proc0

It's the corporate approach to game development, which should be creative driven. I think it's really hard for a large company to remain creative, it grows in bureaucracy and non-contributors by default.

Wow, literally everything in the supermarket has detrimental effects. Either it has too much sugar or a sugar substitute or genetically modified. We're seriously failing as a civilization when it comes to nutrition in modern times.

It used to be only big tech but now large companies are sprinting towards Black mirror episodes.

Yeah that's the status quo. No surprise it's Grok that deviates.

It's interesting that the current AI revolution began with transformers that came out of Google who was trying to apply AI to search, and now that seems to be the an unpopular use for it. I think it's one of the better use cases for it. It's great at compressing knowledge and if it can search the web and summarize things I don't see much of a downside. As far as making a profit, I don't see why they wouldn't charge a small amount for it, and that way they're not shoving everyone to use it.

I should rephrase on the first one. We only have one source of reference for what thinking is and where it happens.

On the second one, yes there can be multiple ways that consciousness can manifest in wildly different systems, but what theory do we have that would validate these other different kinds of consciousness? Without that theory for validation the safer bet is to stick with what we already have a reference to, unless the claim is that consciousness is such an easy algorithm it can easily be stumbled upon by all kinds of systems, i.e. a bunch of matrix multiplications that doesn't even run in real-time (it executes prompts and then stops). I think that is not likely in my opinion.

We evolved to handle light as a sensory stream of data, whether a few are born without part of the system (usually the sensors and not the processing system) is something else. My point is more that we don't really know. The exceptions are not disproving how biological systems evolved.

I would include processing real-time sensory data, i.e. light, building a real-time model of a self and the world, a unified way to perceive, react, and learn from the sensory data. This would be for consciousness in general. Once we're talking about human-level consciousness where language is involved, the list is longer, with theory of mind, ability to construct models of others fairly quickly, and ability to navigate social situations.

Why those properties though? What's so special about them? I just have a longer list of things it would need to satisfy before I can say faking doesn't matter.

Right, but we don't know how much that is necessary for a conscious system. Maybe processing light has certain properties necessary for consciousness. If we don't know this then for me the safe bet is to say it is not conscious unless the system is processing at least a similar stream of information that maps to light waves.

That's the question, it's the Chinese room or philosophical zombie question. How can we tell them apart... but we're not even there yet.

If you put an LLM on your phone and talk to it, it's obvious it's not human. It doesn't have the same social context, it doesn't respond as quickly, it clearly won't form a theory of m ind connection like two humans socializing. So then why would we jump to the conclusion there is something there when the only example we have are humans (that use language and are conscious)?

It is a different signal conversion, but the question is whether that difference is meaningful or not. Light waves are much different than tokens. I think it affects the overall system of our brains much more than we currently know. Having access to so much data has probably shaped biological brains at its "core" (initial evolution stages).

The starting point is the consciousness we already know. That is ourselves, which most people then extend to others, however it's not hard to then extended to at the very least mammals. I then extend this to most animals (whether it's 100% is irrelevant for this point). That extension from my consciousness to all animals is a small logical leap based on biology and our shared tree of life... however it doesn't mean other consciousnesses are not possible. It's more so that they would require a lot more evidence and a proper theory of C. in order to validate. Without that theory we can only point at similar C., of which LLMs are not displaying. They are showing a different kind of "cognition" if we can even call it that (I do think it's debatable).

So it's more a hueristic. We know one kind of C., therefore that's what we should look for. Statistically it's probable that there are many more ways to show similarities with conscious behavior which are NOT conscious, then it is for a divergent behavior to happen to be conscious. In other words, there are more ways to fake similar behavior than to land on an actual conscious behavior that is somehow much different than what we know.

I just don't know if "similar" is good enough. We know what thinking is based on biological brains, so if we are to conclude it happens in machines, the experiment should have identical results, or it's more probable that it's something completely different.

The way around this is to have a predictive theory of how thoughts work, and if that is proven true, then use that to analyze the LLMs. So far we have no such theory so I think the only tool is to look at the exact behavior match.

There's probably an analog to it, but I really doubt it's the same or even close to it. Just think about how we read, it's not tokens it's visual representations. I think LLMs are tapping into some larger knowledge structure that we also use.