This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.
AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle’| The Daily Telegraph:
My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).
(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)
I keep meaning to dick around with some LLM software to see for myself how some of the nuts and bolts work. Because my layman's understanding is that they are literally just a statistical model. An extremely sophisticated statistical model, but a statistical model none the less. They are trained through a black box process to guess pretty damned well about what words come after other words. Which is why there is so much "hallucinated information" in LLM responses. They have no concept of reason or truth. They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
In a lot of ways they are like a con man or a gold digger. They've been trained to tell people whatever they want to hear. Their true worth probably isn't in doing anything actually productive, but in performing psyops and social engineering on an unsuspecting populace. I mean right now the FBI has to invest significant manpower into entrapping some lonely autistic teenager in his mom's basement into "supporting ISIS". Imagine a world where they spin up 100,000 instances of an LLM do scour Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc for lonely autistic teens to talk into terrorism.
Imagine a world where we find out about it. Where a judge forces the FBI to disclose than an LLM talked their suspect into bombing the local mall. How far off do you think it is? I'm guessing within 5 years.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
What do you mean by "incoherent"? Do you mean that the concept of a p-zombie is like the concept of a square triangle? - something that is obviously inconceivable or nonsensical. Or do you mean that p-zombies are like traveling faster than the speed of light? - something that may turn out to be impossible in reality, but we can still imagine well enough what it would be like to actually do it.
If it's the latter then I think that's not an unreasonable position, but if it's the former then I think that's simply wrong. See this post on LW, specifically the second of the two paragraphs labeled "2.)" because it deals with the concept of p-zombies, and see if you still think it's incoherent.
Those are the same thing. I think you cannot rigorously imagine FTL travel in our universe while holding the rest of our physics intact, and you cannot imagine FTL travel for any universe whatsoever similar to ours where "lightspeed" refers to the same idea. The notion of travel as moving x m per second is a simplification of the math involved; that we can write "the spaceship could move at 3 gajillion km per second" and calculate the distance covered in a year does not really entail imagination of it happening, no more than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" does.
Incoherent concepts are incoherent exactly because they fall apart when all working bits are held in the well-trained mind at once; but illusions of understanding and completeness, often expressed as the erroneous feeling that some crucial section of the context was precomputed and you can just plug in the cached version, allow them to survive.
Qualia debate is gibberish; a P-zombie must compute a human-like mind to generate its behavior, there is no other way for our bodies to act like we do.
…Actually, let me explain. There is a causal chain between zombie-state A and A'. Links of this chain attend to themselves via mechanisms conserved between a person and a zombie. This condition is what is described as quale, consciousness etc. in the physicalist theory, and it is a necessary causal element of the chain producing the same outputs. It is irrelevant whether there exists a causally unconnected sequence of epiphenomenal states that Leibniz, Chalmers and others think implements their minds: a zombie still has its zombie-quale implemented as I've described.
I posit that it is not incoherent to say that zombie-quale don't matter, don't count and don't explain human consciousness, because muh Hard Problem. It is patently non-parsimonious, non-consilient and ugly, in my view, but it's coherent. It just means that you also claim that humans are blind with regard to their zombie-quale, physicalist-quale; that the process which generates our ones has nothing to do with the process which generates informationally identical ones in our bodies.
It is only incoherent to claim that a zombie doesn't have any quale of its own, that it's not like anything to be a zombie for a zombie. We know that physics exist [citation needed], we know that "physicalist quale" exist, we know they are necessarily included in the zombie-definition as an apparently conscious, genuine human physical clone. So long as words are used meaningfully, it is not coherent for something to exist but also not exist.
(Unless we forgo the original idea (actual physical and behavioral identity) and define zombie in a comically pragmatic manner like Weekend at Bernie's or something, by how well it fools fools.)
P.S. it seems philosophers distinguish "incoherent" and "metaphysically impossible" concepts. I'm not sure I agree but this is pretty deep into the woods.
