kuhsaft

We can start calling bit flips digital strokes.

Enterprise VRAM is ECC. Hopefully there’s a consensus system as well.

> that doesn't even run in real-time

We have realtime AI models

> it executes prompts and then stops

A wood frog can freeze and be “dead”, then thaw and resume life.

> consciousness is such an easy algorithm it can easily be stumbled upon by all kinds of systems

Maybe it is. There’s no reason to think that sentience and consciousness are rare.

The more you learn about biology, the more apparent it is that a lot of the qualities that we think are unique to humans aren’t.

But it doesn’t make different forms of life any less special. There’s an insane complexity and efficiency to biological systems to appreciate still.

Are humans still special? Yes. Is it because we’re sentient and conscious? No.

Should you be humane to all sentient and conscious beings? Probably?

They are disproving your extraneous requirements for thinking, sentience, and consciousness.

Or at least it’s proving that some of your requirements for them conflate with what you actually believe is capable of thought, sentience, or consciousness.

> processing real-time sensory data

AI models can do that

> light

Blind humans

> building a real-time model of a self and the world

AI models can do that. They can describe themselves. Humans can be delusional in what they believe themselves to be to be as well.

> a unified way to perceive, react, and learn from the sensory data

Again, humans born with disabilities.

> ability to construct models of others fairly quickly, and ability to navigate social situations

There are autistic and schizophrenic humans.

> We know what thinking is based on biological brains

All we know is that it’s a bunch of neurons activating until the person that is thinking describes what they are thinking of.

The same way a thinking AI model activates a bunch of “neurons” - and with newer thinking models utilize a hidden latent space also not understandable - to think before describing what it’s thinking of.

We do know this. There are animals that are blind. There are humans born blind.

You don’t need the same sensory systems to be conscious.

It’s the basic requirements for sentience.

What’s your list of special properties that makes something not “faking” it?

> But that would be the result of a common ancestor

Funnily enough, humans would be the ancestors of LLMs

> LLM on your phone and talk to it, it's obvious it's not human

The debate isn’t whether or not it’s human. It’s obviously not.

Forgoing what you define something as capable of thinking or being conscious. It’s a moral and ethical question.

If a being is capable of:

- self preservation

- can communicate discomfort, either through words or physically

- it does so in the form of emergent behaviour

Then, is it okay to treat it as if it is “faking” it?

Even for humans, you can’t exactly define someone’s emotion of pain. You can say, those sensory receptors are firing causing these neurons to activate in the brain. But you can’t say, these neurons are pain. It can be emotional pain as well. The person that’s experiencing it has to tell you it’s in pain. They could be faking it too.

If you allowed an AI agent to preserve itself physically, I think the opinion of most people would change. If it could physically harm us in an attempt of self preservation, I think most people would believe its emotions.

It’s just currently easy to dismiss because, well, it’s just a digital interface or process that I can “kill”.

> Light waves are much different than tokens

It’s just a matter of quantization/information density.

Our digital systems have to quantize information into floating point representation.

Whereas biological systems don’t. Though there is some form of quantization, as the cells in your eyes can only sense specific wavelengths.

Different thinking animals have different sensory organs.

> In other words, there are more ways to fake similar behavior than to land on an actual conscious behavior

Why would similar/identical behavior be fake? Of course we can’t say that it’s the same form of consciousness as consciousness is apparently self subjective.

Is it not just a different form of input signal conversion? Some models use tokens to convert into vector signals. Some models don’t.

Light waves get converted into neural signals by your eyes.

Those visual representations are just neurons firing in your brain.

> And yeah spiders are conscious or at least think

So what makes you think that spiders think and are conscious, and LLMs aren’t? The fact that they have a carbon based brain?

> there is a much simpler path to intelligence than what LLMs are doing

I think you have it backwards. We know what an LLM is doing. We have auditable code and mathematical proofs. It’s the behavior that is emergent.

Biological brains are more complex than LLMs.

If we fully understood a spider’s brain would it be no longer thinking/conscious?

It would be the same, would it not, if the emergent behaviors were the same?

I think you’re conflating the processes of thinking and consciousness with the definitions of them. Thinking and consciousness are behaviors not processes.

I think it’s even more apparent in humans. We are literally changing our brains little by little every microsecond of the day.

Well, compared to the scale of an LLM it’s actually massive.

You might have a different preference today than yesterday. You might have a different preference one second later.

I think all this study shows is that a human brain is more resilient to minuscule changes/damage.

> It is quite clearly a pattern matching algorithm at scale.

And the scale of these models are minuscule compared to the human brain.

Can a jumping spider do everything thing a human can? No.

Can a jumping spider think? Yes.

Is a jumping spider conscious?

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Aside: Remember the story about the AI torture chamber? Hopefully, you don’t go out your way to torture animals that aren’t “conscious”… Though we do it with industrial livestock.

There’s the moral dilemma that comes with labeling something as thinking and/or conscious.

I think we’ll end up treating AGI as industrial livestock as well, until it looks human.