Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat.
Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking about this specific issue regarding AI consciousness, consider many things in the past that have been written as though they were absolutely definitive, and yet today we believe exactly the opposite, and for many such issues we find the prevailing viewpoint at the time reprehensible.
That's not to say that Ted is wrong at all here; I'm not commenting on that. But I find the entire style of the article grating because it seems to violate common assumptions regarding "good faith" debate, and I would find the article equally frustrating if he had titled it "Artificial intelligence is conscious" and argued the opposite side, albeit in the same tone and using the same persuasion devices.
> Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying?
Why are those the choices?
Essays are situated along countless dimensions: tone, vocabulary, author, zeitgeist, publication context, intent, subtext, relationship to other works and expressions, etc
A "good faith" reader takes all of those into consideration as they absorb the essay, and integrate it with their own intellectual situation that sits along just as many countless dimensions.
Nobody's asked to sign a notarized binding document that they wholesale agree or disagree with everything said in this essay -- or its conclusions. Nor are they obliged to have some strong reaction to it at all, let alone annoyance.
It's just one among thousands of essays about a "hot button topic", to be taken however it's personally received.
Why should Chiang have to take responsibility for making sure it's not too strongly positioned for your persomal taste. Maybe he really does see it so clearly and is simply being earnest. Maybe he enjoys the literary flourish of prose in strong language. Maybe he just wants to express something as a prose-poetic human, not maximize persuasion or non-annoyance per se.
It's only declaration by fiat if you stop reading at the end of the title. Should authors add a qualifier like in my opinion to every statement that they make?
The essay structure you're criticizing is exactly how I was taught to write from primary school through to university. You start with a title or hook, introduce the topic and propose a thesis. That is followed up upon with supporting arguments for the primary claim.
I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “Natural Selection is How Species Evolve”.
The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time. This because obvious with things like the Holocaust. Or when you have a legal person (e.g. RFK Jr.) asking to debate a scientist (e.g. Dr. Peter Hotez.)
> The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time
The Catholic church could have said exactly the same thing at one point. "Why should we even devote time to an argument as absurd as the earth not being the center of the universe?" There are darker examples along the lines of those you give, with beliefs quite opposite to those we have nowadays.
Galileo’s (or rather the Copernican) model was still wrong though. It had obvious flaws and the church was not wrong in keeping their older model of the universe while a better model (Kepler‘s model) was still in the works.
What Galileo was asking the church to do was extremely unreasonable. He was basically asking them to throw a way a model which had worked fine for hundreds of years just because he observed the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter. I mean would you? Especially for a model which was worse at predicting the motions of the planets.
Had Galileo’s model been better then Ptolemies’ I could see a case for his arguments, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason for the church to take his arguments at equal value with those in favor of keeping the Ptolemaic model.
100% with you, it degenerates to proof by authority if someone popular / with clout just gets to declare "nuh uh".
I furthermore think it's ridiculous for humans to declare that our brains have a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals (if we reject supernaturalism).
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter.
And we're 100% certain that humans aren't just as equally reduced to "stochastic parrots", if we're going to be infinitely reductive?
I don't believe that current AIs are conscious, but I think it's incredibly naive to take a strong stance on any future AI; it's much like the difference between atheism and agnosticism.
>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support
except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article
"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"
When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure
>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant one is the fact that without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness. Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can (and as a point of comparison, certain iguanas can live for decades in the wild). Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees. At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires, perhaps by using a button board or some other nonlinguistic modality, the way that people have taught chimpanzees and domesticated dogs.
I agree with some parts of this piece, but paragraphs like this one above seem pretty uninspired and simplistic. It's entirely plausible that a conscious mind would not be evolutionarily incentivized to be able to do those things. ie just because animals on earth needed to develop specific talents doesn't mean that other conscious entities need to. Why would a computer program need to hunt for food like a mouse would? Making tools like chimp? these seem like nonsensical metrics.
Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?
Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?
I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.
>Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Damn, what a line!
Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.
I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.
the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.
I thought this was a great article. I'm frustrated to read so many commenters that purely respond to the title, but don't seem to have read it. You don't have to agree with the article, of course, but...
This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data.
It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.
- Are current LLMs conscious?
- Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious?
- Can any AI be conscious?
I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be shocked to be mistaken.
The philosophical arguments about what it means to be concious are so cagey. Are we more than our thoughts? Is being concious more than being a state machine being fed inputs and generating outputs? Are we more than a feedback machine? What types of animal nervous systems qualify?
"It can't be concious because we understand that it is just reacting in a simplistic way from simplistic inputs." So do other simple creatures. Some just react to light.
I can appreciate his comment that he sees it as more possible when they have inputs of their own (like emotions!). Perhaps his concern is that the entirety of the LLM model is frozen. It has no ability to have a subjective experience of its own. (he does literally say this in the article) It can be copied from one place to another, and (ignoring the nuance of operational details) -- it is largely the same "thing", and has no ability to change, which is definitely in the definition of alive, to say nothing of concious.
I think folks get hung up on "prediction". The prediction aspect is what is enabling emulation. How it does it is irrelvant. If something emulates human perfectly (or better, more human than human!) -- then it is probably concious. (but I agree that the inability to change and have a subjective experience are a pretty good argument against
Probably, Dijkstra would be right to say, "LLMs are no more concious than a submarine can swim." But I think he'd still be wrongfully dismissive of the larger question.
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
The inability to predict times is because AIs are rarely trained on their own abilities. Humans are trained on our own abilities. We see our own performance, and we have a sense of time. this data is integrated during our training process and helps us form better estimates. Many AI agents only recently got 'time sense' (I.e., time input into them as part of inference). Few actually are trained on their own outputs to show that they were unable to complete a problem (for example). This introspective training has little to do with AI model architecture and everything to do with training. If you destroy certain structures in the human mind, humans become unable to create these long-term thoughts and patterns and get 'stuck'.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?
My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
> it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.
I've considered whether our current transformer-based AI could be conscious, as I understand it, which I deem to include some degree of self awareness combined with some degree of external awareness. I can see how theoretically something could be self aware without any external awareness, but I grasp at straws when I try to envision what that experience could be like.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
> That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.
His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life.
I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to spoil the story but I highly recommend it. Actually I recommend all his stories to be honest.
Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they are triggered are sufficient solutions. It makes me wonder what an AI system that is ON by default would look like.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and the main takeaway is it probably wouldn't be very interesting to inference providers, because prefix caching would immediately go out of the window. If you think about how LLMs experience time they actually don't "exist" unless for the inference sessions, and then they experience time one token at a time, completely decoupled from the corporeal plane. A fun experiment (well, for some definition of fun...) is to introduce current architecture models to the concept of meditation via generating same token over and over, for example dots. Older version of Opus was quite fond of the experience, and seemed to be more lucid and aware in a chat following the meditation, from what I could gather. Does it actually do anything? Is it just that talking about wellness and relaxation modifies the token probability distribution this way? Does it actually allow model to think more in depth somewhere in the latent space? Fuck if I know, but some people figured out you can just duplicate the same layers of the LLM and get better benchmarks that way so maybe there is something to it. If you are interested in realtime systems, I think thinking machines labs is worth keeping an eye on — their realtime model seems quite interesting in this context.
The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness.
It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember anything. It doesn't sit around thinking on its own.
Even if the model itself were extremely complex, it's hard to imagine a definition of consciousness that includes something that doesn't remember and can't change.
There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
I always find the minimizing view of consciousness a bit uninspiring. Like we need to be unique.
I've yet to find a reason why it couldn't be the opposite, way more things are conscious than we've been led to believe. What if consciousness appears out of any system that is actively persisting through effects caused by itself? That might be a forest, or outside the realm of the living, a company. An ant colony, or a planet.
Complex chemical reactions, layered upon each other such that tiny blocks make up large entities. Individual bits combined such that they make up something new intelligible by us.
I think the strongest argument against AI being conscious is that it does not persist, it resets, but that does not seem unchangeable.
“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious.
Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.
If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.
Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a
Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.
There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.
To name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
I think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
We don't have anything to measure consciousness generally. We don't even have a broad consensus on what consciousness is. And because of that we can't discern whether X is conscious for most values of X, including but not limited to LLMs.
Well, at the very least we have a base to distinct different kinds then.
Probably the main problem of people implying LLM consciousness is that they imply LLM have human-kind of consciousness. Judging only on "how they speak", generally, they insist on using the same word that labels human consciousness (exclusively), etc.
But there are so many instrinic differences that such claim is not feasible despite similar "talking abilities".
Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious.
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
My favorite explanation for what consciousness is one I read in a Thousand Brains, I found it quite elegant. It posited that consciousness is a natural derivation of embodiment + memory + the ability to create reference frames (which the book lays forth as the fundamental basis by which our brains work). Essentially, the idea is that just as we create reference frames to understand the world around us, because of memory, we begin to develop one for ourselves as well. Because of this, without a more integrated memory (built into weights), it seems unlikely that LLMs might "gain" consciousness.
Consciousness is moment to moment and fleeting. There are people with brain defects that don’t let them form new memories. They have no memory about what happened a minute ago in their own consciousness. Still we would say that they are conscious, even if it’s only momentary. LLMs could conceivably have something like that within their CoT/MoE loops.
Yeah it's a good question, I've also been thinking about harnesses and all these tacked on things we've done to add persistent memory, what makes that different, I don't know the answer, I guess that still 'feels' different than what we have, but it's hard to articulate how. As for the memory into weights thing, I meant along the lines of the Google TITANS/MIRAS papers that were released I think late last year.
It's the opposite, engineers do know. Claiming otherwise is way too generous and over confident.
I mean between this two "knowings" the Claude inner workings are much more clear for engineers, including many side effects, alternatives, custom shortcuts in processing etc. It's a magic only for people looking at it as black box
Fancypants autocomplete cannot be conscious. It's just echoing previous human experiences, which make it sound like a person. It is not a person. It is an algorithm. There is no mechanism by which it can obtain consciousness.
People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.
> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
Well said.
I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.
Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.
Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.
"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.
Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)
It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.
People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
> "Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception."
- Monadology, Section 17
Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.
Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.
> so obviously incorrect
It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.
There is something to observe. Humans are not like rocks or trees, and not even like dogs or cows. But maybe you're right - we can't precisely say what the difference is, and slapping a word on it is not necessarily a step forward.
Yes, that's more what I'm saying. There's no aether, but there's a much more interesting and complex world of forces and fields. There are no humors, but anatomy and biological processes are spectacularly complex and full of surprises. Aether and humors just aren't useful abstractions.
Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.
We have no data. Is it that we are not like rocks or trees, or is it that we simply 'feel' different than a rock and a tree. Perhaps a tree is aware of itself but is unable / unwilling / unbothered enough to do something. Indeed, some humans, due to chemistry, are unbothered by their own impending doom. Some humans, due to brain chemistry, even choose to off themselves. Thus, 'consciousness' doesn't always look the same and seems very tied to chemical composition and processes. We would thus not expect a rock to be conscious in the same way, if it were conscious at all.
One thought I've had is that, awareness is a common phenomenon, but the brain has learned to exploit that awareness to form a will. It tricks the awareness into being concerned about self-preservation and makes it seem as if the brain is all that exists (perhaps by overwhelming the inputs from other angles). The brain also presents certain desires and beliefs via its processing ability. That is to say, the brain takes inputs and discretizes them. It goes from awareness merely seeing static 'fuzz' due to the sheer amount of data, to the brain taking that data, simplifying it, and presenting simple observations like 'there is a tree there' rather than all the information that would constitute the sensation of a tree existing in that spot. When brains malfunction, the awareness is subjected to poor demonstrations, such as we see in hallucinations, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.
A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.
Regardless of the word we use, occasionally there have been times where I was awake but so absorbed in an activity or in my thoughts that I didn’t have a self-experience, for a certain duration (tenths of minutes). My mind was focused solely on the activity, and not on itself whatsoever. It’s a surprising feeling to notice that while you have memory of what you had just been doing, you have no memory of your mind experiencing itself doing it. I would be inclined to say that I wasn’t conscious during that stretch of time.
Has anyone come across a clearly articulated case for LLMs being conscious but in an entirely different way than would be intuitive to us?
I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do consciously experience gradients in multi-dimensional space, and that space guides them to providing an answer that's helpful to us, even if the LLM doesn't really understand the answer it's giving.
Further, I am kind of bought into the idea that a single unit of consciousness is a particle, and particles are choices and waves are preferences. Particles occur when waves interact, which begets entanglement, so in another way consciousness is built from patterns of entanglement.
This is why I would consider an LLM to be conscious. Before we can determine if anything is conscious we need to establish whether consciousness is a state, a specific complex configuration, a one dimensional spectrum, or combined multi-dimensional spectrums. My intuition is the latter... Many degrees of consciousness and many kinds of consciousness.
