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Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
..why ? Do we even know what qualia are?
What if qualia inherently arise if you do a certain way of processing information? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room#Strong_AI )
If we don’t know what qualia is we can hardly replicate with machine learning tools. And not knowing what something is doesn’t mean we don’t know what it isn’t. We don’t know what dark matter is, we do know what it isn’t.
That sounds very shaky logic though. You can cause an avalanche without understanding any physics. Two humans can produce a third human without knowing anything much about biology or genetics. Why, in theory, humans could not produce qualia in the machine without understanding what it is? I am not claiming that's what happened - in fact, I am pretty sure it didn't - but this logic step doesn't seem to be correct.
The cause of the avalanche is physics. The cause of the baby is genetics and sexual reproduction. The idea that consciousness can arise from machine algorithms, just magically, is Frankenstein.
I don't see why the consciousness arising from a mass of interconnected silicon blocks is, on its face, more ridiculous than the consciousness arising from a mass of wet jelly blobs. It looks like post hoc rationalization rather than a principle - of course the consciousness should be in this form, because it is in this form! But why exactly? Not enough complex connections? We're adding more all the time. I don't see an obvious boundary that says "below this it can't happen" - can you identify one?
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As sympathetic as I am to this point of view, you're waving away too many possibilities in too glib a manner. For example, Chalmers' idea that there could be rules which manage whether a structure comes with consciousness. If this were the case, then even if a structure won't intrinsically have qualia, the laws of nature might assign it anyways. Not to mention the entire idea of panpsychism.
It seems wise not to assume that the non-materialist perspective is itself less ambiguous than the materialist one. As far as I know, no consensus exists.
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You're assuming the conclusion here
No, I didn’t. That statement was offered as a premise.
Premises can of course be challenged or supported with further reasoning, as is happening elsewhere in the thread.
Well your premise is so strong and unjustified that your argument is worthless. I can't imagine someone who accepts that premise who didn't already agree with your conclusion before reading your argument.
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How do we know this is true? I'm not familiar with the current scientific progress on the study of qualia, but I didn't think we understood it well enough to conclude something like that.
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Sydney mostly «runs» on a GPU cluster with stuff like A100s (which do not use x86 or any other CPU instruction set), and I don't think the outbound cable can be fairly described as ethernet on her side. SFP+ or something? Bing is very snappy (as far as I know, thanks to Mikhail Parakhin, the guy who also whipped Yandex into shape) and I have faith in their infrastructure being modern.
But assuming you don't really have prejudice against x86 and ethernet specifically, you should flesh out the idea that systems implemented on electronic hardware cannot have quale.
Actually the opposite. It's exciting like looking at a marvelous nuclear blast through tinted glasses, and knowing the shockwave will crush you like tofu.
I'm at the stage where I'm idly wondering when it has started. The pace of advances has long since exceeded what any one human can keep track of. The self-improving and accelerating bit... Perhaps it would be fair to point to the first version of Copilot?
The idea that progress is accelerating just isn’t true. Self driving cars were the latest fad to not materialise and I’m old enough to remember when the threat to the world was nanotechnology. Which died a death.
Recent advances, and I mean just this year, have reduced my scepticism a bit, but not much. All we have right now is somewhat useful tools, except when they are useless. The singularity is just techno eschatology.
I happen to believe you are wrong about literally everything, from your unstated belief that pooh-poohing The Current Thing is a sign of wisdom, to your epistemology and your specific ideas about technological trends, that are divorced from the object level and rely on aggregating people's noises. Self-driving cars exist and improve, nanotechnology exists and improves, journalists were wrong as they always are and estimating expected impact by their noise is unreasonable, this AI boom is the culmination of over half a century of research, increases the viability of all previous ones from fusion to nanotech, and the rate of improvement both in fundamental aspects and in CapEx and adoption is unprecedented.
Most importantly though, one's man modus ponens. I think it's eschatology that was singularity for mystics. The premise of human history being finite is entirely sound, the change is accelerating, forms of our communal and individual existence have been torn asunder a few times already and soon there won't be time even for the debris to settle. We've learned the specific mechanism with which it'll happen, namely technological improvement. Calling it eschatology as if eschatology is a discredited notion is philosophically shallow.
You comment could as well have been written by a bot. Not because it's bad but because bots without inbuilt rules can imitate human reasoning in high fidelity now. Think about what this means and whether you'd have resorted to an argument about "somewhat useful tools" a decade ago, when faced with this fact.
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Supercritical nuclear chain reactions are divided into delayed critical, where the feedback loop takes on the order of seconds to go over unity, and prompt critical, where it takes on the order of nanoseconds.
