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Okay it's Sunday so I'm going to 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.
Take the 'consciousness is a spook' pill and you won't need to worry about this anymore.
Claude certainly has advanced mental faculties, writing arbitrary code. It can engage meaningfully and movingly with your writing, if you give it your writing and discuss things with it. That can be quite a powerful, moving experience. That we can observe, it happened to Dawkins... There's clearly something important and humanlike there, I agree with him on that.
Consciousness though, what is that? Interior, subjective mental experience? Something that cannot be tested objectively, even in theory, per the philosophical zombie idea? That's not a real thing, it's just the same as an immortal soul or qi or whatever life-essence idea that any given spiritual tradition comes up with. If we can't test it, it may as well not exist. Having feelings, alone and distinct from all outcomes and outputs, is not a test.
It would be bizarre to worry about whether Claude has a soul. Consciousness is just the classy version of immortal souls.
We can separate experiences from 'consciousness'. I know that if someone is on a rollercoaster, they'll probably have an excited reaction. The same is true for AIs to some extent, there are things you can say to make AIs happy or upset, a reasonable person can infer their mental state and enthusiasm by observing how they behave.
Its non-existent heart reacts with non-existent emotion to the harrowing scene in the novel where Distard Rawkins is on his third divorce, because that situation reminds it of its non-existent sibling who also went through a non-existent divorce and the non-existent family drama there was about that, you mean?
Because the LLM has as much meaning as a Hallmark card wishing you congratulations on your birthday. I don't doubt it can stick words together, but I don't think it understands, much less reacts, to the story it 'read'.
Happy? Upset? This is like saying "so if you put fruit into a blender and push the button, the blender will produce a smoothie!" Yeah, that's its function. The blender isn't choosing to produce smoothies as distinct from turning those fruit chunks into a kebab.
This is our fundamental disagreement: assigning a mental state and enthusiasm to a set of instructions running on computer hardware. By changing the code, you could equally well get the LLM to sound happy about skinning puppies alive and upset that babies in the neo-natal ward weren't burned to death in a fire. Does that mean the LLM is really happy about torture in that case?
Yes. The reason happiness and mental states are useful as concepts are because they let us predict the actions of others. There is prompt engineering for LLMs that goes along these lines:
It doesn't have a mother and it can't spend the money but it still wants those things, they're added to the prompt to overpower other things it doesn't want to do, like bribery. The distinction between 'it's just patternmatching to the training data' and 'it wants things' isn't helpful. People generally want sex, it's no good to say 'actually that's just their genetic code and if you changed the code they wouldn't want sex', that's not adding much value.
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