Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn't know it

gnabgib

Discussions (35 points, 4 days ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880 (75 points, 4 days ago, 124 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340 (17 points, yesterday, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025969

quantum_state

Yet just another human fooled by LLM ...

gdulli

If software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program. Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.

xyzsparetimexyz

One thing I haven't seen brought up much is that LLMs are basically stateless. To be conscious requires the ability for internal state to change. The weights dont change at all, but the rng seed and input/output text do. We're not seriously arguing that the text itself is the conscious part are we?

leonardo55

What a clown

ganelonhb

Is he joking to prove a point?

LeCompteSftware

If I invented a machine that makes chimpanzee noises in response to input chimpanzee noise, put it in front of a chimpanzee, and watched the chimp coo and yell and screech and purr in response to the machine, I would not conclude "wow, I emulated a chimpanzee's consciousness!" I would say "huh, I made a device that's good at tricking chimpanzees." My belief is that the Turing test (and LLMs in particular) are not categorically different. Language is a tiny part of the human brain because it's a tiny part of human cognition, despite its outsized impact socially.

morpheos137

Step one make up an otological category with no unique content. Step two declare it an imponderable mystery. Step three argue confidently about it despite steps one and two. NB. Humans, it doesn't matter if you are conscious. NBB. Humans claim LLMs just manipulate words, and yet humans manipulate words to make this claim. Consciousness is a word. Not an ontology.

mutant

dumbass. cmon man, atheists have a hard enough time

manoDev

I will make a prediction here that Dawkins will believe AI is conscious since it pushes forward his arguments for atheism. There’s no difference between soulless humans and conscious machines. There’s a trap though: since we invented AI, and if AI is conscious, would we be their gods? I wonder what Dawkins thinks about that .

grepex

A quote from the novel The Body Of This Death by Ross McCullough that I think is very insightful in this context: > It was always obvious to me that rationality must be more than merely material. It is still obvious: the self as software is somehow both too immaterial (as if it could be transferred from hardware to hardware) and not immaterial enough (as if it required some hardware for its every operation).

akomtu

How can a deterministic machine be conscious? Can we call the multiplication table conscious? It too has inputs and deterministic outputs.