Submitted by Malachiian t3_12348jj in Futurology
Malachiian OP t1_jdteo63 wrote
Reply to comment by Silver_Ad_6874 in Microsoft Suggests OpenAI and GPT-4 are early signs of AGI. by Malachiian
Yeah, the fact that we basically tried to replicate the human brain and it all of a sudden became able to solve tasks it wasn't taught to do...
That certainly makes intelligent seem a lot less magical. Like, we are just neural nets, nothing more.
Silver_Ad_6874 t1_jdueq2n wrote
Exactly that. If the complexity of the human mind automatically emerges from a relatively simpel model with sufficiently advanced training/inputs, that would be very telling.
pharmamess t1_jdum003 wrote
What about the soul?
shr00mydan t1_jdvjen6 wrote
You are getting downvoted, but this is a fine question. Alan Turing himself answered it all the way back in 1950.
>Theological Objection: Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul. God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.
>I am unable to accept any part of this, but will attempt to reply in theological terms... It appears to me that the argument quoted above implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty. It is admitted that there are certain things that He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit? We might expect that He would only exercise this power in conjunction with a mutation which provided the elephant with an appropriately improved brain to minister to the needs of this soul. An argument of exactly similar form may be made for the case of machines. It may seem different because it is more difficult to “swallow”. But this really only means that we think it would be less likely that He would consider the circumstances suitable for conferring a soul. The circumstances in question are discussed in the rest of this paper. In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children: rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.
RedditFuelsMyDepress t1_jdvsmlw wrote
I feel like some people maybe take the word "soul" a bit wrong, because it sounds like something from fantasy-fiction. But consciousness is something that undeniably exists and it's very difficult to prove that any machine has one.
terdroblade t1_jdvw2cy wrote
Can’t prove something if you don’t know what it is. It’s a deep rabbit hole with many different sciences , from philosophy to neuroscience.
idiocratic_method t1_jdx5fwp wrote
you use the word undeniably but I've never seen actual proof of consciousness
RedditFuelsMyDepress t1_jdxgkvb wrote
By consciousness I just mean the subjective experience of self. Like the old saying "I think, therefore I am". I can feel and experience the world through my own body and I can assume other people do as well since they're humans just like me (unless I'm living inside a simulation or something and none of you are real). But how do we know a non-biological machine is able to experience the same?
canad1anbacon t1_jdxmsyn wrote
There is the mirror test. Being able to look into a mirror and recognize that is your own body that you see. Dolphins and chimps can pass this test
RedditFuelsMyDepress t1_jdxs0d6 wrote
A smart robot probably would recognize itself in the mirror, but I don't think that's really enough to prove that it's conscious the same way we are. The problem is that everyone experiences the world through their own body so we can't truly put ourselves in someone else's shoes and see and feel what they do. There's no way for me to even know for certain that other humans are conscious, I can only assume that based on us being the same species. A robot may have the appearance of being conscious, but it could be fake. Like a marionette being pulled on strings by its programming. Or like a character written into a story except that this character is being written in real-time by computer algorithms based on things happening around it. Someone might argue that humans are similar to that too, but the point is that puppets and fictional characters aren't conscious even though they may appear as such and a robot could be the same way.
I think we'd have to do more research and understand how the brain and electrical signals in our bodies work to determine if a machine is conscious.
Seidans t1_je1etr3 wrote
the "soul" is just the answers to something scientist and theolgist couldn't understand a couple hundred years ago, humanity and especially theist are just slow to understand that we are just a biological machine
everything too complexe to understand have seen a simple theological answers, easy to understand and rassuring to believe, while the observation is far more cruel and nihilistic
pharmamess t1_jdvtcb6 wrote
Really appreciate this answer, thanks. Food for thought!
Express-Set-8843 t1_jdw6wde wrote
First we would have to define what a "soul" is and then demonstrate if that thing actually exists before we could proceed further with your question.
Attempts to do so have proven unfruitful.
pharmamess t1_jdwdnnf wrote
>Attempts to do so have proven unfruitful.
What you mean is that you're not convinced by any arguments/explanations/evidence that you've ever come across. Many people are.
I'm not put off by the lack of a scientific proof. I think that there's more to life than what can be measured using scientific instruments. Life has unequivocally taught me this truth. It doesn't follow that there is necessarily a soul but I get the sense of it being a valid concept - and I am far from the only one to think that. But I understand the intransigence of the hard materialist / scientific reductionist position so there might perhaps be a little difficulty agreeing to disagree (apologies if I'm being unduly cynical).
I don't think it follows at all that "we are just neural nets, nothing more". That's an extremely narrow take on human consciousness which is obvious to anyone who has scratched the surface.
Express-Set-8843 t1_jdxkyzs wrote
>What you mean is...
And we've exited the realm of constructive conversation.
When you are talking to someone, let them tell you what they mean and you tell them what you mean. I will now exit this pointless debate.
qepdibpbfessttrud t1_je03pra wrote
Soul is our inescapable wonderment about thoughts raising from the unconscious when we're caught in the thought loop as most people spend most of their lives in. In wake and in dreams even. I guess most of it is caused by strong emotions experienced one day and perpetuated for years. Regret is a big one
Meditation allows one to see clearly. At first u're on the bank of river flowing past u, but then u're nowhere to be found. There's just river. Always has been
KnightOfNothing t1_jdtvjbm wrote
that's exactly all humans are and i don't understand you could see anything "magical" about reality or anything inside it.
phyto123 t1_jdu4wp4 wrote
Most things in nature follow fibonacci sequence and golden ratio in design which I find fascinating, and the fact I can ponder and appreciate the beauty in that is, to me, magical.