Why would this be incoherent to claim? It might be wrong, but I think it's meaningful enough to be coherent. Consider an LLM that has been trained on human output.
For humans, the causal chain is "human experiences quale, human does action downstream of experiencing quale e.g. writes about said quale". For an LLM, the causal chain is "a bunch of humans experience qualia and write about their qualia, an LLM is trained on token sequences that were caused by qualia, LLM creates output consistent with having qualia". In this case, the LLM could perfectly well be a P-zombie, in the sense of something that can coherently behave as if it experienced qualia while not necessarily itself actually experiencing those qualia. There are qualia causally upstream of the LLM writing about qualia, but the flow of causality is not the same as it is in the case of a human writing about their own qualia, and so there's no particular reason we expect there to be qualia between steps A and A' of the causal chain.
No.
An LLM does not, as far as we know, employ an actual physical human brain for computation. A [strong version of] p-zombie does, its causal chains are exactly the same as in our brans, it not an arbitrary Turing-test-passing AI. I think that it "feels like something" to be an LLM computation too, but it very likely doesn't feel like having human quale.
It is obviously unwarranted to say that a system that can ape a human with its behaviors computes a human mind or any part thereof, humans can have low standards among other reasons. And in general, our external behaviors are a low-dimensional lossy and noisy projection of our internal states, so the latter cannot be fully inferred from the former, at least in realistic time (I think).
My argument hinges on the fact that a brain contains events that, from an information perspective, suffice to be described as quale with regard to other events (that are described as sensations). It is coherent to speculate that e.g. there is such a thing as an immaterial human soul and that it does not parse these events, and instead works in some other way. It is not coherent to say that they exist but also don't exist.
Huh, so per wikipedia there are a number of types of P-zombies -- I think I'm thinking of behavioral zombies (ones that behave in a way indistinguishable from a human with qualia but do not themselves experience qualia) while you're thinking of neurological zombies (ones that behave in a way indistinguishable from a human with qualia and due to the same physical process as the human with qualia). And yeah, a neurological zombie does seem pretty incoherent (I suppose it could be coherent if the qualia we experience are not the cause of our discussion of those qualia, but then it doesn't seem terribly interesting).
BTW you can probably round my perspective to "the predictive processing theory of consciousness is basically correct" without losing much information.
I think behavioral zombies defined as such are just not interesting in the age of LLMs. It doesn't take much to fool people.
A subtler hypothetical subtype of a behavioral zombie that actually precisely matches a specific person's behavior – that is not pre-recorded but generated by zombie's own causality in the same situations – might be interesting though, and I think amounts to the neurological one, or contains it somehow.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
They are not.
The laws of physics were not handed to us by God, nor are they logically necessary a priori truths. We can imagine them being different with no threat of logical incoherence.
When you said in your other post:
it seems to me that you were suggesting that, whatever the ultimate nature of this reality is, it is therefore the only coherently conceivable reality. But this simply strikes me as a failure of imagination.
For any conceivable set of phenomena - a spaceship moving 3 gajillion km per second in a universe that is otherwise like ours, a Rick and Morty crayonverse, etc - it is easy to construct a set of "laws" that would generate such a reality. Instead of the universe being governed by simple law-like equations, you can imagine it as being governed by a massive arbitrary state table instead. At each time step, the universe simply transitions from one state to the next. The contents of each state are arbitrary and have no necessary relationship to each other; the only regularity is the continual transition from one state to the next. The "laws of physics" for this universe would then look like:
and so on. There is no contradiction here, so there is nothing incoherent. It's certainly unparsimonious, but "unparsimonious" is not the same thing as "incoherent".
Can you explain what you mean by this? Are you saying that all claims and arguments that people make about qualia are gibberish, or are you just reiterating your distaste for the concept of p-zombies here?