I think we've been delayed critical since Attention is All You Need -- even if OpenAI had fizzled at that point, someone else would have carried the torch. And I say we'll be prompt critical when OpenAI et al could carry on without human input.
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I don't think this is generally valid. What makes x86 and an ethernet cable different from grey matter and a spinal cord?
If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.
It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.
What's the justification for this inclination, though? After all, in the realm of physics, there's no clean demarcation between "hardware" and "software." What we call "software" is actually a difference in the physical substrate, in terms of different atoms being placed in different places in the HDD or different volume of electrons flowing through different circuits in a microchip. "Running one set of instructions [instead of another]" really just means "a different physical object," and it's not clear to me that the change in the physical object necessary to generate qualia can't be accomplished through changes in the instructions. It's also not clear to me that it can in this specific case, and my bias points me in the direction that it didn't in this specific case. But I don't see the justification for dismissing it outright.
What we call software is a collection of instructions that can run on any compatible device. How it runs is device dependent but the logic is device independent.
Indeed. That set of instructions "exists" in some abstract way as logic, of course, and when we're talking about actually running that set of instructions, e.g. OpenAI servers running ChatGPT, we mean that those hunks of metal and plastic we call "servers," are physically different from other hunks of metal and plastic that are running some different pieces of software, in the sense that the atoms that make up the storage drives and electrons that flow through the atoms that make up the circuitry are different based on differences in the software. The software instantiates itself in the hardware; otherwise, the software can't be said to "exist" in a meaningful way beyond just an abstract concept.
The same logical axioms are hardware independent though. And we can write it on a board, or examine it on GitHub. On the other hand different compilers and different compiler options will produce different output even for the same chipsets, and totally different output for different chips. And when running, the OS, will run the software differently - how the OS or the system API (which all but the simplest of programs need to interact with it) work differs even in minor versions. Which is why updates to an OS can break a once well behaved app. It’s clear that the software running on the hardware is not really one thing, while the abstract software is another. Both exist and the same terminology is used for both - but only the latter is really “pure”. To my mind any software algorithm really exists in the abstract, not in the actuality.
I agree with all of this, though the last part about what a "software algorithm" really is seems more a matter of philosophical worldview than anything else. I think it's important to note that in each and every one of these cases, including the software being written on a board, saved on GitHub, or even just existing purely in someone's head because they've never written it down, the "software" we're talking about exists in physical reality, whether that be markings on a board, the arrangement of atoms on the storage drives on GitHub's servers, or in the patterns of how someone's neurons fire and are connected.
One could hold the worldview that all software already exists, and programmers are merely "discovering" them by writing the code, in a Library of Babel sort of way - all books already exist, writers are merely "discovering" them when they put words on paper, or all paintings already exist, painters are merely "discovering" them when they put brush strokes on canvas - but I'd wager that's a highly atypical way of viewing the existence of software. Most people would agree that Mark Zuckerburg and his team didn't "discover" Facebook, but rather "created" it, even if it was "created" the moment they thought of it before even thinking of what language to program it in.
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Do our human brains and minds not also encapsulate a massive collection of instructions, some more subconscious than others?
I suppose so but since nobody knows exactly, that’s not a useful theory. In fact not knowing what is software and hardware in the brain and how that is delineated is a problem that we haven’t solved, and may never solve.
What is different from software here is that the human software (mind) is clearly more tightly coupled with the brain than the logic of software is with the computer.
This seems a bit backwards, no? We understand that the mind is expressed in the firing of neurons in different regions of the brain. For computers, software is expressed in the triggering of tiny transistors inside different microchips.
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I mean, our brains (presumably) experience qualia under some circumstances and not under others, e.g. deep sleep or comas, even though it's still the "exact same general purpose computing hardware".
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Nothing, the parent is simply wrong. Unless we want to argue some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains makes us extremely special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram. For all intents and purposes if we could simulate a human brain down to the chemical reactions and electrons and voltage potentials doing their thing it would be a human WITH qualia. It's hardware will just be different.
TL;DR that one episode of Startrek where they argue if Data has Qualia
To have qualia you would have to simulate more than a brain, as qualia isn’t just felt or (in many cases) felt at all in the brain.
If we did understand all this then we could perhaps replicate it in software m. But we don’t.
What we can say is that the software behind ChatGPT is as likely to have qualia as a calculator app on your phone.
Where are you getting all this amazing scientific data about qualia and in which organs they're felt? Up to this moment I thought qualia were a completely made up philosopher's concept with no empirical basis whatsoever.