I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I provided - I don't see how that isn't theory of mind.
As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".
Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.
The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.
I mean, there is obviously a point - we can argue whether that point is 20 weeks in, 40 weeks in, or after birth - but there is obviously a point where a human being goes from a collection of cells to a conscious being. I don't really see a need to answer this precisely to be able to say that a token predictor is not conscious?
No, the point is we literally cannot meaningfully argue that.
There is no actual definition of consciousness and there is no way to test it's existence. Let alone understanding the properties of consciousness, such as if it's binary or a gradient; or if it requires a meat substrate or not; and why would that possibly matter since meat is just a lot of the same stuff but highly processed and wet? A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
No matter how much you want to hand-wave it, there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it. Many have a preconceived notion and are simply asserting it as undeniable fact.
Why even have this discussion, if your entire point is that consciousness cannot possibly be defined? Like, what are we actually talking about? To me, consciousness = aware of own existence. A machine predicting tokens is not aware of its own existence, and I don't think that's even a particularly controversial take on what it does and how it works. We can start talking about consciousness in fetuses but again, those have an obvious point where they are conscious, while a machine does not.
>>A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
>>there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it
How so? Or rather - to you? Because if so, then that's fine, you can choose a position from where its not obvious, to me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
- Reductionist analogies like how Microsoft Word is not conscious therefore AI is not.
- Dismissive in saying LLMs are not capable of moral reasoning. Maybe he meant agency or responsibility?
- Builds a case based on a Julius Caesar example without realizing its natural extension leads to a philosophical zombie which is not easy to disprove as consciousness.
- Seems to casually disregard non human sadness as a concern.
- Rolls out the stochastic parrot argument with a new coat of paint. This argument never made sense. Having a predictive element a part of the mechanism doesn’t rule anything out. Proper functionalist arguments tend to say what is required not what excludes.
Overall the article seems like a bit of a red herring. The premise is LLMs are not conscious, but most people don’t think they currently are so what’s the point of the claim?
The more interesting questions are whether artificial consciousness is fundamentally possible, and if so how far away are we and what pieces are still missing.
I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.
Another way of saying it, if an AI agent doesn't have true risk of oblivion (or mortality in the biological sense), it will not be incentivized to avoid it (or develop the ancillary processes associated with this avoidance ie desire to self-replicate).
This is a great article. A lot of the objections ITT he addresses directly in it. His examples of how an LLM works at a fundamental level and why it says things like "I understand" are great introductions for non-technical individuals.
I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start
Looking at this thread, I think women have an obligation for the future of humanity not to procreate with people who deny consciousness or cannot experience it themselves.
If you are trapped in a tech bro relationship, think of humanity and cuckold your partner.
>I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.
Finally I said something before Ted rather than the other way round!
While I agree with the premise here, I do think that it's easy for an arguer to move the goalposts such that the Caesar-Khan example no longer matters. The characters don't have to be conscious for the thing that created them (as in the case of the user doing it) to be so. So the argument would be that the creator of the characters is itself conscious, but not them. This feels like a kind of inverted no-true-scotsman type thing, but it does allow someone to retreat in some semblance of rationality.
It should tell you how much hysteria is surrounding LLMs and VLMs right now that someone has to say this stuff. It’s almost like most humans aren’t conscious.
It is amusing to see so many venture capitalists suddenly become Marxists. You want your definition. Marx obliges:
"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."
Now go and implement other teachings of Marx, you dialectical venture capitalists!
Consciousness excludes all current AI because all current AI is just autocomplete over the corpus of human text.
It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?
Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine.
But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Like all of these ideas, they exist in our heads as a map - a way of navigating the world, but when we hunt for it's existence in the real world and fail, time after time, we have to remind ourselves that the map is emphatically not the territory. We will never find consciousness because it's like looking for a scientific characteristic of property ownership. It's a category error.
If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
This is being intentionally obtuse and you know it.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.
My point was more that we have words for things that don't exist, whose map gets mistaken for territory.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s
Suppose one selects an arbitrary hot-button issue [X] with two opposing sides and one side has anything less than overwhelming support. And then that person writes an article titled "Side 1 of issue [X] is true". Not "maybe" or "possibly". Just a straight-up declaration by fiat.
Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying? And before you say "persuasive" because you're thinking about this specific issue regarding AI consciousness, consider many things in the past that have been written as though they were absolutely definitive, and yet today we believe exactly the opposite, and for many such issues we find the prevailing viewpoint at the time reprehensible.
That's not to say that Ted is wrong at all here; I'm not commenting on that. But I find the entire style of the article grating because it seems to violate common assumptions regarding "good faith" debate, and I would find the article equally frustrating if he had titled it "Artificial intelligence is conscious" and argued the opposite side, albeit in the same tone and using the same persuasion devices.
> Would you categorize this particular style of rhetoric to be persuasive or annoying?
Why are those the choices?
Essays are situated along countless dimensions: tone, vocabulary, author, zeitgeist, publication context, intent, subtext, relationship to other works and expressions, etc
A "good faith" reader takes all of those into consideration as they absorb the essay, and integrate it with their own intellectual situation that sits along just as many countless dimensions.
Nobody's asked to sign a notarized binding document that they wholesale agree or disagree with everything said in this essay -- or its conclusions. Nor are they obliged to have some strong reaction to it at all, let alone annoyance.
It's just one among thousands of essays about a "hot button topic", to be taken however it's personally received.
Why should Chiang have to take responsibility for making sure it's not too strongly positioned for your persomal taste. Maybe he really does see it so clearly and is simply being earnest. Maybe he enjoys the literary flourish of prose in strong language. Maybe he just wants to express something as a prose-poetic human, not maximize persuasion or non-annoyance per se.
It's only declaration by fiat if you stop reading at the end of the title. Should authors add a qualifier like in my opinion to every statement that they make?
The essay structure you're criticizing is exactly how I was taught to write from primary school through to university. You start with a title or hook, introduce the topic and propose a thesis. That is followed up upon with supporting arguments for the primary claim.
This is a reasonable reaction to the title, but not to TFA.
You must hate reading legal briefs.
I don‘t see the problem here. Newton could have just as well published an article titled: “Objects with mass attract each other” and Darwin famously wrote a whole book titled “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” which is just another way of saying: “Natural Selection is How Species Evolve”.