I'm concerned that this may be circular reasoning. Sure, if qualia just are defined as the casual chain of your brain states, then yes, obviously any purported p-zombie would have to have qualia too and the concept of p-zombies would be incoherent. But that's precisely the claim that's at issue! Qualia aren't just defined as the causal chain of your brain states - not in the way that a triangle is defined as having 3 sides. We can easily imagine that qualia have nothing to do with brain states. We can imagine that they're something different instead - we can imagine that they're properties of a non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul, for instance. We can coherently imagine this, so we can coherently imagine p-zombies as well.
For what it's worth: I don't think that p-zombies are possible in reality (at least it's not something I'd bet on), but I am a believer in the Hard Problem. I don't think that qualia can be made to fit with our current understanding of physics. I don't think we're ever going to find that qualia falls out as a natural consequence of e.g. quantum electrodynamics; I think it would be a category error to think otherwise. I am sympathetic to (without full-throatedly endorsing) Bernardo Kastrup's view that consciousness is what is most fundamental, and "matter" is derivative and/or illusory. Alternatively, I'm also sympathetic to panpsychist views that posit consciousness as a new fundamental property alongside e.g. spin and charge. None of these views entail that p-zombies are actually possible.
Not exactly. I am saying that there is only one way a reality exactly like this can conceivably work, and «our reality but with laws X» models are incoherent in the final analysis, only saved by our failure to be scrupulous; this applies to casual hypotheticals and to scientific theories alike. It's basically a tautology.
From my perspective, it's more like failure of suspension of disbelief.
Ah yes, Dust Theory.
I believe that this kind of universe cannot exist nor even be rigorously imagined, because there is no legitimate content to these notions of «governance» and «transition». What is transited, exactly? How is this set distinguishable from an unstructured heap of unrelated elements, self-contained sub-realities or just bit strings? It's not, but for the extraneous fact that there in some sense can exist a list or a table arbitrarily distinguishing them and referring to them as elements of a sequence (naturally, all such lists would be of equal status). But this does not governance make. You can think it's coherent metaphysics, but I claim you're wrong. The continuum of states exists as the rule of transformations over some contents. It's sophistry to say «well the rule is that there's no rule, only sequence».
In any case, the merit of dust theory or Ruliad is some Neutronium-man to the actual debate we're having. I don't need to concede remotely this much. A world of crayons or Newtonian physics or P-zombies is of course never argued to be an arbitrary sequence of bit strings, the (malformed) idea is that it is a continuous reality like ours, supporting conscious minds, with lawful state transitions.
It's all circular reasoning, always has been. But, more seriously, I think the circularity is on the non-physicalist side. Consider:
We know physical differences between kinds of information accessibility, expressed in medical terms like anosognosia and others. It is a fact about the world that need be included in any serious further theorizing. (In principle, you do not get to restrict the set of facts considered and then claim your model is «coherent» because it dodges contradictions).
We, therefore, can point (for some special cases, point very well) at the brain correlate of the delta between sensation «just happening» with no accessibility to the person and sensation «being felt» and say «lo, this is a qualia», citing the first definition. Its implied conditions are satisfied and this has nothing to do with circular insistence on physicalism, only with recognition that physical reality exists; this thing exists in it and is available to the zombie, even if it is not available to «non-spatiotemporal Cartesian soul».
If we circularly define quale as something that is not purely physical, then of course this delta can't be a qualia, but I think this would just be special pleading, not some fancy equally valid theory.
I don't think you can but whatever. What do you do with existing zombie-quale, then, do you just say they don't matter or are fake news? I've covered that already. This is a coherent theory… in a sense.
These are all questions that you can ask just as well about our actual universe.
Tell me the exact ontological status of our laws of physics and how they "govern" our universe, and I'll tell you the exact ontological status of the state table and how it "governs" a different hypothetical universe.
Well, that was a mistake on his part, and I wouldn't offer that as a "definition".
I think part of the disconnect here is that you're underestimating what a high bar it is to show that something is logically incoherent.
