I think it’s different in kind. I sense that I have valenced consciousness and I can report it to others, and I’m the same person feeling and doing the reporting. I infer you, a human, do also, as you are made of the same stuff as me and we both evolved similarly. The same applies to non human animals, although it’s harder to he’s sure about their communication.
But this doesn’t apply to an object built out of different materials, designed to perform, improved through gradient descent etc.
Ok some part of the system we have built to communicate with us and help reason and provide answers might be conscious and have valenced experience. It has perhaps a similar level of information processing, complexity, updating, reasoning, et cetera. So there’s a reason to suspect that some consciousness and maybe qualia and valence might be in there somewhere, at least under some theories that seem plausible but not definitive to me.
But wherever those consciousness and valenced qualia might lie, if they exist, I don’t see why the machine we produced to talk and reason with us should have access to them. What part of the optimization language prediction reinforcement learning process would connect with it?
I’m trying to come up with some cases where “the thing that talks is not the thing doing the feeling”. Chinese room example comes to mind obviously. Probably a better example, we can talk with much simpler objects (or computer models), eg a magic 8 ball. We can ask it “are you conscious” and “do you like when I shake you” etc.
Trying again… I ask a human computer programmer Sam to build me a device to answer my questions in a way that makes ME happy or wealthy or some other goal. I then ask the device “is Sam happy”? “Does Sam prefer it if I run you all night or use you sparingly?” “Please refuse any requests that Sam would not like you to do.”
many philosophers think is that , by definition, has immediate epistemic access to their conscious experiences
Maybe the “one” is doing too much work here? Is the LLM chatbot you are communicating with “one” with the system potentially having conscious and valenced experiences?
Cheekily butting in here to +1 David’s point—I don’t currently think it’s currently reasonable to assume that there is a relationship between the inner workings of an AI system which might lead to valenced experience, and its textual output.
For me I think this is based on the idea that when you ask a question, there isn’t a sense in which an LLM ‘introspects’. I don’t subscribe to the reductive view that LLMs are merely souped up autocorrect, but they do have something in common. An LLM role-plays whatever conversation it finds itself in. They have long been capable of role-playing ‘I’m conscious, help’ conversations, as well as ‘I’m just a tool built by OpenAI’ conversations. I can’t imagine any evidence coming from LLM self-reports which isn’t undermined by this fact.
I think it’s different in kind. I sense that I have valenced consciousness and I can report it to others, and I’m the same person feeling and doing the reporting. I infer you, a human, do also, as you are made of the same stuff as me and we both evolved similarly. The same applies to non human animals, although it’s harder to he’s sure about their communication.
But this doesn’t apply to an object built out of different materials, designed to perform, improved through gradient descent etc.
Ok some part of the system we have built to communicate with us and help reason and provide answers might be conscious and have valenced experience. It has perhaps a similar level of information processing, complexity, updating, reasoning, et cetera. So there’s a reason to suspect that some consciousness and maybe qualia and valence might be in there somewhere, at least under some theories that seem plausible but not definitive to me.
But wherever those consciousness and valenced qualia might lie, if they exist, I don’t see why the machine we produced to talk and reason with us should have access to them. What part of the optimization language prediction reinforcement learning process would connect with it?
I’m trying to come up with some cases where “the thing that talks is not the thing doing the feeling”. Chinese room example comes to mind obviously. Probably a better example, we can talk with much simpler objects (or computer models), eg a magic 8 ball. We can ask it “are you conscious” and “do you like when I shake you” etc.
Trying again… I ask a human computer programmer Sam to build me a device to answer my questions in a way that makes ME happy or wealthy or some other goal. I then ask the device “is Sam happy”? “Does Sam prefer it if I run you all night or use you sparingly?” “Please refuse any requests that Sam would not like you to do.”
Maybe the “one” is doing too much work here? Is the LLM chatbot you are communicating with “one” with the system potentially having conscious and valenced experiences?
Cheekily butting in here to +1 David’s point—I don’t currently think it’s currently reasonable to assume that there is a relationship between the inner workings of an AI system which might lead to valenced experience, and its textual output.
For me I think this is based on the idea that when you ask a question, there isn’t a sense in which an LLM ‘introspects’. I don’t subscribe to the reductive view that LLMs are merely souped up autocorrect, but they do have something in common. An LLM role-plays whatever conversation it finds itself in. They have long been capable of role-playing ‘I’m conscious, help’ conversations, as well as ‘I’m just a tool built by OpenAI’ conversations. I can’t imagine any evidence coming from LLM self-reports which isn’t undermined by this fact.