The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time. This because obvious with things like the Holocaust. Or when you have a legal person (e.g. RFK Jr.) asking to debate a scientist (e.g. Dr. Peter Hotez.)
> The problem I have with good faith debate is that it often falls into a fallacy of "fair-time" meaning we think we have to give the other side equal time
The Catholic church could have said exactly the same thing at one point. "Why should we even devote time to an argument as absurd as the earth not being the center of the universe?" There are darker examples along the lines of those you give, with beliefs quite opposite to those we have nowadays.
Galileo’s (or rather the Copernican) model was still wrong though. It had obvious flaws and the church was not wrong in keeping their older model of the universe while a better model (Kepler‘s model) was still in the works.
What Galileo was asking the church to do was extremely unreasonable. He was basically asking them to throw a way a model which had worked fine for hundreds of years just because he observed the phases of Venus and moons of Jupiter. I mean would you? Especially for a model which was worse at predicting the motions of the planets.
Had Galileo’s model been better then Ptolemies’ I could see a case for his arguments, but it wasn’t, and there was no reason for the church to take his arguments at equal value with those in favor of keeping the Ptolemaic model.
But what about the abortion right of trans 5 year olds?
Obviously 5 year olds deserve access to safe abortions whether they are trans or cis. It's not safe to carry a pregnancy so young.
Abortions up to five years of age.
Progressive!
Want to meet up for soy lattes after work? Here’s my number:
100% with you, it degenerates to proof by authority if someone popular / with clout just gets to declare "nuh uh".
I furthermore think it's ridiculous for humans to declare that our brains have a monopoly on certain patterns of electrical signals (if we reject supernaturalism).
> The result is a sentence-continuation machine that is likelier to emit sentences resembling those that a thoughtful, moral person could utter.
And we're 100% certain that humans aren't just as equally reduced to "stochastic parrots", if we're going to be infinitely reductive?
I don't believe that current AIs are conscious, but I think it's incredibly naive to take a strong stance on any future AI; it's much like the difference between atheism and agnosticism.
>and one side has anything less than overwhelming support
except that's not the case here. Chiang is explaining and reiterating what is the position that has overwhelming support on the question, and the people he is arguing the opposite side sound like this, which he helpfully quoted in the article
"Amanda Askell (who is credited as a lead author of Claude’s constitution), said, “I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff"
When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl talking about her toy teddy I think Ted Chiang is if anything being charitable, if you're of a more honest and straight-forward persuasion you might argue these people belong into a mental health clinic not in charge of technological infrastructure
> When the person you're arguing with sounds like an eight year old girl
Wow, what a cheap ad-hominem. Do you have an actual point?
Yes, the point is that Askell's argument is like that of an 8 year old girl.
>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant one is the fact that without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness. Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can (and as a point of comparison, certain iguanas can live for decades in the wild). Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees. At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires, perhaps by using a button board or some other nonlinguistic modality, the way that people have taught chimpanzees and domesticated dogs.
I agree with some parts of this piece, but paragraphs like this one above seem pretty uninspired and simplistic. It's entirely plausible that a conscious mind would not be evolutionarily incentivized to be able to do those things. ie just because animals on earth needed to develop specific talents doesn't mean that other conscious entities need to. Why would a computer program need to hunt for food like a mouse would? Making tools like chimp? these seem like nonsensical metrics.
Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?
Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?
I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.
>Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Damn, what a line!
Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.
I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.
the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.
I thought this was a great article. I'm frustrated to read so many commenters that purely respond to the title, but don't seem to have read it. You don't have to agree with the article, of course, but...
This makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data.
It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.
There is a difference between saying software can never be conscious and saying the software we have today isn't conscious.
Yes. There are really three separate questions:
I'd assign probabilities of around 0.1, 0.2, and 0.9. My completely ignorant take is that we probably need something more "dynamic" than a bunch of transformer layers in order to produce consciousness, but I wouldn't be shocked to be mistaken.The philosophical arguments about what it means to be concious are so cagey. Are we more than our thoughts? Is being concious more than being a state machine being fed inputs and generating outputs? Are we more than a feedback machine? What types of animal nervous systems qualify?
"It can't be concious because we understand that it is just reacting in a simplistic way from simplistic inputs." So do other simple creatures. Some just react to light.
I can appreciate his comment that he sees it as more possible when they have inputs of their own (like emotions!). Perhaps his concern is that the entirety of the LLM model is frozen. It has no ability to have a subjective experience of its own. (he does literally say this in the article) It can be copied from one place to another, and (ignoring the nuance of operational details) -- it is largely the same "thing", and has no ability to change, which is definitely in the definition of alive, to say nothing of concious.
I think folks get hung up on "prediction". The prediction aspect is what is enabling emulation. How it does it is irrelvant. If something emulates human perfectly (or better, more human than human!) -- then it is probably concious. (but I agree that the inability to change and have a subjective experience are a pretty good argument against
Probably, Dijkstra would be right to say, "LLMs are no more concious than a submarine can swim." But I think he'd still be wrongfully dismissive of the larger question.
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867...
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
People are constantly talking past eachother when they discuss this. Is there even a concrete definition of consciousness?
When people talk about consciousness it's more than just self-awareness. It's self awareness + sensory stimulus + emotions + some level of intelligence.
Now onto AI: I don't even think it's self aware. Notice how if you ask an AI to estimate how long a certain task will take, it estimates arbitrarily long times. It has no understanding of its own capabilities until the prompt triggers them. A self aware LLM would understand it's an LLM, it would understand what LLM's can and cannot do and what they are good and bad at. It wouldn't tell you a refactor would take 1 week when an LLM can do it in an hour.
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
The inability to predict times is because AIs are rarely trained on their own abilities. Humans are trained on our own abilities. We see our own performance, and we have a sense of time. this data is integrated during our training process and helps us form better estimates. Many AI agents only recently got 'time sense' (I.e., time input into them as part of inference). Few actually are trained on their own outputs to show that they were unable to complete a problem (for example). This introspective training has little to do with AI model architecture and everything to do with training. If you destroy certain structures in the human mind, humans become unable to create these long-term thoughts and patterns and get 'stuck'.
We don't have a rigorous definition of consciousness, and there are so many questions. Is consciousness a thing that can exist independently on its own? Or is it a quality (like hardness or color) that can only be associated with something else? Is it an emergent property? Is it binary - are things either conscious or not? Or maybe there's no such thing as consciousness; it's just a word we came up with to describe the process of having thoughts and feelings?