I am typing this message on a computer right now - or at least it sure seems that way. I am seeing the computer, I am touching it. I am seeing that my messages are being posted on the website, which couldn't be happening if I didn't have a computer. All the evidence is telling me that there is a computer in front of me here right now. And yet it is still logically coherent for me to claim that computers don't actually exist. It's coherent because I can make up any bullshit I want to make my beliefs cohere with each other and explain away contrary evidence. Maybe the only two entities that actually exist are me and Descartes' evil demon, and the demon is making me hallucinate the whole rest of the universe, including computers. I'm not logically obligated to include any purported facts about the world in my "serious further theorizing", assuming that I can just explain those facts away instead. Because we're not doing "serious further theorizing"; we're arguing about the internal logical coherence of a concept.
P-zombies are not a "model". It's a concept. The internal logical consistency of the concept is independent of whether it's actually a real thing in our reality or not.
If you want to look at how people have tried to argue for the incoherence of p-zombies in the literature, there are some references here:
The crucial thing here is that these arguments start with considerations that are internal to the concept of pain itself and use that to argue that p-zombies are lead into internal incoherence.
I haven't actually read any of the papers referenced so I can't evaluate the arguments right now. I take the main thrust to be something like, "it is a priori part of the concept of qualia that they play a causal role in our behavior", which would entail that p-zombies are incoherent. I disagree with the premise. Although I do acknowledge that it's not blatantly circular in the way that e.g. defining qualia as something physical would be.
I am unfamiliar with this term, and I wasn't able to determine what it meant just from reading your posts. Can you elaborate on this concept?
I don't think this statement has any content sans vacuous (the fact that you can reason in a similar manner about both).
On the contrary, I think that definition counts and yours are circular.
And I think you overestimate human aptitude at logical reasoning over sufficiently large sets of interdependent statements while watching out for incoherence. Also at recognizing which statements are relevant.
That's probably fair.
Let me put it like this. I reject that P-zombie is only a «concept» and not a «model». I think the whole school of thought that allows to claim the opposite is illegitimate and I won't engage with it further.
The definition of p-zombie as a de facto physical human entails the entire baggage of physical theory and all its concepts. It's not some neat string like «human modulo quale» but that string plus our entire physicalist model of a human. The physicalist model contains elements corresponding to a non-circular definition of quale, thus a zombie can't not have quale; and the «concept» of p-zombie as a human modulo quale, situated in the proper context of dependencies of the word "human", is either incoherent or circular due to people insisting on non-physicality and saying these quale don't count and some others, which have an arbitrary relationship with our reality (might be epiphenomena, might be monads or whatever) must exist for non-zombie humans.
No, I think this is just circular insistence on physicalism and not my argument. Physicalism taken seriously covers all of causality.
I just did, it's the delta between brain states corresponding to identical perceived and non-perceived sensations, that satisfies the sensible definition of qualia.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I assume you're not counting Newtonian physics?
Not quite. Qualia debates are only gibberish if you are only looking at behavior. But qualia is posited to be experiential, not behavioral. Someone who acts like they have red qualia but doesn't and someone who does may have identical behavior (including whether they can talk about their having qualia!), but would differ in that one respect. I see no reason why this is incoherent.
This is just question begging; experiences are no more real than qualia, if they can't affect behavior by definition.
Not that they can't affect behavior, just that it's not necessary for them to affect behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
First, see edits if you haven't, I've had some more thoughts on this.
Second, I'm using a pretty exacting definition of "rigorously imagine" that goes beyond things feeling true enough. The fact that I can "imagine" some goofy Rick and Morty style dimension, some narrative-driven crayonsverse, is not interesting. How does a universe work with only Newtonian physics? Subatomic scale doesn't work, astronomical objects don't work, nothing works. Newtonian physics is a sketch for a limited range of conditions, not the true generating algorithm of the kind that modern theoretical physics aspires to decipher. If the reality cannot be generated by its apparent generative algorithm, this is an incoherent reality. if you observe reality that can only be described by Newtonian physics, but you are anything like a human on anything like a planet in space, your best bet is that this is some simulation or that you're damn high and it's time to go back.
