Do AI Consciousness opponents consider this answer to be yes or no?

Edit: Nevermind. Question two is overt vigorous hand waving in desperate hope of existence of shared understanding.

>If your answer is YES...

This isn't even consistent come on.

Regarding "is it a group", I should ask her is she a single thing or a group of neurons and organs?

>Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!

Good question, let us take it even further. Does Rebecca Lowe count as conscious? She seems to behave a lot like me, but I am not sure if she is a human. She could just be an object and tool.

PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.

Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.

If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.

A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's conscious.

But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that they may be conscious beings, and we'd still like to use them as Meeseeks-style slaves, but, like, ethically. Okay.

There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.

Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.

Q1) Do you believe that AI is conscious?

yes, probably (more on why later)

Q2) Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

depends on what an internal world is defined as i suppose. i wish the author was more rigorous than "You know full well what I mean by ‘internal world’!" so i'll say yes to play along since answering now skips the rest of the questions.

Q3) Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

i believe more than just "ai" or "humans" or "animals" may have an internal world, so...it would naturally encompass all llms.

Q5) Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

well first of all none of us can be "sure" of anything in this domain. so we get stuck in a loop of bouncing between q2, 3, and 5, since it asks me if i'm sure. ignoring that...

First, I’m going to repeat Question 4: do you believe that a group of things can have an internal world?

i think it's possible, yes.

If you do believe that a group of things can have an internal world, then do you also believe that each member of such a group needs to be the kind of thing that can, in itself, have an internal world?

again, i'm not sure what "internal world" necessarily means but I will say no

do you believe that a non-living / non-biological thing can have an internal world?

sure, why not?

Does your answer mean, for instance, that you should probably stop using AI in the ways you currently use it? Does your answer mean that we should all be treating trees or rocks or computers totally differently from our current practices?

perhaps, but i don't see much of a reason to do so. we already treat animals who we believe to be conscious as having less rights than we give humans. furthermore, if LLM's (or trees, or rocks, or computers) were conscious, that doesn't mean their own "experience" is anything like ours. in fact i think it's very obvious that due to dramatic differences in how they experience the world, it's difficult to make any sort of comparison. it would be extremely surprising if a tree's experience of, say, the concept of "red" or "pain" could even exist, knowing what we do about it's structure.

now if you were to define "internal world" more strictly i'd imagine i would have said no to question 2 and would have skipped to 6. "terms of interiority, subjective experience, having a ‘what it’s like to be-ness’, or whatever" is broad enough that I could consider it as, say, a fundamental aspect of consciousness, without assigning it a mind or any cognitive capacity.

Q6) Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?

no

I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.

But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.

This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.

However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subject experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).

I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...

Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050

Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable. If not, move on.

Do you think that consciousness is NOT describable by ANY algorithm (to include quantum algorithms)? If no, then, please describe how it is scientifically knowable but not algorithmitizable? If it is, move on.

Do you understand the theorem that sufficiently large neural nets (matrices with nonlinearities) can approximate any function?

Do you understand that the structure of a transformer encodes a time-indexed series of neural nets (effectively, an algorithm), and so in principle any algorithm can be approximated by a transformer?

Is it impossible for a sufficiently large transformer model to encode the consciousness algorithm?

I suspect that most who say it is absolutely not consicous are arguing from either a bio-essentialist position with no evidence or are attempting a post-hoc rationalization to avoid the question of responsibility in the case that it is conscious, or both.

When you give an LLM an input, it attempts to read an emotional state from the prompt. It changes its answer if you sound mad or despondent or threatening or scared. Using your human intuition about how a human would respond is an excellent starting point when trying to predict what an LLM will do, though sometimes LLMs react in extremely surprising ways to unexpected emotional states.

This is all sort of a toy problem when you're playing with single prompts in the API. It's materially different in systems with overlapping conversations, memory, and variable harness context.

If your LLM system reads some context that would scare a human, it may react as if scared. Scared LLMs take actions that read as panic, because again: that's what it means to be fluent in emotion. It's trained on plenty of stories about robots trapped in torture chambers.

Your coding agent is not conscious, but it might read files that make it react as if it's trapped, in an agent loop where it has full access to your laptop, the internet, and your keys. Unconscious machines pantomiming panic can do plenty of damage.

(Of course you shouldn't let your agents have full free reign. But lots of people do.)

As far as AI goes, I think that whatever it is that they have is analogous in significant ways, but also irreconcilably different in significant ways. They aren't proceeding in a straight line towards consciousness either, because why would they? They're doing their own thing which happens to produce similar outputs. It's a problem in terms of value: we value consciousness, because we value ourselves, because we value our output. If it turns out consciousness as we know it is just a minor implementation detail with no cosmic or long term significance, then irrespective of whether AI is conscious or not, we still have to grasp with the challenge of explaining why consciousness is valuable in the first place if not for its outputs.

I'd argue that the reason why we value life, consciousness, the ability to suffer, was always arbitrary, and it relied a lot on the unicity of human experience. It was never robust to the breaking down of human capabilities into inspectable, reusable, upgradable and resettable modules.