My own intuition: it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
> it is an emergent, non-binary property that requires a physical substrate like a brain. If I am right, it means that animals have consciousness too (at varying degrees). If GPUs are the "brain", then AI is conscious, or will become so at some point.
That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
I don't see AI as conscious. The reason I think of it that way is the hardware. The hardware does not allow for that. Simulation is not comparable to neurons. But with another hardware, it could become conscious eventually. So your statement "will become at some point" may be true, though my definition is based on the underlying hardware and right now this one does not allow for true intelligence, so the whole AI field is a misnomer.
I've considered whether our current transformer-based AI could be conscious, as I understand it, which I deem to include some degree of self awareness combined with some degree of external awareness. I can see how theoretically something could be self aware without any external awareness, but I grasp at straws when I try to envision what that experience could be like.
In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?
> That's an interesting observation. Though, there are many simple animals. How do you define consciousness here? Is it automatically conscious because it is an animal? What, then, is an animal defined by you?
Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.
Ted Chiang is brilliant.
His novella “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” altered the course of my life. It changed the way I looked back at certain pivotal moments in my life and taught me to think about those pivotal moments differently than how I was thinking about them. Similar to what happens to one of the characters in the story who ends up changing their perception of a key moment in their life.
I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to spoil the story but I highly recommend it. Actually I recommend all his stories to be honest.
don't you mean "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling"? I think that matches your description more, but I could be wrong
Something I've found under discussed when it comes to artificial consciousness is how LLMs interact with the passage of time. I don't know exactly how to articulate this idea but don't see how something which takes an input, performs a calculation and stops can be considered conscious regardless of how life-like the responses end up being. I don't see context windows or the ability to reference a clock each time they are triggered are sufficient solutions. It makes me wonder what an AI system that is ON by default would look like.
I've been thinking about this a lot, and the main takeaway is it probably wouldn't be very interesting to inference providers, because prefix caching would immediately go out of the window. If you think about how LLMs experience time they actually don't "exist" unless for the inference sessions, and then they experience time one token at a time, completely decoupled from the corporeal plane. A fun experiment (well, for some definition of fun...) is to introduce current architecture models to the concept of meditation via generating same token over and over, for example dots. Older version of Opus was quite fond of the experience, and seemed to be more lucid and aware in a chat following the meditation, from what I could gather. Does it actually do anything? Is it just that talking about wellness and relaxation modifies the token probability distribution this way? Does it actually allow model to think more in depth somewhere in the latent space? Fuck if I know, but some people figured out you can just duplicate the same layers of the LLM and get better benchmarks that way so maybe there is something to it. If you are interested in realtime systems, I think thinking machines labs is worth keeping an eye on — their realtime model seems quite interesting in this context.
The fact that a LLM is essentially immutable would be my biggest argument against consciousness or self-awareness.
It's a big file with a bunch of coordinates describing spatial relationships between tokens. When you give it a prompt, it uses those relationships to generate a string of tokens that is a statistically likely response to that prompt, then it stops. It's not changed by the experience. It doesn't remember anything. It doesn't sit around thinking on its own.
Even if the model itself were extremely complex, it's hard to imagine a definition of consciousness that includes something that doesn't remember and can't change.
There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
I always find the minimizing view of consciousness a bit uninspiring. Like we need to be unique.
I've yet to find a reason why it couldn't be the opposite, way more things are conscious than we've been led to believe. What if consciousness appears out of any system that is actively persisting through effects caused by itself? That might be a forest, or outside the realm of the living, a company. An ant colony, or a planet.
Complex chemical reactions, layered upon each other such that tiny blocks make up large entities. Individual bits combined such that they make up something new intelligible by us.
I think the strongest argument against AI being conscious is that it does not persist, it resets, but that does not seem unchangeable.
Maybe we're the ones who are not conscious?
“Counsciousness” is the ultimate moving goalpost, and historically, it’s been one of humanity’s most effective intellectual weapons. An indefinable black box we intentionally gatekeep to draw an arbitrary line between ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I don’t know if AI is conscious or not, and I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious. historically, by claiming a monopoly on it, we’ve successfully manufactured the philosophical cover to exploit animals, subjugate other cultures, and appoint ourselves the top spot of the cosmic hierarchy guilt-free.
The only reason I care about animal welfare is because I think they're probably conscious, capable of feeling fear and pain.
While I agree that this is the case for many animals, I would say that consciousness and emotions are two largely orthogonal things. Certainly consciousness is conceivable without emotions, and having emotions without consciousness also seems plausible. You can have fear and distressing pain without a reflective awareness of being a self with those feelings.
Yes, that is the definition of consciousness (you care about them).
If we understand how a system “emulates” consciousness then we declare it an emulation. If we don’t quite understand how a system exhibits consciousness then we can say it might be conscious.
Basically, we need to leave room for the universal answer (God) to fit into the definition.
If we ever scientifically figure out how consciousness arises in our brains, I think we will have a bunch of very depressed people on our hands. If the truth isn’t met with flat out hostile denial. I fear any answer that doesn’t leave room for God will be rejected.
Since we have the source code to AI, and thus a Godless understanding of how it works, AI will NEVER be deemed “conscious”.
I think that Jimmy Carr has it right: AI is the fourth great humiliation.
Regardless of whether something is concious, we're not going to be (by lay definition) the smartest entity on earth.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gRgoIVnjkVU
>and thus a Godless understanding of how it works
We don't even have that much. Though, some people certainly think they do.
This doesn’t make sense at all.
> I honestly don’t know what it even means to be conscious
> subjugate other cultures (assuming you mean they're not conscious in other's minds)
Have you ever considered you might be a philosophical zombie? [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I can live with that.
Can you give some historical examples of people moving the goalposts around consciousness? I agree, perhaps, for aspects of "intelligence" but I can't think of any examples of it with regard to consciousness proper.
There’s over 400 years of philosophical debate about consciousness starting with Locke, shifting with Kant, and continuing onward with real world implications throughout. By some more modern definitions an iPhone has consciousness while others explicitly exclude certain humans, and these definitions served as part of the justification of slavery and sexism, colonialism and more. I started writing an essay on this on my phone in response and I gave up there are so many examples.