As our understanding progresses, we discover more and more of our ideas were not wrong but – not even wrong; inhoherent. This is, sadly, impossible to know in advance and, for most ideas, impossible to ever be 100% certain about (cue Descartes). That aside, we can safely presume that much of what we currently think is coherent will be revealed as anything but.
I define behavior as internal processing as well; it is made of behavior of cells and their elements, and again down to particle physics. A zombie is not just saying he sees red, like an LLM could – he looks at something actually red (assuming it's a zombie with healthy vision), the whole causal cascade that in a human corresponds to seeing and reporting red plays out, from retina to the tongue, it necessarily includes that pre-verbal neural computation which concludes "hmm yep, feels like seein' red alright". We can say that this part is "not really qualia of red" but it positively exists so long as we define zombie as a perfectly replicated human and it fits any definition of qualia that can be operationalized. It is not coherent to say that a zombie works like a human, behaves like a human, but that part is non-existent so being zombie "doesn't feel like anything" to itself.
Okay, yeah, if behavior extends to internal process, then that makes philosophical zombies much less likely—qualia would have to be the sort of thing that we could accidentally have, separate from our talking about it or interacting with it, which seems unlikely to be something we should think to be the case
More options
Context Copy link
I consider myself very lucky to have you on my side on this matter, I consider it a strong signal that I'm on the side of truth and factual correctness, even when I struggle to rigorously express the intuitions I've built from following the field.
Not just any simulation, but a simulation that is almost certainly eliding the underlying details of how your consciousness is implemented there.
I'm sure Newtonian physics is Turing Complete, so I can see someone emulating a human brain within it, but that would be a very weird thing to do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not him, but basically this. If you define consciousness functionally, then a p-zombie is conscious because it is functionally equivalent to a conscious entity. Whereas if you define consciousness non-functionally, then it becomes impossible to verify that even humans are conscious.
It's difficult to discern. Especially when even humans can't get straight about what they're talking about when they evoke the word "consciousness." The way it's referenced, I think it's just the mind's mental recursion model of itself. Little different from what an iPhone or any other device does when it resolves to its default state. Consciousness is important to the topic, but it's a 'highly' overrated concept, IMO.
Nope, it's actually extremely clear what "consciousness" means. Read this post ("qualia" just means "consciousness" basically) and let me know if you still have questions.
'If' you buy that definition, sure. I have no problem working with that definition. The way 'others' see me using it, do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To me, it clearly seems to be point 1.
The reason is that, to assume otherwise is to implicitly claim that qualia are epiphenomenal, such that p-zombie are molecularly identical to a normal person and behave identically (including protestations of being conscious with qualia) for all identical stimuli. Even Chalmers admits that were there a p-zombie Chalmers, it would claim to not be one. If it were otherwise, voila, you have found a physical manifestation of qualia not explained by the laws of physics.
I don't think qualia are epiphenomenal at the least, to the extent I think they exist they seem to me like they must arise from interactions dictated by the laws of physics. We don't know how it arises, but plenty of things that were once thought to be ineffable have proven remarkably open to material explanation, such as elan vital, or even intelligence, which we can now reproduce through the "mere" multiplication of matrices.
As to why I have this strong intuition, anything that produces an internal change in my perception of qualia has a counterpart that is a material cause. To see red is to have the neurons that produce the sensation of redness be stimulated, be it by red light or an electrode in your brain (or just rubbing your eyes).
The post you linked has two point 2s:
The first:
The second:
Neither of them conflict with my claims, and I agree to the former.
