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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.
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.
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