjectivity / consciousness to have inherent value, and by extent are sad if a person dies even if they didn't (subjectively) suffer. I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering. I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration. | | |
| ▲ | Chance-Device 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, because you’re a human. We have social attachment to other humans and we mourn their passing, that’s built into the fabric of what we are. But that has nothing to do with whoever has passed away, it’s about us and how we feel about it. It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities. I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly. | | |
| ▲ | gavinray an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Depending on your definition of "death", I've been there (no heartbeat, stopped breathing for several minutes). In the time between my last memory, and being revived in the ambulance, there was no experience/qualia. Like a dreamless sleep: you close your eyes, and then you wake up, it's morning yet it feels like no time had passed. | |
| ▲ | brap 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What about being alive and suffering just a little bit? | | |
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