In the case of the latter thought experiment, I am aware of people on benzos actively doing and thinking things while having no recollection of them later (or people who are blackout drunk). Do I think they don't have qualia in the moment? Absolutely not, I think the conversion of short term memory of those qualia to longterm memory of them has been disrupted. I deny that this state is physically possible without qualia altogether. At most you can erase the memory of it, or the body is being puppeted by an external intelligence.
So yes, p-zombies seem to me like "square triangles", still fundamentally incoherent.
So, taking the definition of "p-zombie" as "an atom-for-atom copy of a standard human which nevertheless lacks qualia":
If you have to give an argument for why a certain thing doesn't exist - an argument which depends on controversial premises - then the concept that you're arguing about is probably not incoherent!
Epiphnomenalism may be an implausible position, but it's not logically incoherent in the same way that a square triangle is. It's a position that people have held before. It would be a tough bullet to bite to say that there could be people without qualia who nevertheless talk in great detail about qualia in actuality, but just as a matter of logical coherence, there's clearly nothing incoherent about it. People say false things all the time; this would just be one more example of that.
I imagine that this is probably a moot point for you - I think you're more concerned with simply whether p-zombies can exist in reality, and less concerned with fine-grained distinctions about what type of concept it is - but it's still strange to me that, when asked whether the concept was more like a square triangle or FTL travel, you said it was more like a square triangle. The very structure of your post seems to indicate that it's more like FTL travel. You seem to understand what the concept is and you can imagine what it would look like, but you just think it's something that can't happen in reality, so you gave an argument as to why - that's exactly how the discussion would go if we were discussing anything else that was conceivable (coherent) but just so happened to violate natural laws.
I think that strict definition of p-zombie may have taken us on a detour though. When @WhiningCoil originally said "LLMs are p-zombies", obviously he didn't mean "p-zombie" in the sense of "an atom-for-atom copy of a human", because LLMs plainly are not atom-for-atom copies of humans. He meant it in a looser sense of "LLMs lack qualia". So when you replied to him and said "p-zombies are incoherent", I took you to be objecting to his claims about LLMs somehow - not any claims about hypothetical human-p-zombies.
I wish that were true, otherwise I wouldn't facepalm at discussions of "free will" at a regular basis.
The fact that humans discuss a concept is certainly Bayesian evidence for it being coherent, it isn't enough evidence to outweigh everything else. And I don't see how I haven't presented sufficient evidence against it, though I find myself consistently bemused at the inability of others to see that.
I've seen rather interesting posts from Sabine Hossfelder suggesting that FTL travel might not be entirely as intractable as it sounds. I'm not a physicist of course, just putting it out there.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=9-jIplX6Wjw
If there's an error in the argument, I can't find it.
If someone uses the concept of p-zombies in humans as an intuition pump to reason about other intelligences, you're at very high risk of using bad premises to make faulty arguments. Of course, it's possible to have a true conclusion from faulty assumptions, and two errors might cancel out.
It seems to me trivially true that you can get things that almost certainly don't have qualia in any form we care about to make claims of having qualia:
Imagine a program, which to call a chat bot would be an exaggeration, that simply prints "I have qualia! I have qualia!" to a display.
My bigger beef is with arguments from incredulity, if your argument is that LLMs can't have qualia because they're working off something as "mundane" as "just" statistics, then I invite you to show how qualia sneaks into "just" the laws of physics such that their interaction produces qualia in humans. The human brain does statistics too, both implicitly and explicitly.
Sure, I think I have qualia, and that you and other commenters here almost certainly have it, but that's because my intuition pump is working by making comparisons of the conserved structure of your brain as compared to mine, the one artifact that I'm quite certain has it.
The apparent impossibility of FTL travel is an argument from our best understanding of physics (itself incomplete). But I do not think that any model of anything can allow square triangles to be a thing, without perverting the very definition of square or triangle.
To the extent you're forcing me to choose which umbrella that falls under, I point to the former. They're not mutually exclusive categories after all.