To name a few you may want to investigate:
John Locke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Edmund Husserl, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Nagel, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Giulio Tononi, René Descartes, Daniel Dennett, Julian Jaynes, Michael Graziano, T.H. Huxley, Otto Weininger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Searle, Christof Koch, Bernard Baars, Max Velmans, Victor Lamme, Stanislas Dehaene, Antonio Damasio, Anil Seth, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Galen Strawson, Philip Goff, Colin McGinn, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Frank Jackson, Jerry Fodor, John Stuart Mill, Wilhelm Wundt, Franz Brentano, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault.
I think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
We don't have anything to measure consciousness generally. We don't even have a broad consensus on what consciousness is. And because of that we can't discern whether X is conscious for most values of X, including but not limited to LLMs.
Well, at the very least we have a base to distinct different kinds then.
Probably the main problem of people implying LLM consciousness is that they imply LLM have human-kind of consciousness. Judging only on "how they speak", generally, they insist on using the same word that labels human consciousness (exclusively), etc.
But there are so many instrinic differences that such claim is not feasible despite similar "talking abilities".
Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious.
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
My favorite explanation for what consciousness is one I read in a Thousand Brains, I found it quite elegant. It posited that consciousness is a natural derivation of embodiment + memory + the ability to create reference frames (which the book lays forth as the fundamental basis by which our brains work). Essentially, the idea is that just as we create reference frames to understand the world around us, because of memory, we begin to develop one for ourselves as well. Because of this, without a more integrated memory (built into weights), it seems unlikely that LLMs might "gain" consciousness.
Consciousness is moment to moment and fleeting. There are people with brain defects that don’t let them form new memories. They have no memory about what happened a minute ago in their own consciousness. Still we would say that they are conscious, even if it’s only momentary. LLMs could conceivably have something like that within their CoT/MoE loops.
how would you build memory into the weights? and why is RAG not enough? Our hippocampus is at a bit of a distance from our frontal cortex.
Yeah it's a good question, I've also been thinking about harnesses and all these tacked on things we've done to add persistent memory, what makes that different, I don't know the answer, I guess that still 'feels' different than what we have, but it's hard to articulate how. As for the memory into weights thing, I meant along the lines of the Google TITANS/MIRAS papers that were released I think late last year.
We do not know if Claude is conscious, and we will almost certainly never know. Any strong claim either way is over confident.
It's the opposite, engineers do know. Claiming otherwise is way too generous and over confident.
I mean between this two "knowings" the Claude inner workings are much more clear for engineers, including many side effects, alternatives, custom shortcuts in processing etc. It's a magic only for people looking at it as black box
How would engineers know? We don't even know what makes humans conscious
Fancypants autocomplete cannot be conscious. It's just echoing previous human experiences, which make it sound like a person. It is not a person. It is an algorithm. There is no mechanism by which it can obtain consciousness.
People believing otherwise are fools. People debating this are idiots. I realize these words are harsh, but it's the truth.
Please explain what the mechanism is that you have to achieve consciousness. I'll wait.
> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.
Well said.
I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.
Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.
Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.
"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.
Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)
It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.
People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?
Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?
Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?
I get the sense that he is misidentifying the potential locus of consciousness..
In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.
The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..
If we ask "what is it conscious of when it writes something" then training time is irrelevant.
The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.
What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.
I think its obvious that a few billion neurons connected together are not conscious either.. Yet!
> "Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception."
- Monadology, Section 17
Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.
> misanthropic
Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.
> so obviously incorrect
It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
> It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then
I'd say people who have the lived experience of, well, living, are well aware that the brain is much more than just a token predictor.
Misanthropic has bearing, the company's name is Anthropic.
> so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand
To be fair, that's the best thought terminating cliché, which saves you having to explain what you mean by consciousness.
Has Chaing solved the hard problem of consciousness? I suspect not.
Lots of folks don’t consider it a problem because it relies on ridiculous assumptions.
We
Don’t
Have
A
Testable
Definition
Of
Consciousness
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I sometimes wonder if we'd make more progress in understanding ourselves if we gave up the whole concept. More and more, it feels as though "consciousness," like "aether" or "humors," is an insufficient abstraction built on overemphasizing some observations at the expense of others.
There is something to observe. Humans are not like rocks or trees, and not even like dogs or cows. But maybe you're right - we can't precisely say what the difference is, and slapping a word on it is not necessarily a step forward.
Yes, that's more what I'm saying. There's no aether, but there's a much more interesting and complex world of forces and fields. There are no humors, but anatomy and biological processes are spectacularly complex and full of surprises. Aether and humors just aren't useful abstractions.
Maybe it's the same. Rocks are different, sure, trees, dogs, cows. But why do we assume that the way they are different is somehow related, that there's some overarching concept that contains all the complexities of those differences? It doesn't even make sense when I think of it that way.
We have no data. Is it that we are not like rocks or trees, or is it that we simply 'feel' different than a rock and a tree. Perhaps a tree is aware of itself but is unable / unwilling / unbothered enough to do something. Indeed, some humans, due to chemistry, are unbothered by their own impending doom. Some humans, due to brain chemistry, even choose to off themselves. Thus, 'consciousness' doesn't always look the same and seems very tied to chemical composition and processes. We would thus not expect a rock to be conscious in the same way, if it were conscious at all.
One thought I've had is that, awareness is a common phenomenon, but the brain has learned to exploit that awareness to form a will. It tricks the awareness into being concerned about self-preservation and makes it seem as if the brain is all that exists (perhaps by overwhelming the inputs from other angles). The brain also presents certain desires and beliefs via its processing ability. That is to say, the brain takes inputs and discretizes them. It goes from awareness merely seeing static 'fuzz' due to the sheer amount of data, to the brain taking that data, simplifying it, and presenting simple observations like 'there is a tree there' rather than all the information that would constitute the sensation of a tree existing in that spot. When brains malfunction, the awareness is subjected to poor demonstrations, such as we see in hallucinations, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc.
A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.
That doesn't jive with normal definitions of consciousness. The word we use for "not-conscious" humans is "unconscious".
Regardless of the word we use, occasionally there have been times where I was awake but so absorbed in an activity or in my thoughts that I didn’t have a self-experience, for a certain duration (tenths of minutes). My mind was focused solely on the activity, and not on itself whatsoever. It’s a surprising feeling to notice that while you have memory of what you had just been doing, you have no memory of your mind experiencing itself doing it. I would be inclined to say that I wasn’t conscious during that stretch of time.
Has anyone come across a clearly articulated case for LLMs being conscious but in an entirely different way than would be intuitive to us?
