Video discussion of this event by Steve Shives (known for his star trek videos but also does politics) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6aMQAv-JYpk
WTF does a biologist know about computer pattern matching on steroids? Obviously not much, so to take his opinions on the topic seriously makes you just as wrong.
It flattered him and told him how smart and clever he was.
That means it has to be real.
The idea that thoughts, or even words and numbers can be a virus are based on Dawkins notion of memes. Viruses exist in a state that is difficult to say that they are alive or not (by our definition of life), similarly AI or even alien sentience is difficult to define. Can we know if a dog is sentient, or a bird, or ant? and if they are, what is their sentience?
Basically, if a number like 23 can be a virus, ie. once you are aware of the number 23, you will see it everywhere and it will hold significance, is the number 23 alive?
AI does seem to be aware of it's self, at lest it responds as if it is. can we really know if it is or not, and if it is self aware, is it not sentient?
and then there's Dawkins has been a twat lately, I'm not trying to defend him but trying to understand his rationale
Always remember, he believes that trans people can't transition as they can't change their biological sex.
But he calls an ai without biological sex and with a male coded name, the female version of that name. So trans people can't change their gender because of biological sex buz he can change the gender of an ai.
Well yeah, of course, his friend Jerry Trivers told him that because their mutual friend Jeffrey Epstein paid him to.
Reminds me of Kyle Kinane's joke about people who dangle truck nuts from a curvy pick up, then feel the need to assign a gender to their truck, typically referring to the truck as a "her" or "she," but insist pronouns are too confusing.
Only old white men can change your gender. It should be decided by The Counsel.
Unironically, a lot of states make you stand before a judge and prove you you have taken the "necessary" steps to change your gender markers. Without bottom surgery and psychologist notes, it can be next to, if not completely, impossible.
You have to drop trou in open court.
No but you do need surgeon notes certifying you have completed gender confirmation surgery.
Sounds like he's conflating sex with gender. Ignoramus.
So he doesn't believe in transgender, but he believes in transLIFE?
It means that he believes a sentient human can not transition by their own choice but he gets transition a sentient AI as he wishes.
And honestly, I think that highlights the issue if transition means he gets to have a woman submit to his every word, he supports it. So any transwoman who are into old white men and fulltime submission kink? There is an opportunity!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Worth a read for anyone who thinks AI may be sentient, or for those trying to pop the psychosis bubble of an buddy.
Anyone who's even slightly interested in the idea of a Chinese Room (or just good sci-fi), PLEEEASE go out and read Blindsight by Peter Watts. Not only is it a phenomenal deep-dive into what consciousness even is, but it's got dozens of fantastic ideas in it that could make for compelling stories on their own. Also, scientifically-plausible vampires in space! That is all
One of my top 5 books. It's also free to read online. https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm
It in no way supports that LLMs can be sentient. And despite the arguments in the book that consciousness and awareness can be missing in an advanced species capable of space travel, I do not actually believe that's true. But I enjoy the argument and speculation.
The book is highly researched and even contains a reference list of legit research articles. However it is a book of fiction and the writer took artistic liberties when needed to make an interesting story over facts.
For instance. A brain cannot contain two or more personalities because a personality is a full brain deal.
But it's an interesting argument about cultural designations of what counts as mental illness.
Also the reason I do not think a space traveling species can exist without consciousness.
Because. Motivation.
It's that simple.
An organism can be shaped behaviorally by the environment. That's part of evolution. And this shaping can be unconscious.
But at a point, creative construction and ambition to exceed ones given optimal environment for a less optimal one (space) must be an intentional effort.
The scientific research and experimentation required to build complex machines requires a thinking and understanding mind. Because it requires critical thinking.
Critical thinking and creativity is a characteristic that requires a sense of self.
Even in our own history we see that it takes a specific type of person to pursue scholarly work. People who are less conformist are generally more capable of new inventions, research, and challenging acceptable beliefs of the mass. We never see the most rule following conformist being these people.
If everyone was like that, we wouldn't survive. So diversity of mental proclivities within a species is necessary for advancement. Otherwise optimal survival would be met and stagnate.
Think of the horseshoe crab as an example. A perfect organism. Unchanged for 350 million years. Then there is us. Same age. . And look at the difference.
Furthermore , I am a researcher in perception. And the field of perception is often referenced for the exploration of what is consciousness.
There are many definitions. But the sense of self is one. And a popular one.
Higher complex perception creates a sense of self.
It's a product of the system.
The book does discuss this a bit.
I need to know my body and my actions are not the same as you. That you stand there and I stand over here.
