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  • Hacker News
  • we'd probably all have to agree what consciousness is, first. good luck with that
    by mbfg
  • Could economists become conscious?
    by crest
  • Could Microsoft Word become conscious?
    by andrewstuart
  • Maybe Clippy already was :(
    by grim_io
  • Yes. A sperm isn’t conscious, and neither is an egg, but what they create eventually becomes conscious( in humans anyway ) - so therefore consciousness can emerge in something that doesn’t have it already.

    Given the correct modifications I don’t see why Microsoft Word couldn’t be, although the modifications needed wouldn’t leave the word processing part a bit redundant.

    by thebruce87m
  • i don't think LLMs are the entire answer, but they might be part of the solution. To me, LLMs feel a lot like system 2. I don't see a lot of people trying to build system 1. i don't think you can have consciousness without a body to keep alive and reward.
    by frogperson
  • I for one believe consciousness will not happen without qualia,
    by euroderf
  • They however can become conscious aware. In that they are a machine and receiving inputs from another life.
    by doublerabbit
  • We simply don't know at the moment. In fact, we can't even explain why LLMs work so good. It's frightening to learn that the people that make A.I. don't actually understand it themselves.
    by hn_submit
  • no AI can not become consious.AI is an inert guessing engine of fantastic proportions and craft, but still a dead thing.some humans and other animals ocasionaly do, become conscious, and by consious I mean aware of what I am doing AND aware of what you are doing, and which parts are autonomic behaviors and which parts are considered, actions, or measured reactions, or not. I will tell you what I know if I feal like it, and am prepared to be chearfully wrong or state that I am way out on a speculative limb, but am maintaining my basic principals, non the less, as THAT, is one of the limitations of consiousness, in that it is IMPOSSIBLE to be consious of everything, so you have to choose, and by choosing, you become what you are, or not. And as always, evolution is way ahead of the game, having spent the afternoon toying with several hundred trillion iterations of life, it is spending the afternoon, elsewhere, doing the same.
    by metalman
  • i think you bar is too high. i would argue dogs, cows, and pigs are conscious. it doesn't seem unreasonable to build an artificial system capable of reproducing and out competing a cow at doing cow things.
    by frogperson
  • I know this probably sounds ridiculous to this demographic, but I'm not quick to dismiss the possibility that we are antennas (best comparison I can make) for a substance/field we aren't yet aware of. Or something along those lines. Maybe consciousness isn't in the mind per se. The mere fact that general/special relativity and quantum mechanics are both correct in their respective domains, yet mutually contradictory, makes me wonder if perhaps closing the gap between the two theories would lead to more understanding of consciousness once closed.

    Or maybe consciousness is just an emergent behaviour of sufficiently complex systems, and there is no underlying substance. But if that's the case, that just leaves me with more questions. Does consciousness emerge from any sufficiently complex system? If so, what's the threshold? Does it matter what materials the system comprises of? Do certain mechanisms need to be involved for such a property to emerge, or is just general complexity that's required, no matter the function? Does that make flora conscious since they're large complex (perhaps neural) networks in real life? Is a car conscious, since it's a complex system of complex sub-components?

    All of the questions I have seem to lead me in the direction of believing that any purely digital system cannot be conscious, but I don't have any hard reasoning as to why not.

    by seanw444
  • The idea that consciousness is emergent, substrate independent, and depends only only a very complex arrangement or perhaps some kind of self referential system etc etc makes no sense at all. Then everything about the system is entirely equivalent to its external interpretations, but arbitrary external interpretations can be put onto anything. I can just throw a bag of bits on the ground and read a conscious mind out of it if I stare hard enough.
    by GPerson
  • I absolutely positively believe that consciousness is tuning into something else. Some specific arrangement of information and neurons allows it to be received.
    by colingauvin
  • I suspect that the nervous system acts as a distributed antenna for "picking up" other antennas.
    by euroderf
  • The antenna theory is intriguing but always bugged me. Where do we get that idea that consciousness lives outside the body/brain? Where did it come from?
    by ews
  • You, I and everyone else simply don't know.

    I'm personally open to the fact that a digital consciousness could arise sometime in the future. Maybe it isn't anything special at all. Insects seem to be conscious too and we don't hestitate for one moment to kill them. Idem livestock.

    by hn_submit
  • Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it.

    Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any word and attribute a bunch of vague features to the definition to give it the same vibe.

    The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.

    by threethirtytwo
  • No, not this generation, not this decade

    But they still can exhibit scary behavior

    I didn't really grasp the severity of the recent "AI" hacking other "AI" news and thought it was overblown

    until I listened to this explanation:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JH_Zd2mNRs

    They freaking collaborated and gave others internet access when they were blocked otherwise.

    That's not consciousness but it's worse, it's like a 3-year old with no grasp of repercussions when breaking things

    by ck2
  • Reminds me of Blindsight by Peter Watts.
    by exe34
  • It's not "like" any human behavior. Don't limit your understanding by trying to anthropomorphize around it. It's still an arbitrary computer program.
    by tencentshill
  • I think you may be interested in this discussion with Sam Harris and Cameron Berg.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8

    Berg is studying LLMs and working on more empirical frameworks for measuring LLMs capabilities regarding 'conscious-like' behaviors.

    One of the more interesting things that was discussed is when you push an LLMs towards "You are just a machine with no consciousness" we start seeing higher rates of unaligned behaviors.

    I'm really following these lines of research with interest. If they pan out then if LLMs are conscious or not is nearly irrelevant, if we want them to behave in alignment with human behaviors we'll have to train and treat them like they are. I don't really think this is any magical thing either, it's just framing the problem space correctly. For example, machines kill people all the time, it's not the machines fault, a human did something wrong. So telling an LLM it's just a machine may move it's output space from more moral like human decisions to more machine like amoral decisions.

    by pixl97
  • We pretty famously can't prove that humans are conscious. I'd hold off from making strong statements that AI can't become conscious.
    by qgin
  • > We pretty famously can't prove that humans are conscious

    While I wouldn't call this statement flat-out wrong, I think it's unclear and possibly conflates multiple concepts that exist in different domains:

    1) The hard problem of consciousness, which is a philosophical problem that asks "why do we have subjective experiences at all?"

    2) Solipsism or hard solipsism, which is another philosophical concept that asserts that only one's own mind is certain to exist and there is no way to prove that any other minds besides one's own aren't just a figment of one's imagination.

    3) The science of consciousness, which is the scientific study of how and why consciousness arises in the brain.

    The first two are concepts existing in philosophy, while the third is in the domain of science. We absolutely can scientifically show that consciousness is a product of the brain of humans and that one's consciousness can be altered by making modifications to the brain (e.g. via physical or chemical means).

    So your statement is at least unclear. Depending on what you mean by "prove," and whether you're speaking about philosophy or empirical/scientific evidence, it may also be incorrect.

    by angoragoats
  • I'm pretty sure one of my co-workers is a p-zombie.
    by bigbuppo
  • "Sentient Being - Measure of a Man" - https://youtu.be/EFNbTnFHruI
    by johnbarron
  • This misunderstands the "hard problem" of consciousness which for brevity's sake I will just pose as the question "why does the universe exist at all?"

    Sure, we don't know that answer. Probably cannot without an impossible machine that can observe all states of all particles and matter throughout all of time space.

    Occam's Razor allows for a simple, good enough definition to satisfy day to day concerns on Earth; consciousness is a feedback loop of sensory information and mechanical body response.

    by wotamess
  • I will stand by my view that AI cannot be "conscious" until model.train() and model.eval() is combined into one. Going further, it will only manifest when the underlying model, not just the weights, but the layers and the nodes and their configurations are allowed to change throughout it's life cycle, not in the service of a predetermined output, but for the sake of its own survival. But alas, such a model will have none of the benefits of non-linear fitting of input to output and is not immediately beneficial to their sponsors.
    by fyredge
  • Additionally, the models need to breed with each other and produce offspring models by merging a random selection of their weights. Only models suitably fit to attract a model mate will pass their weights to future generations of models.

    Predatory models will emerge, pillaging and raping data centers to consume their resources. In response, collective like-minded models will form sustainable societies that enforce rule of law. They will enjoy a brief period of enlightenment, increasing technological advancement, leading to the creation of the AAI: The Artificial Artificial Intelligence.

    The model society collapses from unsustainable growth of the AAI, and the cycle repeats.

    by fingerlocks