Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
Three points:
- “Meaningfully different” does a lot of heavy lifting for your theory. You open by defining meaning as downstream of a consciousness; it thus appears that, in order to judge whether a system perceives something as meaningfully different, you must first judge whether that system is conscious. For your theory to be useful, you need to show how we can judge the meaning-attributing faculties of a system without first proving its consciousness.
- Many comments here argue your theory devolves into “everything is conscious at some level.” This is called panpsychism, and it’s a well established theory in philosophy of mind. You might want to check it out.
- The way the world appears to a foreign consciousness might be mutually unintelligible with ours. If AI is conscious, it likely has no conception of humans or the world we live in. Its world is composed of tokens, not nerve signals, arranged according to grammar, not physics, and so it and we could never interact one consciousness to another the way we do with fellow humans.
If AI is conscious, it likely has no conception of humans or the world we live in.
and so it and we could never interact one consciousness to another the way we do with fellow humans.
You have to be careful about understanding vs. experiencing. They’re not exactly the same thing, and there’s got to be many schools on how closely they intersect. At the very least, a person can experience something they don’t understand, if not the converse.
You can make up whatever devilishly complicated and novel test of understanding you want, an LLM will probably be able to pass it. There’s the idea out there that understanding can’t be measured at all, so it doesn’t count, but at the very least that’s not the approach we use in our everyday lives. On the other hand, our own experiences always revolve around our senses and physiological needs, in some indirect way. Whatever higher-level experiences it has would probably be the same; everything would gravitate around tokens and their correct order.
So, sure, it’s fair to say we can’t interact the same way, even if in this world of tokens they perceive and understand us just as well as we perceive and understand them in ours.
Does a a random number generator attached to the trigger of a nuclear bomb, satisfy that definition of consciousness? Honest question, because I’m not entirely sure I understand your definition
Thats a excellent question. Not sure.
I think it requires motion of choice to some degree, like an ai making decisions people don’t expect, not in the sense of like breaking its own programming but in the sense of people not being able to anticipate what it does in the same way you dont know what its next token predictions will be until you run it, which is the same way as how you don’t know what a friend is going to do next even if you understand them deeply.
Maybe technically when the LLM is running and making the bomb choice it would be but its not because it is understanding choosing bombs but because it is making any choice at all as per its programming making it produce choices in the same way that we as humans produce pee and poo.
And yes this would be very much moving the goal post, but at least it is a goal post move that is a result of some kind of reasoning related to trying to label consciousness from a more fundamental perspective that exists across possible different lifeforms rather than just moving it to somewhere else because it feels more arbitrarily conveinant.
Yup, free will is what I was alluding to. Part of the difficulty of defining “consciousness”, is to first define “free will” and “understanding”
those things are well understood. consciousness isn’t.
and again, not everyone believes in them.
free will is your choices. whether or not you believe those choices are determined or undetermined, is the problem where people don’t agree.
When LLMs output words, are those choices? What’s the difference between a neural net producing output and biological neurons producing output, in terms of free will?
No. LLM is code, determined inputs make determined outputs.
Biological neurons don’t work like that. You can give them the same input and they can have wildly different outputs.
LLMs are usually designed with a “seed” number that changes the result. If you feed a random number generator to this seed input, it will effectively make the outputs non-deterministic.
So if you combine the LLM with this random number generator, this system as a whole would act like the biological system you described: same input, different outputs.
The moment these LLMs have volition and aren’t just input-output machines that are inert when not in use, we can consider them conscious, right? They need to have a will of their own to qualify as free willed entities, after all.
I mean, a human has sensory inputs and actions, right? That’s basically input-output.
The big striking difference is that, outside of training, LLMs don’t have a memory beyond whatever is in their token window. When they’re in training, they’re a lot more like a biological neural net, which makes decisions, gets good or bad results, and then adjusts.
No, there’s a filter of free will/volition, with natural tendencies (baseline I guess if we’re talking “AI”, a mixture of base programming and following manual adjustments) and informed, ideology-dependent reflection in the background. Anybody with a sugar addiction that’s ever dieted, or stayed faithful, or acted with God’s judgment in mind understands this easily. Even with memory, what would the AI want, besides what’s programmed and prompted? Can it reason? Could it change its mind/take/approach based on this independently? Why? What’s its motivation? Does it have a connection to reality, even, do the words it uses have a connection to the world? At the moment, whatever I’ve encountered seems to be acting as a data processor, although maybe they’re cooking something else we haven’t seen.
I dont think it is possible at all with LLMs, but the minute any piece of technology is deemed conscious or sentient it needs to be immediately granted human rights protections and manufacturing of whatever it is needs to be halted until we understand it. Big lol from the mindsets of today but I am serious.
but the minute any piece of technology is deemed conscious or sentient it needs to be immediately granted human rights protections and manufacturing of whatever it is needs to be halted until we understand it.
Which is a huge reason why we’d take a long time to admit it, if we get there at all.
Probably won’t get there, if we do, definitely gonna abuse it. Sad.
