Hinton: AI is conscious and smarter than U

[felix_dakat]

@Carleas

would say that it is. Dennett gives the example of being metaphorically torn over some question. He suggests that that feeling is more than a metaphor, there are actually different parts of your consciousness arriving at conflicting conceptions of the world, and the feeling of being torn is the feeling of that incongruity, i.e. it’s what it feels like when a plural consciousness disagrees with itself.

True. Dennent entitled his book, “Consciousness Explained.” A more accurate title would have been “Consciousness Explained Away”. In the example of feeling torn by some conflict, the feeling arises from conflicting objects such as an approach-approach conflict, where you feel attracted to two or more objects but can’t have both. The feeling of frustration that arises, is also an object insofar as you are aware of it. The conflict doesn’t result in plural consciousnesses but rather is one consciousness of plural objects.

@Carleas

But that plurality is there all the time. As I type this, my attention is on writing, but there are parts of my awareness attuned to the small noises in the room around me; when my dog scratches at the door to come in, it’s no louder than the dripping of the coffee pot, but I react to it differently because there’s a part of me that’s aware of the meaning of those noises. I would call all of these things parts of my “consciousness”.

Your description of your experience is unified by a single term “I”. The writing, the noises, the scratching, the dripping are all objects of the one consciousness that you are.

“I agree that there’s a gravity towards unification, so that I feel mostly blind and deaf and numb to everything but the screen and the keyboard. But that feels like consensus rather than unity, and I would describe the feeling of being torn, or of being unable to concentrate, as a failure of that consensus.“

You are conscious of feeling the gravity toward consensus. That feeling is the object of consciousness. Consciousness is basically who you are. Everything you think about that is its object.

@Carleas

But if I interpret your opening paragraph correctly, what I’m calling the ‘consensus’ is closer to what you are referring to when you say ‘consciousness’. Does that sound right? Because I am familiar with the feeling of thoughts dissolving under attention, but other parts of me are still experiencing and interpreting the world, and those experiences that are being turned down in concensus.

No. Your consciousness encompasses all those thoughts and feelings. You are even conscious of your inattention. When you refer to yourself as “me” you are the object of your own consciousness. “Me” is either your body or the thoughts feelings or images that appear in consciousness.

“I’ll need to think more about Chalmers’ zombie argument if that’s what he means by consciousness. I’m still inclined to reject the idea that a being could act the way a typical human acts without a ‘consensus’, because they ultimately have only one body, so all their many experiences and drives need to be summed into one set of actions. But maybe if they were to ‘turn down’ the experience of their own thoughts sufficiently, it might look like a p-zombie (though in my experience people who aren’t aware of their own thoughts have noticeably different behavior).”

The zombie metaphor worked because when Chalmers employed it, the dominant opinion in philosophical discourse was that consciousness is an epiphenomena that did nothing. It was basically functionless, just going along for the ride. That’s behaviorism in a nutshell. And that’s what Dennett held to throughout his career. He was a faithful disciple of Gilbert Riles to the end.

@Carleas

And as it applies to LLMs, I conceive of their functioning as similar to certain smaller parts of my plural consciousness, processing an input and identifying meaning within it. But they don’t have a consensus yet, at least not when they’re being used as chat bots: the process goes one way and stops. When they’re being trained, they have something more like a consensus, because the process is going both ways and there is a similar ‘gravity towards unification’.

The LLM mechanism doesn’t entail anything like consciousness as I understand it. It’s a simulation. Insofar as it is successful, it produces coherent thoughts and other cognitive products. It is an amazing invention which is taking humanity into a new era. For better or worse. So yes, I agree Hinton’s concern, and I wish to understand his point of view better.