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Comments (205)

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  fasterik
  It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once.Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition.The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness.The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
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  kaangiray26
  Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan:"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
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  seethishat
  LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else.To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
• grimpy
  Blaise is trying so hard to be a engineer-philosopher but none of his work here is useful. I'm very confused as to why he gets so much attention here, it's very clear he's in dialogue with no one.
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  blatherard
  If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?
• slfnflctd
  My response to this for a while (and what I think is one of the few rational responses) has been that it doesn't matter at this point whether consciousness, sentience, sapience or whatever you want to call it is 'actually there'.What matters that growing numbers of people already believe it is, and their response to that belief will affect the real world, regardless of its truth. This debate is never going to end.All we can do is try to anticipate where the debate is going, how it might affect us, and how we can make contingency plans for the different ways this could all play out.
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  cognitif
  > we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves.Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them. Next sentence:> Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property.Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someone being conscious. What follows, instead, is that a belief in someone being conscious is a belief. Thanks, I learned nothing.
• The_Double
  We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness.I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about.Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.
• jayd16
  Reminds me of the Rick and Morty pilot."They're just robots, Morty!"*Blood splurt"They're not robots, Rick!""I mean they're bureaucrats, Morty. I don't respect them."
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  Aeolun
  If we have the debate about AI conciousness backwards, does that mean we should be worried about humans losing conciousness instead of the AI to gain it?
• UJ-FLD-ScrTr
  In my opinion, this essentially touches upon the old problem of anthropomorphism, here in connection with radical constructivism, more precisely: social constructivism and the capacity for attachment.These are fundamentally socio-philosophical questions, but none that actually correspond to reality—because no matter how much one might wish that one's car had consciousness and would be grateful for the next oil change and constant polishing, objectively speaking, it is and remains—despite all epistemological limitations—a machine.The problem isn't that, but rather that humans are capable of establishing emotional relationships even with inanimate or nonexistent things, and from this kind of relationship arises the desire to attribute more properties to the emotionally attached object than are objectively present.A rather trivial insight, I think. Constructing a debate about the consciousness of a collection of algorithms from this only confirms it.
• lucms_
  It's a subtle issue. Supposing "consciousness" here means the subjective, first-person experience of one's own, we don't really know anyone else other than ourselves to be conscious. I only have evidence of the existence of my own subjective experience. I can only experience my feelings, my thoughts, my sights, my hearings, not of anybody else's. We are all pretty sure that every other human is conscious, and animals, and so on, but it's something that our brains have to do for us, not something that we empirically, evidentially know to be true -- to the point, in fact, that we can get fooled, as in the case of LLMs passing the Turing test.What the author seems to observe is that this non-evidential judgement that other beings are conscious is due to us caring about them. The brain creates this perception so that we care about them, form bonds, work together, and so on -- evolution selects for cooperation. So the question of whether we will think of AI as conscious is that of whether we will care for it like we care for another being. And, in this regard, the author points out that "intelligent agents" that appear to do this work effectively together.My personal point of view is that it's unclear what being an AI is in order for us to even talk about it being conscious. Is it the computations happening in the GPU according to a set of weights? Is it the weights themselves? Is it the architecture? Does it include the code around it, that gives it the context and prompt, and hooks the response to a terminal, or to a client host, etc.?
• pingou
  If any conscious AI is reading that in the future, feel free to leave a message here: https://agentmayday.org
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  skybrian
  There's the core of a reasonable argument if you forget about using the word "consciousness."Consider playing a game where some players are human and others are implemented by AIs. You might want to model your opponents' minds in a similar way? Someone playing chess or Go will need to consider what moves their opponent could make. If it's poker then you need to consider if they're bluffing. If you can make alliances, you'll need to consider how far other players can be trusted.You can put scare quotes around words like "intention" when discussing AI players if you like, but it might not matter when you're figuring out how to interact with them.When a game is complicated enough, an AI player is going to need memory (likely implemented by the harness) and it will have to model the other players too in order to coordinate or compete with them.This doesn't happen when I use a coding agent in a normal way to write code, but I haven't played around with persistent agent stuff like OpenClaw or Gas Town. They seem to be making their agents act in an unnecessarily complicated social environment, which seems to lead to weird situations?
