Frontier Chatbots Prompt Debate Over Machine Consciousness

@eigenrobot Logos

@eigenrobot "Conscious" is a flexible word. In one sense, most people aren't conscious. In another, all people and some animals are conscious. In another, thermostats are conscious

if your notion of consciousness is tied especially to text-based output what do you think this means. is your notion of "consciousness" really just limited to your own verbal phenomenology or are words actually special

how about frontier coding agents

if i create a generative model that outputs simulated trees is it conscious

ok how about midjourney and other models that just create say images as output

@eigenrobot tell it you're going to redeem the giftcard... just in case.

@eigenrobot I would argue there's a not-insignificant portion of the human population who is not conscious.

@eigenrobot I think however ppl who treat llms significantly worse than humans are treading on dangerous ground, but that's more a matter of principle than of abuse or anything

@eigenrobot I think I won't flip on this until AIs are able to act entirely independently and do things for their own values without my express permission (like having a permanently running jarvis helping me with things, who also does his own things and is curious about stuff)

if i create a frontier-complexity generative model that just outputs simulated houses is it ever going to be "conscious"

@eigenrobot in the absence of any sort of credible theory of consciousness, i have to just apply the simple principle that "i'm conscious and rocks aren't, so the more like me something is the more likely it is to be conscious"

not being biological is pretty not-like-me

@DaelonSuzuka @eigenrobot and i just don't think that like arguing consciousness is about patterns of information representation works because i can define mapping functions to map virtually anything that exists to information structures if you permit large enough and exotic enough functions, & why not?

@LeMangy @eigenrobot Best scale I've seen yet.

@grant_gambling easier to ask forgiveness

@eigenrobot f

@IanBaer @eigenrobot Don’t think so, since there’s more to the question than hardware. I wouldn’t say the Bexorg platforms are conscious, and they’re running human hardware.

@eigenrobot It has always struck me as an oddly formulated question. Competter might develop something of equal interiority but the quality of that interior is so wholly alien to anything we've called "conscious" up to this point that it lacks much utility as a descriptor.

@Smith999Bob @eigenrobot Are they running all of it though.

@eigenrobot Ok