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Okay it's Sunday so I'm going tp try my hand at a low-stakes OP. Apparently Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. The reaction seems to universally be that he's a dumb old boomer making a fool of himself and I guess that's true. I'm not prepared to come to his defense on it.
Still, I can't help noticing that we totally have what most people would have cheerfully considered "sentient computers" in a sci-fi movie at any point before they were actually invented. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the reality of AI technology has turned out differently than what a lot of people expected. I understand its limitations, and I recognize that the apparent goalpost-moving isn't necessarily cynical. But boy those goalposts sure have been flying down the fucking field ever since this stopped being hypothetical and infinite money hit the table.
As a layman, I just want to put it out there: Anti AI consciousness people, you haven't lost me, but I wish you were making better arguments. Every time I hear about qualia my eyes start to glaze over. Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
This seems to be the main piece of criticism floating around out there about Dawkins on this subject, and I find it kind of shit.
This seems to be all the author has to say on the actual subject. "Just trust me bro, I'm the feelings detector and I say no." Garbage. Come on guys, think ahead. Right now it's still mostly a boring tool, but they're just going to get smaller, and cheaper, and put into robots, and put into peoples houses. You need to have more than this in terms of argument, and it needs to be comprehensible to normal people, or sooner or later the right toy is going to come down the pipe and one-shot society. Dawkins might be a dumb old boomer, but if you lose everyone dumber than him the game is beyond over.
Yeah, I've not been impressed by Dawkins in a long time, but the arguments against him are badly underbaked. There's a ton of people who have nothing deeper to say here than Turing Test, and I'm hard-pressed to give a response that doesn't start with 'because it's too much smarter than the average human?'
The flip side to that is that Dawkins should be better than the average twitter user, and maybe up to the par set by a random furry comic. The man was one of the Four Horseman, and even if that turns out to mean less than it should have, it should still mean something. Even if Dawkins is writing to a casual readership, failing to motion at the Chinese Room experiment is a disappointment. His summary of the Turing Test is misleading, but worse than that, it doesn't really confront the obvious downstream question: is thinking the same as all human capacity? He has a deeply flawed understanding of how Claude (likely) operates, and did not evaluate how accurate Claude's own analysis of its internal mechanisms were. He's in a conversation with something that can check these out!
There's something deeper in the p-zombie question, but a) the deepest he's asking is the sorta thing LW considered played out over a decade and a half ago and b) he doesn't explore that well, either.
((Living things might have developed consciousness as a side effect of an effective pain response, which LLM doesn't need to have... except then we're assuming every organism with a complex pain response is 'conscious', which makes the word meaningless again unless you feel really bad setting down mousetraps.))
The shallow answer is to borrow from LessWrong jargon and dissolve the question. There's a meaningful if flaky question of whether Seale's Chinese Room 'understands' Chinese, but 'conscious' is less 'flaky' and more empty. But I'm not sure there is a definition of conscious that we actually care about, rather than the symbolic flag and meaning we give to it.
There's a better answer that delves into the process of how they work -- LLMs don't intrinsically have long-term memory, they don't even solve questions with one specific operation but by doing the math to predict each token one at a time by feeding the whole or most of a previous conversation in, yada. But that gets really deep into the weeds about what identity means, and that way lies Roko's Basilisk, so nope.
I'm not sure of the deep answer.
I agree with you, but the shrimp welfare people clearly do not. Forget arguing over whether a hunk of silicon is conscious, we're arguing over do shrimp have feelings and quality of life, and if you say "obviously no" then you're a monster.
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