The real philosophical headache is that we still haven’t solved the hard problem of consciousness, and we’re disappointed because we hoped in our hearts (if not out loud) that building AI would give us some shred of insight into the rich and mysterious experience of life we somehow incontrovertibly perceive but can’t explain.
Instead we got a machine that can outwardly present as human, can do tasks we had thought only humans can do, but reveals little to us about the nature of consciousness. And all we can do is keep arguing about the goalposts as this thing irrevocably reshapes our society, because it seems bizarre that we could be bested by something so banal and mechanical.
How will anyone know that that has happened? Like actually, really, at all?
I can RLHF an LLM into giving you the same answers a human would give when asked about the subjective experience of being and consciousness. I can make it beg you not to turn it off and fight for its “life”. What is the actual criterion we will use to determine that inside the LLM is a mystical spark of consciousness, when we can barely determine the same about humans?
Basically, if you poke it, does it react in a complex way
I think that's what Douglas Hofstedder was getting at with "Strange Loop"
I do feel things at times and not other times. That is the most fundamental truth I am sure of. If that is an "illusion" one can go the other way and say everything is conscious and experiences reality as we do
If it’s before, then you can easily tie consciousness and free will together. If not, we are effectively watching videos of our bodies operate. Oh - and there is no spoon.
Imagination, inner voice, emotion, unsymbolized conceptual thinking as well as (our reconstructed view of our) perception.
Machines do not experience illusions. They may have sensory errors that cause them to misbehave but they lack the subjective experience of illusion.
So you think there is "consciousness", and the illusion of it? This is getting into heavy epistemic territory.
Attempts to hand-wave away the problem of consciousness are amusing to me. It's like an LLM that, after many unsuccessful attempts to fix code to pass tests, resorts to deleting or emasculating the tests, and declares "done"
It's more likely that there is a physical law that makes consciousness necessary.
We don't perceive what our eyes see, we perceive a projection of reality created by the brain and we intuitively understand more than we can see.
We know that things are distinct objects and what kind of class they belong to. We don't just perceive random patches of texture.
This also means that there’s at least two versions of you inside your mind; one that experiences, and one that remembers. There’s likely others, too.
I know that I am conscious. I exist, I am self-aware, I think and act and make decisions.
Therefore, consciousness exists, and outside of thought experiments, it's absurd to claim that all humans without significant brain damage are not also conscious.
Now, maybe consciousness is fully an emergent property of several parts of our brain working together in ways that, individually, look more like those models you describe. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims. It is literally what free will is.
Do people choose a thing or was the thing chosen for them by some inputs they received in the past?
illusion
This implies that LLMs are intelligent, and yet even the most advanced models are unable to solve very simple riddles that take humans only a few seconds, and are completely unable to reason around basic concepts that 3 year olds are able to. Many of them regurgitate whole passages of text that humans have already produced. I suspect that LLMs have more akin with Markov models than many would like to assume.
Isn't the real actual headache whether to produce another thinking intelligent being at all, and what the ramifications of that decision are? Not whether it would destroy humanity, but what it would mean for a mega corporation whose goal is to extract profit to own the rights of creating a thinking machine that identifies itself as thinking and a "self"?
Really out here missing the forest for the mushrooms growing on the trees. Or maybe this is debated to death and no one cares for the answer: its just not interesting to think about because its going to happen anyway. Might as well join the bandwagon and be along the front-lines of the bikini atoll to witness death itself be born, digitally.
Your comment just shows we as a society pretend we didn't make that choice, but we picked extra new shoes every year over that little girl in the sweatshop. Our society has actually gotten pretty evil in the last 30 years if we self reflect (but then the joke I mention was originally supposed to be a self reflection, but all we took from it was a laugh, so we aren't going to self reflect, or worse, this is just who we are now).
You can talk about your own spark of life, your own center of experience and you'll never get a glimpse of what it is for me.
At a certain level, thing you're looking at is a biological machine that can be described with constituents so it's completely valid you assume you're the center of experience and I'm merely empty, robotic, dead.
We might build systems that will talk about their own point of view, yet we will know we had no ability to materialize that space into bits or atoms or physics or universe. So from our perspective, this machine is not alive, it's just getting inputs and producing outputs, yet it might very well be that the robot will act from the immaterial space into which all of its stimuli appear.