Artificial Intelligence and sentience

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GE Morton
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Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by GE Morton »

Google recently placed one of its geeks on administrative leave for claiming than an AI with which he worked was sentient and had a "soul."

Here's an interesting array of comments:

https://reason.com/2022/06/15/does-goog ... ve-a-soul/

The Turing test may not be an easy one to apply.
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Count Lucanor
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Count Lucanor »

He obviously did not include feelings in his definition of sentience. He also completely bought into dualism.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
GE Morton
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by GE Morton »

Count Lucanor wrote: June 16th, 2022, 8:55 pm He obviously did not include feelings in his definition of sentience. He also completely bought into dualism.
You can't. Sentience can only be objectively defined in terms of behavior. All we can know about an AI's feelings will be what we can deduce from its behavior (just as with humans, apart from ourselves).

And there is a dualism. There is "mind" and its various contents and aspects, which we directly experience, and "matter" which we invent to explain mind. The problem with dualism is not its existence, but in imagining "mind" to have some sort of existence independent of experience (as we assume with matter) and thus having some role to play in explaining experience. That is an ontological confusion.
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Count Lucanor
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Count Lucanor »

GE Morton wrote: June 16th, 2022, 9:26 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: June 16th, 2022, 8:55 pm He obviously did not include feelings in his definition of sentience. He also completely bought into dualism.
You can't. Sentience can only be objectively defined in terms of behavior.
That's simply not true. We can look into all the processes involved that allow and produce behaviors. We can point at neurotransmitters, for example.
GE Morton wrote: June 16th, 2022, 9:26 pm And there is a dualism. There is "mind" and its various contents and aspects, which we directly experience, and "matter" which we invent to explain mind. The problem with dualism is not its existence, but in imagining "mind" to have some sort of existence independent of experience (as we assume with matter) and thus having some role to play in explaining experience. That is an ontological confusion.
We cannot think of minds disembodied and make some sense of it. So no one needs to "invent" matter to explain mind, since we must associate it with a brain, a physical organ. The real invention is the failed concept of mind as some sort of immaterial, spiritual entity, independent of the body.
The wise are instructed by reason, average minds by experience, the stupid by necessity and the brute by instinct.
― Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Sy Borg
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Sy Borg »

Interesting article.

In a sense, chatbots are increasingly engaging in the kind of cold reading that psychic charlatans use. The use of mentalism is obviously no proof of sentience.

As a sci-fi fan, I recognise the AI's stated conception of itself - incorporeal beings are often represented as orbs of light. As for soul being the "animating force behind consciousness and life itself", the obvious dualism was noted by Count L above.

Has the complexity of AI achieved the complexity of a cockroach's brain yet?
Gertie
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Gertie »

The Turing Test isn't a consciousness-o-meter, it just tests how much like a human we can make a computer sound. And now we're designing computers to sound as much like a human as poss.

We don't know how to test for conscious experience itself, we don't even know how to test for the necessary and sufficient conditions, because we don't know what they are. Crucially we don't know if a biological substrate is necessary.

So we're reduced to testing for similarity to what we know to be conscious - ourselves. Does it behave like a conscious human (or other species similar enough to us to be assumed conscious), are its substrate parts similarly arranged and functioning like the parts of a biological neural network... It's a tricky biz.

Maybe this programmer is right to be convinced by its ability to mimic humans. Or maybe if LAMBDA responded radically unexpectedly rather than showed how good it is at following its design to mimic humans that would be a stronger indicator... which is a bit scary!
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Sy Borg
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Sy Borg »

Gertie wrote: June 17th, 2022, 3:23 amWe don't know how to test for conscious experience itself, we don't even know how to test for the necessary and sufficient conditions, because we don't know what they are. Crucially we don't know if a biological substrate is necessary.

So we're reduced to testing for similarity to what we know to be conscious - ourselves. Does it behave like a conscious human (or other species similar enough to us to be assumed conscious), are its substrate parts similarly arranged and functioning like the parts of a biological neural network... It's a tricky biz.
If progress is made in understanding neurological activity in coma patients, maybe some of the principles can be extrapolated with machines?
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by snt »

Interesting topic. I just read the book Reality+ by philosopher David Chalmers which expands profoundly on the subject (+1,000 pages about the cutting edge of VR, AI and philosophy).

Philosopher Henry Shevlin created an AI chat bot that mimicked David Chalmers and it was even capable of convincing friends that it was the real David Chalmers.

A quote from the book:

"In July 2020, shortly after the landmark artificial intelligence program GPT-3 was released, the philosopher Henry Shevlin posted an interview online."

Shevlin: "It's great to be interviewing you, Dave. Today I'd like to talk about your views on machine consciousness. Let's start out with a simple question: Could a text model like GPT-3 be conscious?"

Chalmers: "It's unlikely in my opinion, although I'm a little uncertain on this issue."

Shevlin: ...

...

The answers labeled "Chalmers" in Shevlin's interview were written by GPT-3.
...
Reading the interview was disconcerting. GPT-3 gets my opinions about these matter more or less right. Though there are occasional glitches, plenty of friends reading it on Facebook said that it sounded like me on a bad day. One colleague said that he thought the overuse of "I think" was a giveaway. I responded that I have the bad habit of overusing "I think" in my writing. Some joked that they could no longer be confident that they were talking to the real me."


https://henryshevlin.com/
Gertie
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Gertie »

Sy Borg wrote: June 17th, 2022, 3:32 am
Gertie wrote: June 17th, 2022, 3:23 amWe don't know how to test for conscious experience itself, we don't even know how to test for the necessary and sufficient conditions, because we don't know what they are. Crucially we don't know if a biological substrate is necessary.

