The issue of valence — which things does an AI fee get pleasure/pain from and how would we know? — seems to make this fundamentally intractable to me. “Just ask it?” — why would we think the language model we are talking to is telling us about the feelings of the thing having valenced sentience?
I think as AIs get smarter it may well be more accurate than with animals? At least they can tell you something, rather than us drawing long bows interpreting behavioral observations.
I agree this is a super hard problem, but I do think there are somewhat clear steps to be made towards progress (i.e. making self reports more reliable). I am biased, but I did write this piece on a topic that touches on this problem a bit that I think is worth checking out.
I might be obtuse here, but I still have a strong sense that there’s a deeper problem being overlooked here. Glancing at your abstract
self-reports from current systems like large language models are spurious for many reasons (e.g. often just reflecting what humans would say)
we propose to train models to answer many kinds of questions about themselves with known answers, while avoiding or limiting training incentives that bias self-reports.
To me the deeper question is “how do we know that the language model we are talking to has access to the ‘thing in the system experiencing valenced consciousness’”.
The latter, if it exists, is very mysterious—why and how would valenced consciousness evolve, in what direction, to what magnitude, would it have any measurable outputs, etc.? … In contrast the language model will always be maximizing some objective function determined by its optimization, weights, and instructions (if I understand these things).
So, even if we can detect if it is reporting what it knows accurately why would we think that the language model knows anything about what’s generating the valenced consciousness for some entity?
I think one can reasonably ask this question of consciousness/welfare more broadly: how does one have access to their consciousness/welfare?
One idea is that many philosophers think one, by definition, has immediate epistemic access to their conscious experiences (though whether those show up in reports is a different question, which I try to address in the piece). I think there are some phenomenological reasons to think this.
Another idea is that we have at least one instance where one supposedly has access to their conscious experiences (humans), and it seems like this shows up in behavior in various ways. While I agree with you that our uncertainty grows as you get farther from humans (i.e. to digital minds), I still think you’re going to get some weight from there.
Finally, I think that, if one takes your point too far (there is no reason to trust that one has epistemic access to their conscious states), then we can’t be sure that we are conscious, which I think can be seen as a reductio (at least, to the boldest of these claims).
Though let me know if something I said doesn’t make sense/if I’m misinterpreting you.
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?
The issue of valence — which things does an AI fee get pleasure/pain from and how would we know? — seems to make this fundamentally intractable to me. “Just ask it?” — why would we think the language model we are talking to is telling us about the feelings of the thing having valenced sentience?
See my short form post
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fFDM9RNckMC6ndtYZ/david_reinstein-s-shortform?commentId=dKwKuzJuZQfEAtDxP
I still don’t feel I have heard a clear convincing answer to this one. Would love your thoughts.
I think as AIs get smarter it may well be more accurate than with animals? At least they can tell you something, rather than us drawing long bows interpreting behavioral observations.
I agree this is a super hard problem, but I do think there are somewhat clear steps to be made towards progress (i.e. making self reports more reliable). I am biased, but I did write this piece on a topic that touches on this problem a bit that I think is worth checking out.
Thanks.
I might be obtuse here, but I still have a strong sense that there’s a deeper problem being overlooked here. Glancing at your abstract
To me the deeper question is “how do we know that the language model we are talking to has access to the ‘thing in the system experiencing valenced consciousness’”.
The latter, if it exists, is very mysterious—why and how would valenced consciousness evolve, in what direction, to what magnitude, would it have any measurable outputs, etc.? … In contrast the language model will always be maximizing some objective function determined by its optimization, weights, and instructions (if I understand these things).
So, even if we can detect if it is reporting what it knows accurately why would we think that the language model knows anything about what’s generating the valenced consciousness for some entity?
I think one can reasonably ask this question of consciousness/welfare more broadly: how does one have access to their consciousness/welfare?
One idea is that many philosophers think one, by definition, has immediate epistemic access to their conscious experiences (though whether those show up in reports is a different question, which I try to address in the piece). I think there are some phenomenological reasons to think this.
Another idea is that we have at least one instance where one supposedly has access to their conscious experiences (humans), and it seems like this shows up in behavior in various ways. While I agree with you that our uncertainty grows as you get farther from humans (i.e. to digital minds), I still think you’re going to get some weight from there.
Finally, I think that, if one takes your point too far (there is no reason to trust that one has epistemic access to their conscious states), then we can’t be sure that we are conscious, which I think can be seen as a reductio (at least, to the boldest of these claims).
Though let me know if something I said doesn’t make sense/if I’m misinterpreting you.
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?