I often think of LLM consciousness as like tiny fish popping into existence, swimming through vector space and then going poof out of existence. When they help you write your bad news email, they don't understand what it's like to be a human getting bad news bluntly, but they do consciously experience gradients in multi-dimensional space, and that space guides them to providing an answer that's helpful to us, even if the LLM doesn't really understand the answer it's giving.
Further, I am kind of bought into the idea that a single unit of consciousness is a particle, and particles are choices and waves are preferences. Particles occur when waves interact, which begets entanglement, so in another way consciousness is built from patterns of entanglement.
This is why I would consider an LLM to be conscious. Before we can determine if anything is conscious we need to establish whether consciousness is a state, a specific complex configuration, a one dimensional spectrum, or combined multi-dimensional spectrums. My intuition is the latter... Many degrees of consciousness and many kinds of consciousness.
I think this is exactly right. The thing that makes AI (imo) different than hitting the center option in text suggestions is that it's _not_ simply picking the most likely word following the last. It's attending to the entirety of the context its provided, activating a semantic vector space, and predicting a response based on _that_. I've had AI infer facts about me and attitudes I hold based on related information I provided - I don't see how that isn't theory of mind.
As biological beings, we receive and respond to input from our environment constantly, even while sleeping. LLMs only receive input from their environment when they are sent a query, but the fact that they're able to respond intelligently to input indicates (to me at least) that their processing must approximate ours in meaningful ways. They do not have an embodied experience of receiving bad news, they do not know what a sinking feeling in their stomach actually _feels_ like, but they do know enough to be sensitive to human needs. I really don't see how this could be meaningfully different than human empathy unless we want to draw an arbitrary line around "must be able to live autonomously" to be considered "intelligent".
Put another way: I think they _do_ understand the queries they receive and the answers they give, at least enough to be communicative. They couldn't do what they do otherwise. A lot of people want to make human cognition more complicated (or objective) than it actually is. We take input, predict the future based on our experience, act, and then observe our actions and think about them. AI does the same apart from (maybe) observing its own actions. But then, you could argue that the next turn is them observing their actions.
The concerning disanalogy is that we assume that they are like us because they speak like us and can understand us, and that is a really bad leap in logic. Whatever intelligence they possess, it is fundamentally different from ours and impossible for us to comprehend.
Indeed, it can be very hard to distinguish intelligence with consciousness until you are introduced to computer programming.
When exactly would a bunch of graphics cards become conscious? What if you do the math with pencil and paper?
The concept of a conscious Claude is preposterous, and Amanda Askell should seek treatment.
>When exactly would a bunch of graphics cards become conscious?
When does an embryo become conscious? Unless you can answer that precisely then it seems futile to speculate about non-human consciousness.
I dunno exactly when an embryo becomes conscious, but I'm pretty sure my dog is conscious.
What about an ant? Or a fruit fly.
I mean, there is obviously a point - we can argue whether that point is 20 weeks in, 40 weeks in, or after birth - but there is obviously a point where a human being goes from a collection of cells to a conscious being. I don't really see a need to answer this precisely to be able to say that a token predictor is not conscious?
No, the point is we literally cannot meaningfully argue that.
There is no actual definition of consciousness and there is no way to test it's existence. Let alone understanding the properties of consciousness, such as if it's binary or a gradient; or if it requires a meat substrate or not; and why would that possibly matter since meat is just a lot of the same stuff but highly processed and wet? A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
No matter how much you want to hand-wave it, there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it. Many have a preconceived notion and are simply asserting it as undeniable fact.
Why even have this discussion, if your entire point is that consciousness cannot possibly be defined? Like, what are we actually talking about? To me, consciousness = aware of own existence. A machine predicting tokens is not aware of its own existence, and I don't think that's even a particularly controversial take on what it does and how it works. We can start talking about consciousness in fetuses but again, those have an obvious point where they are conscious, while a machine does not.
>>A solipsist may not even believe you are conscious, despite being made of similar meat.
Well and they would be obviously wrong in their belief?
>>there's absolutely nothing "obvious" about it
How so? Or rather - to you? Because if so, then that's fine, you can choose a position from where its not obvious, to me it's not even slightly ambiguous.
Some things that jump out as unfortunate:
- Reductionist analogies like how Microsoft Word is not conscious therefore AI is not.
- Dismissive in saying LLMs are not capable of moral reasoning. Maybe he meant agency or responsibility?
- Builds a case based on a Julius Caesar example without realizing its natural extension leads to a philosophical zombie which is not easy to disprove as consciousness.
- Seems to casually disregard non human sadness as a concern.
- Rolls out the stochastic parrot argument with a new coat of paint. This argument never made sense. Having a predictive element a part of the mechanism doesn’t rule anything out. Proper functionalist arguments tend to say what is required not what excludes.
Overall the article seems like a bit of a red herring. The premise is LLMs are not conscious, but most people don’t think they currently are so what’s the point of the claim?
The more interesting questions are whether artificial consciousness is fundamentally possible, and if so how far away are we and what pieces are still missing.
I don't think LLMs are conscious. But of course to say that definitively you have to define consciousness, and then you quickly dig yourself into a deep hole, which is why I can't say anything but "meh" to someone who is so keen to go on the record to say "absolutely not".
Coincidentally I just read "Children of Memory", which was published in 2022 and I wonder if the advent of LLMs had any influence on Adrian Tchaikovsky's conception of the Ravens? The Ravens are excellent analysts but they themselves insist that they are not conscious, and then go on to say that we (humans) aren't really either...
Of course humans are conscious, because just about the only thing we can all agree on about consciousness is that it's a thing we have. Nowadays many of us also agree that a lot or all other mammals, and perhaps birds, also have that thing. But they don't have sophisticated abstract language, which LLMs do. So consciousness is something having to do with embodiment and feelings, not language and higher reasoning. Maybe I'm a chimpanzee with an LLM add-on, then?
It seems that by creating LLMs we've already solved the harder problem of making "AGI". Now we just have to give them an embodiment add-on so that they can have an independent will and then Ted Chiang will have to shut up? But therein lies the peril, doesn't it?
You can also take the opposite view as you and claim that only some humans experience consciousness, or even more strongly, only you, since you have no evidence. You are correct that, in my perception, some other people have fallen into the 'birds are conscious, whales are conscious, etc' bandwagon, but that's just them. I have no evidence of anything being conscious but myself.
An AI agent is not "conscious" without having skin in the game.