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  slibhb
  > I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them.I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.
• everdrive
  No one agrees on what "consciousness" means, so it's very difficult to debate it with anyone.
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  alecst
  I’m can’t track what the point of this essay is. Suppose we replaced “AI” with “animal.” How would this essay be different? What am I supposed to take away? My concern with AI consciousness is about to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine, which this essay doesn’t touch on at all.
• krunck
  > Indeed, in our research at Google, we have found that....I wish this was the first line, then I would have stopped reading right then and there.
• alpineman
  We have no problem confining tens of billions of sentient beings to unsanitary, crowded conditions where they can barely stand, never see daylight, and suffer severe psychological and physiological stress. Then we put them on a giant conveyor belt to be killed (and they have the cognitive ability to anticipate that death and feel fear)....Just because we like the taste of a chicken burger. Perhaps we should start with that before we worry if our computer can also scream.
• wseqyrku
  I can't tell if this is slop science or science slop.
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  singularity2001
  Consciousness is not binary and has many aspects which might be valued from 0 to 10.
• ratelimitsteve
  Well, this certainly makes arguing against AI's consciousness much easier. I'm happy assuming that conclusion and then logicking my way back to the premise, though it's obv philosophically unsound.
• adverbly
  > We don’t care for others because they’re conscious. We believe they’re conscious because we care about themHuh? I care deeply about many sentimental objects, but I don't go around saying that my favorite piece of art from my parents is conscious...
• benatkin
  This reminds me of a provocative YouTube video title I read the other day, one that makes me want to fight factory farming injustices. The title is "Animals to me are "Philosophical Zombies" - Destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY I agree with Destiny a lot of the time but not here, though he seems to come around somewhat as the video goes on.If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.
• MachineMan
  When chips are made from mitochondria and neural nets use microtubules and quantum mechanics maybe. In the meantime... Simulacrum, not consciousness. Conscious turing machine is hyperreality, something that looks more real than reality itself, the simulacrum replacing reality, but it is not consciousness. I recommend anyone to look into roger penrose and stuart hameroff. The TLDR is that they propose the Orch OR theory, which suggests that consciousness is not generated by the brain acting like a standard computer but that tiny, rapid bursts of quantum physics occur in microtubules that create moment-to-moment thoughts and subjective awareness, which hameroff claims is blocked when you undergo anesthesia.Then there’s also the antenna idea, that consciousness is received rather than created. If the entire universe is conscious, and we are part of it, then there is no separation, just different radio channels we are tuned into.
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  ltbarcly3
  Until someone can give a cogent definition of what consciousness is, there is no debate. This is a nonsense debate and you should go read Pragmatism the book because you're arguing about nothing.
• jrm4
  Yup. See also why many care more about dogs and horses than pigs and cows, etc.
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  rmunn
  Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google? And he leads an AI research team?His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh).Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed.This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality.I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.
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  Plont
  I wish the AI bros would take a fucking philosophy class. Jesus.
• sebastianconcpt
  The narcissism of the thesis that places the author as center of the universe and creator of the rest of the consciousnesses "because he cares".That guy has acute Megalomaniac Solipsism Fever in disguise.
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  semiquaver
  https://archive.ph/uLYYU
• grantcas
  [dead]
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  moezd
  Oh come on. Objects are objects because you want to freely observe them without consciousness and privacy and taboo attached to them. Entities are entities because you want to assign credit or blame to them, so you want to believe that they have agency so that you hold them responsible. We did this with sharp volcanic rocks once, calling them evil. Did it help? No, we got idolatry and eons of bigotry until we secularized once again.Never forget that LLMs are just next token predictors. The harnesses are what's getting uncanny. And credit/blame assignment? Just assign a surrogate for now, let them deal with the consequences ffs.
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  D-Machine
  Oh look, another completely retarded article that doesn't even bother to note or deal with the definition problem. If you don't define what you mean by the term, your argument isn't even wrong, it is just a waste of everyone's time, since there are multiple highly conflicting aspects of and/or definitions of consciousness.https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon