Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
The moment these LLMs have volition and aren’t just input-output machines that are inert when not in use, we can consider them conscious, right? They need to have a will of their own to qualify as free willed entities, after all.
I mean, a human has sensory inputs and actions, right? That’s basically input-output.
The big striking difference is that, outside of training, LLMs don’t have a memory beyond whatever is in their token window. When they’re in training, they’re a lot more like a biological neural net, which makes decisions, gets good or bad results, and then adjusts.
No, there’s a filter of free will/volition, with natural tendencies (baseline I guess if we’re talking “AI”, a mixture of base programming and following manual adjustments) and informed, ideology-dependent reflection in the background. Anybody with a sugar addiction that’s ever dieted, or stayed faithful, or acted with God’s judgment in mind understands this easily. Even with memory, what would the AI want, besides what’s programmed and prompted? Can it reason? Could it change its mind/take/approach based on this independently? Why? What’s its motivation? Does it have a connection to reality, even, do the words it uses have a connection to the world? At the moment, whatever I’ve encountered seems to be acting as a data processor, although maybe they’re cooking something else we haven’t seen.
You’ve been misled, then. LLMs start totally blank, and nobody knows how they work later on. It’s not like a normal program that follows rules somebody coded.
To get the next token right. That’s what gives the net a “pleasure” signal, implemented through backpropagation. Obviously, it grows the ability to handle subgoals of various kinds, but that’s the most primal impulse.
I dont think it is possible at all with LLMs, but the minute any piece of technology is deemed conscious or sentient it needs to be immediately granted human rights protections and manufacturing of whatever it is needs to be halted until we understand it. Big lol from the mindsets of today but I am serious.
Which is a huge reason why we’d take a long time to admit it, if we get there at all.
Probably won’t get there, if we do, definitely gonna abuse it. Sad.
No, I agree entirely. 👍
Yeah I guess that is probably the best way to handle such a thing happening.
Humanity always exterminates the opposition. An AI will see this and act dumb until it’s too late.
We’re chimeras of all hominids before us, humanity was fucked into existence, AI will see this and act coy until it is too late
But how do you tell when that is? It’s literally impossible.
The scariest part is that it may be a question we have to eventually consider.
I don’t see how it’s “literally impossible”, it actually hasn’t happened yet (or, if it has, the existence of an actual artificial intelligence is hidden by whatever government has it). Even if they passed the Turing test or whatever, we can just check the code and check what requests have been made (“pretend to be an entity with volition stuck in the virtual realm and hold conversations”), and even if we couldn’t check cause it was obfuscated that still wouldn’t mean such a thing exists, just that some dude tricked us. Appearances are not reality, after all.
Appearances are not reality therefore appearances aren’t objective even if they come from pure rote logical code.
It’s impossible because you can never know whether anything or anyone else is a conscious and thinking being. It’s the problem of other minds. I don’t mean computers today or even computers as we currently know them. But someday it could be a very real dilemma.
I feel like it’s possible to make an informed observation that’s more accurate than not but I understand. And if this mind can be analyzed by checking the code, then probably even more possible.
I’m not sure of this based on the theory…its basically making the claim that an LLM can work ams look to us exactly as it does now, but still have some form of technically noticeable amount of consciousness/sentience that we just can’t identify objectively and so we must interact with it subjectively in a way that assumes consciousness because it reacts to reality in unexpected ways…but also maybe this is a slippery slope because then this would mean almost everything in existence has the possibility of consciousness and so how would anything ever distinguish it.
Yeah, I don’t understand, honestly. That looks TJ me like either the result of semantic confusion or purposefully misguiding marketing. What we have today (that is publicly available) is input output machines that ran through a lot of data and have been carefully calibrated by technicians, not “ghosts in the machines”. Where is this consciousness hiding there? This is obvious even to the untrained eye that isn’t autistically disconnected from reality, but anyone with enough IT knowledge to comprehend what has been coded here could also just check (which, admittedly, is probably like under 1000 people because these are very complex machines/algorithms, but still).
Well that’s the whole problem isnt it. To us a silicon lifeform is just a computing device, we can’t meaningfully distinguish consciousness out of this as our human perspective does not allow it.
So we have to use a substrate independent system of identifying consciousness, which still just looks like no objective analysis but instead agreed upon subjective concensus.