You might be a zombie, I feel qualia. So I think that’s worth explaining.. Sure the definitions are loose, and not very scientific but qualia exist.. If it helps you understand humanity better, i could perhaps replace qualia with emotions here - since that’s what I was really getting at, not how we experience the colour red but fear and anxiety and so on. Which needs the heart and stomach involved, or at least the simulation of them.
Could you expand on this? I'm not sure why the heart and stomach need to be involved, even as simulations. To use the example of fear, it's hard to nail down exactly what "fear" feels like, but vaguely, I might feel it through my heart racing faster or a "knot" in my stomach. But that doesn't require me to have a heart or a stomach or even a simulation of them; whatever causes me to experience qualia (which may be the brain, the soul, or the heart and stomach or all of them or something else entirely) could just cause me to experience the feeling of my heart racing faster and my stomach getting cramped. I don't see why those organs would need to be simulated in order to bring about that qualia.
I don’t see much of a difference between a simulated qualia of feeling the heart racing and having a simulated heart that races. Maybe there’s some shortcuts. 🤷♂️ it’s all very theoretical.
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Well…. now you’re getting somewhere.
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Nothing that I've said implies this.
Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.
There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.
If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?
Yes. You're simulating a human -- you can have a conversation with them, and ask them what they see, and they could describe to you the various hues that they perceive, or else be surprised that they are blind. They could ask where they are, and be upset to learn that they're being simulated through a pile of rocks and that you don't believe they are conscious. Anything less would be an incomplete simulation.
That's the beauty of the Turing machine, is that it's universal. Given enough time and space, even something as dumb as rule 110 can compute any other computable function. And the materialist perspective is that the human mind is such a function.
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I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
I don't see how I could rule out this possibility. If you believe you can, why?
Fair. Rocks being conscious or at least representing something that is was more or less a default for belief in many cultures across time. Ruling it out so casually is a result of a particular unique, historically rare socialization.
I think it's very unlikely that individual rocks are conscious, just as I think it's very unlikely that individual neurons are conscious, but a collection of neurons, rocks, or transistors arranged in a particular way and executing a particular algorithm may well be conscious.
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Agreed, but in my opinion enough ram and the proper algos + processing power would be enough.
I would argue that yes. But this stems from what I consider to be a bog standard materialist position taken to its logical conclusion. If everything we are is contained in our brains and the state of neurons, neuron connections, their internal state, all of this backed by chemical reactions and molecules, all of this underpinned on the laws of chemistry and electro-magnetism. If we could "simulate that" in varying degrees of precision we could theoretically recreate a consciousness and it would be just as "real" as the genuine thing.
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Given enough time and sufficient memory, you could simulate a human brain or the entire universe on a phone. It's not obvious, at least, that the hardware/software system wouldn't be generating qualia. (That's true even with Penrose-ish quantum consciousness.) They could be p-zombies, but those are controversial.
I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.
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How do you know this? I don't think we can conclude this without actually doing it and checking. And I don't think we have the technology to do this yet or even to check it.
The physiological analogy between you and me is my reason for thinking that you are conscious. Why would I not make the same inference for a sufficiently analogous artificial simulation of your brain?
That is quite reasonable and basically matches my own beliefs on the matter, but what if you are mistaken in your belief that my being conscious has that much to do with the physiological analogy between yourself and myself? I don't think we know if you're mistaken on that, and I'm not sure it's even possible to find out right now.
There are lots of things that I might be mistaken about. I might be mistaken in my belief that my laptop is not suddenly going to transform into a dragon and eat me. Both of these are ultimately derived from inductive reasoning, and inductive reasoning is rational but not infallible.
Infallibility is an excessive standard for knowledge.
It seems to me that there's more reason to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that one's laptop won't transform into a dragon than to be confident that one is not mistaken about the belief that someone else's consciousness is contingent on the physical analogy between one's own brain and their brain, though. We have some pretty deep level of understanding of the physics of a laptop and creatures like dragons and how they relate to each other based on our studies of things like plastic and metal and reptiles. We might be mistaken, but I think we've reduced the error bars quite a bit. I don't know that we can say the same for our study of how consciousness arises.
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We never will. This is in the realm of metaphysics. No matter how much technological progress we make, I don't think it's even conceivable that we could invent a machine that tells you whether or not I'm a philosophical zombie.
Not with our current level of understanding of consciousness and qualia, at least. I'm not ready to discount the possibility of some future developments in physics discovering some sort of physical, material instantiation of "having an experience" that can be measured or at least detected, though. I've no idea what that would look like, or even what some fictional scifi/fantasy versions of such concepts look like, though. As you said, it's inconceivable.
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Lets call it a strong conviction in materialism.
I don't think we do yet either.
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