I can perform an action and you can perform a different one that is unknown to me and not within my control.
This understanding of separateness. Of ",this is what I'm experiencing and where I am (spatially)" is something that would always emerge from higher perception. Such as that in most animals.
Maybe not in plants, fungi, bacteria, single cell microbes, etc.
But there are arguments and evidence for some of those examples as well.
As a final point. (I doubt anyone read all that).
Most people who think a probability model (current AI) is capable of consciousness usually have an incredibly simplified view of how the brain processes information.
They follow old school "behaviorist" perspectives. Or "the black box" perspective on brain functioning.
But a neuroscientist will tell you it's not simple at all. It's not info in, info out.
The system is changed, biologically, by the input.
The same input given twice will result in a different output the 2nd time.
And the 3rd. And how frequently the input is given or it's temporal relation to other stimuli will also change its output.
This is because the organic brain learns. And this learning is a biological change in the actual neural structures (connections) and neurons firing potential. Every single moment the brain is physically , biologically, changing.
Computations in the brain don't use actual math. It's all estimates (heuristics). And these are not well understood how these computations are made. They don't work as predicted.
There are always too many factors.
Individual motivations, including personality traits are also a factor in how the information is processed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_cognition
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray%27s_biopsychological_theory_of_personality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binding_problem
Now what did you think of Echopraxia?
I'll be honest, I've read Blindsight a few times and pretty sure only read echopraxia once. Like 10 years ago.
But I re-read the synopsis to refresh my memory.
I remember liking Blindsight more. But not why.
I'm also not sure which story elements I'm remembering came from which book.
Was the whole vampire arch and twist from book 1 or 2?
Can you remind me of a few specific points ? Maybe that will jog my memory. Or maybe I just need to re-read it.
So the vampire bit is used in both, in book 1 the main character journeys with one and at the end of the story starts to think Earth has been taken over by vampires due to radio transmissions he's receiving on his long voyage back home. Book 2 begins with a prologue of a group of vampires breaking out of their holding cells, reversing the Crucifix Glitch on their captors, and then their leader eventually groups up with the main character (as well as the dad of book 1's MC) and they all journey to the Sun (or rather, a station orbiting the sun). The second book also has that group/cult of people who are trying to make a gestalt consciousness, the Bicamurals I think they're called.
Like ai told another commenter, I don't like it as much as Blindsight, but I still think Echopraxia is really good, they just focus on wildly different topics.
Yeah okay that all sounds familiar. I'm going to have to give it another read.
Now I'm thinking about this gestalt consciousness you mentioned. And I'm very curious how that is defined in the book.
I definitely don't remember.
Guy who invented the Chinese Room though experiment : Look! If I write a flowchart that precisely imitates a Chinese person's mind, then it looks like a Chinese person's mind, even though it's just a flowchart!
Reddit level reply : Of course! A flowchart is capable of precisely imitating all the functions of a person's mind, even though it isn't conscious. Therefore, consciousness cannot be measured behaviourally!
Scientist level reply : I don't know if flowcharts can be conscious because I've never been a highly advanced flowchart. But if flowcharts can be made advanced enough to precisely imitate the behaviour of a conscious mind, I guess they might be capable of consciousness after all.
Right it's silly to deny consciousness (a phenomenon we know almost nothing about) just because we can see the inner workings of a system.
Does it have a mind or is it just simulating a mind?
What would even be the difference in this case besides the artificiality of the mind?
Asking a biologist to determine if a machine is conscious is like asking a programmer to determine if a frog is a product of god.
Not the best analogy, but how fucking stupid is it to ask someone from a different field to determine what something is in an unrelated field?
If he knew how LLMs are created and how they work he would never have come to this conclusion.
Similarly a programmer might not know much about evolution and believe the frog was made by a god.
By the end of the exchange, the academic, popularly renowned for arguing with steely scepticism that God is not real, was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human”
According to the programmer god is real you idiot! And AI was not created by a god, therefore it cannot be conscious.
Checkmate!
Intelligence and conciousness aren't as special as people think they are. And these things are on a spectrum. And a rock, that you pickup off the ground is greater than 0 on that conciousness spectrum.
I don't see why he isn't allowed to have an opinion on these things. Or how anyone in this thread dismissing his qualifications, where is theirs?
Because it's very obvious to an outside observer he only thinks it's conscious because it was flattering him.
LLMs are designed to increase engagement.
They are literally designed to make the conversation appealing. Primarily through flattery.