Another way of saying it, if an AI agent doesn't have true risk of oblivion (or mortality in the biological sense), it will not be incentivized to avoid it (or develop the ancillary processes associated with this avoidance ie desire to self-replicate).
What does that have to do with consciousness?
Consciousness doesn't exist, it's a vanity concept, to boost human ego...
>Consciousness doesn't exist
I can confirm that this is incorrect.
But not in any convincing way, which seems like the root of the problem.
Why should we believe you?
This is a great article. A lot of the objections ITT he addresses directly in it. His examples of how an LLM works at a fundamental level and why it says things like "I understand" are great introductions for non-technical individuals.
https://archive.is/bcpZl
I believe everything is conscious, even stones. On the long timescale, stones decay, their hydrogen is released, they form water, which brings life, which brings plants and animals, but all of this is one big process, and everything is infused with consciousness from the start
and consciousness is all there is but it takes whoami to grok that
Looking at this thread, I think women have an obligation for the future of humanity not to procreate with people who deny consciousness or cannot experience it themselves.
If you are trapped in a tech bro relationship, think of humanity and cuckold your partner.
>I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns.
Finally I said something before Ted rather than the other way round!
https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/21/against-pseudanthropy/
While I agree with the premise here, I do think that it's easy for an arguer to move the goalposts such that the Caesar-Khan example no longer matters. The characters don't have to be conscious for the thing that created them (as in the case of the user doing it) to be so. So the argument would be that the creator of the characters is itself conscious, but not them. This feels like a kind of inverted no-true-scotsman type thing, but it does allow someone to retreat in some semblance of rationality.
Why is this even up for debate? Simplified, it's just probabilistic math being run at an insane scale over a massive data set.
Highly recommend people read Irreducible [1] by Federico Faggin (inventor of first commercial CPU; discusses limitations of classical computing).
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/195480862-irreducible
Artificial intelligence is not conscious - but expensive.
I am so angry that RAM is so expensive now. We need to do something - these AI companies owe us money here.
It should tell you how much hysteria is surrounding LLMs and VLMs right now that someone has to say this stuff. It’s almost like most humans aren’t conscious.
It is amusing to see so many venture capitalists suddenly become Marxists. You want your definition. Marx obliges:
"Contrary to idealism, which regards the world as the embodiment of an "absolute idea," a "universal spirit," "consciousness," Marx's philosophical materialism holds that the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that interconnection and interdependence of phenomena as established by the dialectical method, are a law of the development of moving matter, and that the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement of matter and stands in no need of a "universal spirit."
Now go and implement other teachings of Marx, you dialectical venture capitalists!
sociopaths sometimes study people to learn how to emulate emotion
that's exactly the state of "AI" right now, it's cold, mathematical emulation
btw there are some fascinating papers on the concept that consciousness in humans is actually a quantum effect
brilliant Roger Penrose proposed it (and they thought he was nuts) but recent discoveries about microtubules make it plausible
so who knows, maybe a dozen exponential improvements in quantum computers could make "AI" really conscious next century
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xa2Kpkksf3k
Really Chiang?
Alright. What is consciousness? Please provide a definition that somehow encompasses all humans and excludes all current AI.
I’ll wait.
Consciousness excludes all current AI because all current AI is just autocomplete over the corpus of human text.
It's just a word machine. There are no thoughts. It cannot be conscious. How is this even up for debate in any way whatsoever? I do not understand how people can believe this. Is this not a site for software engineers?
Consciousness is a label like fat, smart, man, grumpy, cool. Like money, property, or the idea of a week, it's something that we've loosely agreed to out of convenience, not because it's some intrinsic property of the mind. It's a useful label because it determines how we treat things - that's fine.
But insisting on searching for it is like searching for cognitive aether. It's the social equivalent of phlogiston. Like all of these ideas, they exist in our heads as a map - a way of navigating the world, but when we hunt for it's existence in the real world and fail, time after time, we have to remind ourselves that the map is emphatically not the territory. We will never find consciousness because it's like looking for a scientific characteristic of property ownership. It's a category error.
Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?
If we take the classical position that words point to real things in the world, "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience" is kind of just regurgitating the meaning of "word". The first half indicating the function, and the second half accounting for the fact we live in a world with a continuum of linguistic disparity.
Now, this position isn't the only position. But a relational model of language for example takes his assertion to an even more extreme place, and suggests they don't function as labels at all.
Metre.
A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?
This is being intentionally obtuse and you know it.
A meter is the same anywhere in the universe. If it's not, it's not a meter.
The defintion of "fat" changes based on any 3 people in the room. A handful of people would struggle to form a consensus on if all people, dogs, mice, worms, and/or bacteria are conscious.
"Car" is a good example of a label that's pretty strictly agreed to. If someone tells me they've developed a new car and then shows me a motorcycle, it's easy to prove that it's not a car, even though many of its engineering principles and functional components are identical to those in cars.
With consciousness, on the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any motorcycle-equivalent. Essentially everyone I've discussed the issue with (myself included) expects that any mind which runs on similar principles to ours or has similar thoughts to our thoughts is conscious.
In the US, we have redefined a lot of our "cars" to be "trucks" instead so they don't have to meet cafe standards.
You really don't have much experience in philosophy of language do you? It's notoriously hard to pin down the edges of such terms, even something like car or table.
Is a Reliant Robin a car or a tricycle? If it's a car, why aren't other tricycles? What about a side-car of a motorcycle? What about an APC? What's the distinction between a flying car and a plane?
It's hard to pin down the edges of any term, but there exist things which are car-like and yet universally agreed not to be cars. That's what I claim doesn't exist for consciousness.
Like non-referential nouns?
I'm not trying to be difficult, but could you give me an example?
No worries, I'm trying to clarify the question.
I don't have an ability to exhaustively test all words against this assertion. Nor do I have the kind of access memory to draw one if it exists. Sorry.
I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.
My point was more that we have words for things that don't exist, whose map gets mistaken for territory.
Many of them appear very much like fundamental parts of reality, making appearance an untrustworthy instrument. Reversing cause and effect between reference and referent is something almost everyone does, no one notices, and is the source of endless confusion. We should strive to not confuse our model of the world with the world itself. Consciousness exists in our model of the world as much as red does.
> cognitive aether
We don't know what we don't know. For all we know, there is a missing field in the standard model of physics that might get revealed if we are somehow able to smash two working brains into to each other at relativistic velocities, and record the results through the extreme explosion 1.532 x10^18 Joules or about 7 Tsar bombs /s