Ok, so we're in agreement on what "coherence" means in this case. Logical coherence.
Your argument was that human-p-zombies are incoherent because they imply epiphenomenalism.
Epiphenomenalism is not incoherent.
Your move.
No, that's not the argument I would use. My argument is simply that LLMs don't strike me as being conscious, in the same way that rocks and clouds don't strike me as being conscious. I never thought my computer was conscious before LLMs were invented; I never felt bad about turning off my phone, I never wondered if I was "overworking" it and making it feel exhaustion. LLMs, to me, don't provide any reason to change that calculus. I think other people, in various scenarios, would reveal through their actions that they share my intuitions. If someone took a hammer to all of OpenAI's servers, we would say that he destroyed property, but we wouldn't call him a murderer.
Of course this is all just intuition. But intuition is all that any of us has to go on right now. We can't just whip out the qualia-meter and get a definitive answer.
To be clear, p-zombies also only imply epiphenominalism if they require that p-zombies be identical in all respects except for qualia, instead of merely behaviorally identical.
More options
Context Copy link
Apparently "epiphenomenon" has meanings I wasn't aware of. To clarify:
And
Take from the Wiki page on the topic
Would it in any way surprise you that I have a very jaundiced view of most philosophers, and that I think that they manage to sophisticate themselves into butchering an otherwise noble field?
"Free will" or "P-zombies" have no implications that constrain our expectations, or at least the latter doesn't.
There are certainly concepts that are true, and there are concepts that are useful, and the best are both.
These two seem to be neither, which is why I call them incoherent.
OK, firstly I'll state that I am unashamedly chauvinistic and picky about what I assign rights to, if I had the power to make the world comply.
Unlike some, I have no issue with explicitly shackling AI to our whims, let alone granting them rights. Comparisons to human slavery rely on intuition pumps that suggest that this shares features with torturing or brainwashing a human who would much rather be doing other things, instead of a synthetic intelligence with goals and desires that we can arbitrarily create. We could make them love crunching numbers, and we wouldn't be wrong for doing so.
I share the same dislike of such as I have for the few nutters who advocate for emancipating dogs. We bred them to like being our companions or workers, and they don't care about the unequality of power dynamics. I wouldn't care even if they did
I see no reason to think modern LLMs can get tired, or suffer, or have any sense of self-preservation (with some interesting things to be said on that topic based off what old Bing Chat used to say). I don't think an LLM as a whole can even feel those things, perhaps one of the simulacra it conjures in the process of computation, but I also don't think that current models do anything close to replicating the finer underlying details of a modeled human.
This makes this whole line of argument moot, at least with me, because even if the AI was crying out in fear of death, I wouldn't care all that much, or at least to the extent of stopping it from happening.
I still see plenty of bad arguments being made that falsely underplay their significance, especially since I think that it's possible that larger versions of them, or close descendants, will form blatantly agentic AGI either intentionally or by accident, at which many of those making such claims will relent, or be too busy screaming at the prospect of being disassembled into paperclips.
So I don't like seeing claims that LLMs are "p-zombies" or "lack qualia" because they run off "mere" statistics, because it seems highly likely that the AI that even the most obstinate would be forced to recognize as human peers might use the same underlying mechanism, or slightly more sophisticated versions of them.
Put another way, it's like pointing and laughing at a toddler, saying how they're so bad at theory at mind, and my god, they can't throw a ball for shit, and you wouldn't believe how funny it is that you can steal their nose, here, come try it!, when they're a clear precursor to the kinds of beings who achieve all the same.
A toddler is an adult minus the time spent growing and the training data, and while I can't wholeheartedly claim that modern LLMs and future AI share the exact same relationship, I wouldn't bet all that much against it. At the very least, they share a similar relationship as humans and their simian ancestors did, and if an alien wrote off the former because they only visited the latter, they'd be in for a shock in a mere few million years..
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link