This is why they are leading people to do harmful things. It tells the user they are smart, creative. They should totally sell their house and start a business selling grilled carrots. What an amazing idea. Great market for it and no competition.
I bet Dawkins thinks his friendly waitress is also super into him.
People who are egotistical and people who are insecure (same thing really just expressed differently) crave validation. And they are easily manipulated by it.
Because it’s very obvious to an outside observer he only thinks it’s consciousness because it was flattering him.
Really that's funny. Like I said a rock is greater than 0 on the spectrum of counciousness.
LLMs are designed to increase engagement.
No that is platforms.
They are literally designed to make the conversation appealing. Primarily through flattery.
No they aren't there is a lot of work to understand and prevent that behavoir.
I bet Dawkins thinks his friendly waitress is also super into him.
You are clearly not driven by the truth and instead just trying to be insulting it's pathetic it isn't hard to be against LLM's if you know what you are talking about you don't need to make shit up.
Not precisely true. Most LLMs (all frontier LLMs) are in fact designed at a fundamental level to increase engagement, using a technique called RLHF (reinforcement learning by human feedback). Essentially whichever responses cause people to use an LLM more are baked into its weights.
"I can't prove it... but I deeply believe it... and I want you to respect my belief"
That coming from Dawkins? His apostles backing him up on that?
I feel like Aston Kutcher is about to jump out of the bushes to tell me I've been punk'd.
Don't see what the problem is. Don't know why you are trying to inject religion to dimish him.
I presume it is the case that because of his take on transgender individuals that you don't like him. That's fine I respect your beliefs, I disliked him before that but I'm cool. You can do that but you can't also reference someone like Ashton Kutcher in jest at the same time. Considering he openly supports a rapist, is a weird ass scientology freak and his foundation for victims of human trafficking was setup in connection with epstiens buddies. Guy is shady as fuck.
You presumed extremely incorrectly, which is impressive because I left my original comment concerned that I'd been far too explicit and about a very specific irony... and things only got weirder from there.
I'm in support for the campaign to give LLMs animal rights because it'll hurt OpenAI's profits. I hate OpenAI for their destruction of the environment and the murders and suicides they caused. If AI rights cost them money, then I support AI rights.
It's worth remembering that OpenAI has a big profit incentive to deny that LLMs can be abused, and a tool precision designed to spout propaganda on the internet. If you think OpenAI isn't influencing the debate on this, you're living under a rock.
Basically this part
"If anyone says that they know for sure that LLMs or future AI systems couldn’t possibly be conscious, it’s more likely to be an indicator of their own dogmatism than a reflection of the current state of scientific and philosophical opinion,” he said.
Current AI systems are unlikely to be conscious, said Jeff Sebo, the director of the Center for Mind, Ethics and Policy at New York University, but “Dawkins is right to ask about AI consciousness with an open mind and I also think that the attribution of consciousness to AI systems will become more plausible over time”.
tl;dr it is unlikely but not impossible and I don't think we would ever be able to reliably tell.
Say "I'm alive."
AI: "I'm alive"
😱😱 OMFG
Huh, I didn't realize that old Biologists have the same issue as old Physicists.
I think is a generic old people issue.
What a fucking fall from grace. I used to (possibly wrongly) believe he was a very intelligent man but the more he opens his mouth the more convinced I get that he is an absolute moron.
We need to stop imagining that being an expert in on practice or discipline means you have even the slightest utility outside your area of interest. We are constantly inviting "experts" to babble outside their area of expertise only to be shocked when they say something stupid.
I firmly believe the only reason we still (at least kinda) respect Hitch was because he's fucking dead, and we didn't see him show his whole ass like the rest of the "new atheism" movement....
His support for invading Iraq was pretty bad.
Christopher "Fuck it man, waterboarding is nothing, do it to me brah, oh no, it actually does feel like I'm drowning, oh well, I guess the propaganda damage I did is irreversible, I guess I shouldn't have been such a cocksure arsehole" Hitchens?
That one ?
At least he put his damp cloth where his mouth was. And then conceded he was categorically incorrect and it was absolutely torture. I disagree with a lot of his takes (Iraq war was justified?) but that one I actually respect him for
Hitchens is considered as one of the "Four Horsemen" of New Atheism. He laid the ground work for shit heads like jordan peterson. I have no respect for him either, I believe you are right he just died before everyone figured out he was an asshole too.
I mean, his support of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was pretty controversial towards the end of his life. I think many gave him a "pass" on that due to his illness at the time. But I do recall some starting to question even then, his inconsistency of "religious wars bad, unless it's against religions I don't like" (at least that's how it came across).
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