brookst
7 hours ago
Ok, this is fun. Perhaps a little on-the-nose, but then again, so is much of the “AI isn’t really thinking, it’s just doing the same work and producing the same output” claptrap.
The last couple of years have changed my thinking on lots of stuff, but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience. Maybe there’s something ineffable there. Or maybe… not. Maybe it is all post hoc rationalization.
In any event, I look forward to the day when our AI agent counterparts can enjoy the existential angst of uncertainty about their own consciousness.
Lerc
6 hours ago
>but the biggest and most disturbing one is a newfound doubt in my / our own sentience.
I think it depends on whether you are attributing sentience to be something that you imagine to be somehow transcendent, or if you think of it as just the descriptive term for what we are doing. For the latter it is undoubtable that we have it because that is literally what it means. It also becomes very difficult to come up with scenarios that say other things could never be sentient.
If you use the transcendent definition, then you can say that it is special, but it becomes very difficult(perhaps impossible) to describe what it is, and clearly impossible to prove that anyone has it. It is a truly ineffable thing which you may as well call Attribute Q, because you can't really draw any conclusions about what has it nor any conclusions about the things that have it and what they are like.
The only thing people use the ineffable thing for is as a club membership. The angst is worrying about if you are a member of a club that you don't really know anything about.
ThrowawayR2
5 hours ago
From Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience : "Sentience is the ability to experience feelings and sensations. It may not necessarily imply higher cognitive functions such as awareness, reasoning, or complex thought processes." LLMs are clearly not sentient even if one sides with those who think it is reasoning.
Lerc
4 hours ago
How do you know that?
How about if you draw a line graph of ability and sentience, We know two points. No ability at all has a sentience of zero. Human ability has a sentience of 1HS (one human sentience). Mark a point where you think a LLM sits. (presumably from your description some ability, zero sentience)
What shape is the line graph? It gets from zero to 1HS as you go across. When does it climb. If there is just some point where it goes from 0HS to 1HS then it seems like you should be able to point to what happened there.
If the graph is a line or a curve then you have some varying degrees of sentience.
If you put a LLM on zero sentience but recognise that it has some ability, then you are saying that if it is a curve, it starts flat and then begins climbing. Again, it seems like this marks a discrete level where something changes, why is that not identifiable.
The only other alternatives are continual graduation down to zero, the shape of the curve is unknown, but it leads to the conclusion that everything with non-zero ability has some non-zero level of sentience. That makes Rocks a little bit sentient, but in an incomprehensibly small manner. Compared to a human it would be trying to imagine a single molecule of water in a swimming pool, you can think about it in the abstract, but you have no sense of what the scale difference actually is.
But if that were the case then LLMs would be sentient, because everything would be, it is just a matter of scale, and where things sit on that scale.
While that notion might be hard to imagine, it is the only one that does not raise the question of "What is the threshold to qualify". If you assume there is a clear threshold, why would it elude discovery so well?
queenkjuul
2 hours ago
> the ability to experience feelings and sensations
This isn't a scale of "0 to Human," this is a binary: can a computer feel sensations?
We know for a fact that many animals can, including humans. Rocks can not.
Joker_vD
2 hours ago
Descartes famously thought that no, animals did not have feelings and sensations, and their reactions were purely mechanistic in nature. You see, he believed that humans and animals had fundamentally different substrate i.e. immortal soul/lack of it, and you needed soul to percept.
Thankfully, today we know better than that, and so we can be absolutely certain that computers can't feel sensations: they have different underlying substrate than the humans and animals. There is no way this view can be challenged.
throwaway63467
6 hours ago
Why would you doubt that you’re sentient? Your world model includes yourself and you can reason about yourself as part of the world so why should the ability of an AI model being able to also do that change your opinion on that? Don’t get why you think what consciousness is, I guess you look at something beyond the definition and whether there’s something special on the meta level but I don’t get how you could doubt that you’re conscious, it’s a straightforward property as far as I understand, it’s just nothing special.
spwa4
3 hours ago
> Why would you doubt that you’re sentient?
Because if you apply the same logic to that we apply to AI. "Under the hood" AI is nothing but vector-matrix multiplications and a few other operations.
We know matrix multiplications aren't sentient, nor are those other operations.
Likewise, we know if we look under the hood/cut open a human brain we find conductive membranes, and a Kalium-Natrium balance that shifts, signals jumping from one neuron to the next, moderated by one of four chemicals. And by the way, the structure of neurons looks a lot like one of those vector-matrix multiplications. Not exactly but quite a bit.
Why would we draw a different conclusion? You're not sentient by those rules we use to judge AI.
Everytime someone finds a new way to fool humans into thinking an AI is sentient this comes up again. Of course, these days we have many examples of AIs not just convincing humans they're AI but actually doing it to the point they exploit human thinking and "steal" money (stealing in the hacking sense, except what's hacked is human minds). And doubtless intelligence agencies are doing far, far worse.
daveguy
6 hours ago
If that's claptrap this is article sewage waste. On the nose is an understatement.
It's not doing the same work, or producing the same output.
It's an episodic response to specific requests. If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either.
This article pretends that we understand human brains as much as we understand the simple algorithms of LLMs. And that's just laughable. Even so out of touch as to say consumption of "[humans] consume thousands of liters of water per years". As if there isn't multiple orders of magnitude more consumption for data centers. For data centers that produce a braindead simulacrum.
Lerc
6 hours ago
>If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either.
I don't think any one is saying AI has a normal human state of consciousness.
Nobody claims that people with anterograde amnesia are not conscious. Similarly, you could drug someone unconscious after every time they answer a single question. It's not a normal state of human consciousness, but I wouldn't want to say a person in that situation were not sentient.
It is true that there is much that we do not know about the human brain, but it is also true that many of the things that people describe as attributes that clearly disqualify AI have known analogues in humans.
From simple failures of perception in optical illusions, to the inability to notice quite significant changes in front of your eyes if the change happens during a saccade. There are a wide range of known limitations that humans have that reveal how much we overlook things we can't do, that when you consider them, reveals our own behaviour could be an more of an arrangement of systems than we would like to think.
daveguy
6 hours ago
Every single one of your examples is one that comes nowhere near the blankness of an llm pile of numbers when it isn't answering a question. Maybe I should have said, is completely dead, rather than in a coma, between questions.
The quirks we observe in llms we only pretend have analogues in humans because we love to anthropomorphize. And it's easy to ansthropomorphise a language simulacrum. We've been doing it since ELIZA.
Lerc
5 hours ago
I'm not sure why you think a temporary cessation of activity is relevant at all.
Would you think of a hypothetical machine that could freeze a human to absolute zero and restore them again sufficient to declare their behaviour when unfrozen as not that of a sentient individual.
How about if you had a picture of a black man and a white woman in front of a person and you swapped the heads, right in front of the observers eyes, but you picked just the right time so that even though they never sensed any time of not looking at the image, they did not notice the change.