Fuck AI

1455 readers

354 users here now

"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"

A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.

founded 8 months ago

MODERATORS

1060

Timmy the Pencil (lemmy.world)

submitted 6 months ago by homesweethomeMrL to c/fuck_ai

149 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We don't even know what we mean when we say "humans are conscious".

Also I have yet to see a rebuttal to "consciousness is just an emergent neurological phenomenon and/or a trick the brain plays on itself" that wasn't spiritual and/or cooky.

Look at the history of things we thought made humans humans, until we learned they weren't unique. Bipedality. Speech. Various social behaviors. Tool-making. Each of those were, in their time, fiercely held as "this separates us from the animals" and even caused obvious biological observations to be dismissed. IMO "consciousness" is another of those, some quirk of our biology we desperately cling on to as a defining factor of our assumed uniqueness.

To be clear LLMs are not sentient, or alive. They're just tools. But the discourse on consciousness is a distraction, if we are one day genuinely confronted with this moral issue we will not find a clear binary between "conscious" and "not conscious". Even within the human race we clearly see a spectrum. When does a toddler become conscious? How much brain damage makes someone "not conscious"? There are no exact answers to be found.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I've defined what I mean by consciousness - a subjective experience, quaila. Not simply a reaction to an input, but something experiencing the input. That can't be physical, that thing experiencing. And if it isn't, I don't see why it should be tied to humans specifically, and not say, a rock. An AI could absolutely have it, since we have no idea how consciousness works or what can be conscious, or what it attaches itself to. And I also see no reason why the output needs to 'know' that it's conscious, a conscious LLM could see itself saying absolute nonsense without being able to affect its output to communicate that it's conscious.