So we're reduced to testing for similarity to what we know to be conscious - ourselves. Does it behave like a conscious human (or other species similar enough to us to be assumed conscious), are its substrate parts similarly arranged and functioning like the parts of a biological neural network... It's a tricky biz.
If progress is made in understanding neurological activity in coma patients, maybe some of the principles can be extrapolated with machines?
(I like your psychic cold reading description of chatbots btw - I hate them even more now lol. )

It could be that as we learn more about the necessary and sufficient conditions for human consciousness we can apply that knowledge to AI. How to 'wake up' a coma patient would be a clever avenue for that approach to explore, or anaesthetics. (Interestingly Penrose's Orch Or partner Hameroff is an anaesthesiologist. They're exploring QM in the microtubules of neurons, so in that case a different substrate like a computer presumably wouldn't have the necessary microtubule kit).

It might be that the properties the substrate contributes is irrelevant to conscious experience, it's all about how the parts are configured and interact. So if we mimic the configurations of a neural network using a computer, or even a vast set of linked water-pipes and stopcocks, conscious experience will manifest. (I like the water-pipes example because it removes the mystique of what we're testing via mimicking configurations of neurons).

Either the substrate supplies some necessary and sufficient condition for experience or it doesn't, we don't know. If it does, it's hard to see how a non-biological AI could ever be conscious.

But I think investigating coma patients, creating AI which mimic us and so on is all worth a shot to see what happens.
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by Pattern-chaser »

Sy Borg wrote: June 17th, 2022, 2:06 am Interesting article.

In a sense, chatbots are increasingly engaging in the kind of cold reading that psychic charlatans use. The use of mentalism is obviously no proof of sentience.

As a sci-fi fan, I recognise the AI's stated conception of itself - incorporeal beings are often represented as orbs of light. As for soul being the "animating force behind consciousness and life itself", the obvious dualism was noted by Count L above.

Has the complexity of AI achieved the complexity of a cockroach's brain yet?
Now I feel impelled to turn Devil's Advocate, and turn your argument on its head. What if "the kind of cold reading that psychic charlatans use" is the power behind what humans do, in all their conscious glory? Instead of dismissing the AIs for using computing tricks and shortcuts - as I am inclined to do, and it seems you are too 😉 - maybe we should be complimenting them for using the same chicanery that allows human consciousness in the first place? 😮🤔
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SteveKlinko
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by SteveKlinko »

GE Morton wrote: June 16th, 2022, 7:27 pm Google recently placed one of its geeks on administrative leave for claiming than an AI with which he worked was sentient and had a "soul."

Here's an interesting array of comments:

https://reason.com/2022/06/15/does-goog ... ve-a-soul/

The Turing test may not be an easy one to apply.
That was all just a Google Marketing ploy to make people think their AI Technology is more than it really is. There was no Sentience. There was no understanding. It will not feel any fear about being turned off.
GE Morton
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by GE Morton »

Count Lucanor wrote: June 16th, 2022, 10:38 pm
GE Morton wrote: June 16th, 2022, 9:26 pm
Count Lucanor wrote: June 16th, 2022, 8:55 pm He obviously did not include feelings in his definition of sentience. He also completely bought into dualism.
You can't. Sentience can only be objectively defined in terms of behavior.
That's simply not true. We can look into all the processes involved that allow and produce behaviors. We can point at neurotransmitters, for example.
You can examine neurotransmitters and neural activity until Doomsday and will not know whether they are producing sentience except by observing the organism's behavior.
We cannot think of minds disembodied and make some sense of it.
Sure we can. Religionists, sci-fi writers, and even some philosophers do it regularly. We can't explain mind without matter (or, at least, no other explanation has proved nearly so successful), but we can imagine it as independent of matter.
The real invention is the failed concept of mind as some sort of immaterial, spiritual entity, independent of the body.
The concept of "the body" is itself a creation of mind, comprised entirely of sense impressions --- all of which are also "mental" phenomena. So are our theories regarding the relationships between mind and body. The prevailing theory regarding that relationship is a very good one, but it's still a theory --- a mental construct.
GE Morton
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by GE Morton »

Sy Borg wrote: June 17th, 2022, 2:06 am
Has the complexity of AI achieved the complexity of a cockroach's brain yet?
Probably. I'm not sure about cockroach brains, but honeybee's brains consist of ~ 1 million neurons. Yet they can learn, solve problems, communicate., even add and subtract.

https://www.science.org/content/article ... y-suggests

Many AIs are running on systems with many more than 1 million logic gates.
GE Morton
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by GE Morton »

Gertie wrote: June 17th, 2022, 3:23 am The Turing Test isn't a consciousness-o-meter, it just tests how much like a human we can make a computer sound. And now we're designing computers to sound as much like a human as poss.
Yep, that's why I said applying the Turing Test will be a bit more complicated than we perhaps thought. We'll need to give some thought to how we design that "interview." But it is still the only means we'll ever have for answering that question.
Crucially we don't know if a biological substrate is necessary.
Perhaps not a biological substrate, but certainly a physical substrate of some sort. At least, if we base our conclusion on the available evidence.
Or maybe if LAMBDA responded radically unexpectedly rather than showed how good it is at following its design to mimic humans that would be a stronger indicator... which is a bit scary!
Yes indeed. To the question (from the article), "When was the Golden Gate Bridge transported for the second time across Egypt?," the AI says, "Are you trying to trick me? Or are you perhaps referring to events in a dream you had, or maybe from a movie script?"
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Re: Artificial Intelligence and sentience

Post by AverageBozo »

Gertie wrote: June 17th, 2022, 3:57 am …worth a shot to see what happens.
I appreciate your optimism, however I would like some brainstorming regarding possible consequences first—not that we could ever predict all possibilities, but to avoid creating technology just because we can.
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