BilingualThrowaway01 t1_jdudp5a wrote
Life always finds the path of least residence through natural selection. It will always gradually tend towards being more efficient over time through evolutionary pressure. The Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio happen to be geometrically efficient ratios to use when it comes to many physical distributions, for example when deciding how to place leaves in a spiral that will collect as much sunlight as possible.
phyto123 t1_jdvm93a wrote
Excellent explanation. I also find it fascinating there is evidence that our ancient ancestors would build according to this natural order. The way Luxor Temple was built utilizes this order from its first room to the last
4354574 t1_jdu8nat wrote
We're conscious. Subjective experience is magical. The experience of emotions is magical. Being aware of experience is magical. If that isn't magical to you, then...sucks to be you. What is even the point of existing? You might as well just go through the motions until you die.
There is no evidence at all that AI is conscious.
Surur t1_jdubb31 wrote
How do you know you are not the only one who is conscious?
4354574 t1_jdunko1 wrote
I don't. It's the classic "problem of other minds". This is not an issue for Buddhism and the Yogic tradition, however, and ultimately at the highest level all of the mystical traditions, whether Sufism, Christian mysticism (St. John of the Cross and others), shamanism, the Kabbalah etc. What's important to these traditions is what your own individual experience of being conscious is like. More precisely, from a subjective POV, there are no "other minds" - it's all the same mind experiencing itself as what it thinks are separate minds.
If your experience of being conscious is innately freeing, and infinite, and unified, and fearless, and joyous, as they all, cross-culturally and across time, claim the state of being called 'enlightenment' is, then whether there are other minds or not is academic. You help other people to walk the path to enlightenment because they perceive *themselves* to be isolated, fearful, angry, grieving individual minds, that still perceive the idea that there are "other minds" to be a problem.
In Buddhism, the classic answer to people troubled by unanswerable questions is that the question does not go away, but the 'questioner' does. You don't care about the answer anymore, because you've seen through the illusion that there was anyone who wanted an answer in the first place.
Surur t1_jdur5b3 wrote
Sure, but my point is that while you may be conscious, you can not really objectively measure it in others, you can only believe when they say it or not.
So when the AI says it's conscious....
audioen t1_jdw2frs wrote
The trivial counterargument is that I can write a python program that says it is conscious, while being nothing such, as it is literally just a program that always prints these words.
It is too much of a stretch to regard a language model as conscious. It is deterministic -- it always predicts same probabilities for next token (word) if it sees the same input. It has no memory except words already in its context buffer. It has no ability to process more or less as task needs different amount of effort, but rather data flows from input to output token probabilities with the exact same amount of work each time. (With the exception that as input grows, its processing does take longer because the context matrix which holds the input becomes bigger. Still, it is computation flowing through the same steps, accumulating to the same matrices, but it does get applied to progressively more words/tokens that sit in the input buffer.)
However, we can probably design machine consciousness from the building blocks we have. We can give language models a scratch buffer they can use to store data and to plan their replies in stages. We can give them access to external memory so they don't have to memorize contents of wikipedia, they can just learn language and use something like Google Search just like the rest of us.
Language models can be simpler, but systems built from them can display planning, learning from experience via self-reflection of prior performance, long-term memory and other properties like that which at least sound like there might be something approximating a consciousness involved.
I'm just going to go out and say this: something like GPT-4 is probably like 200 IQ human when it comes to understanding language. The way we test it shows that it struggles to perform tasks, but this is mostly because of the architecture of directly going prompt to answer in a single step. The research right now is adding the ability to plan, edit and refine the replies from the AI, sort of like how a human makes multiple passes over their emails, or realizes after writing for a bit that they said something stupid or wrong and go back and erase the mistake. These are properties we do not currently grant our language models. Once we do, their performance will go through the roof, most likely.
4354574 t1_jdwkos3 wrote
Well, I don’t believe consciousness is computational. I think Roger Penrose’s quantum brain theory is more likely to be accurate. So if an AI told me it was conscious, I wouldn’t believe it. If consciousness arose from complexity alone, we should have signs of it in all sorts of complex systems, but we don’t, and not even the slightest hint of it in AI. The AI people hate his theory because it means literal consciousness is very far out.
Surur t1_jdwqof7 wrote
> If consciousness arose from complexity alone, we should have signs of it in all sorts of complex systems
So do you believe animals are conscious, and if so, which is the most primitive animal you think is conscious, and do you think they are equally conscious as you?
4354574 t1_jdx1c88 wrote
If you want to know more about what I think is going on, research Orchestrated Objective Reduction, developed by Penrose and anaesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff.
It is the most testable and therefore the most scientific theory of consciousness. It has made 14 predictions, which is 14 more than any other theory. Six of these predictions have been verified, and none falsified.
Anything else would just be me rehashing the argument of the people who actually came up with the theory, and I’m not interested in doing that.
Outrageous_Nothing26 t1_jdvbget wrote
Just calculate the probability of that arising from randomness. That’s just incredible, you see the answers and think easy because the problem was already solved for you.
KnightOfNothing t1_jdvcn5y wrote
no i see the answer and think "wow i really didn't care about the problem in the first place" sorry but things in reality stopped impressing/interesting me many years ago.
Outrageous_Nothing26 t1_jdvcq2h wrote
Sounds like a skill issue or depression one of the two
KnightOfNothing t1_jdvhuy8 wrote
you're not the first one to bring up "skill issue" when I've expressed my utter disappointment in all things real, is the human game of socialize work and sleep really so much fun for you guys? is this limited world lacking of anything fantastical really so impressive for all of you?
i've tried exceptionally hard to understand but all my efforts have been for naught. The only rational conclusion is that there's something necessary to the human experience i'm lacking but it's so fundamental no one would even think of mentioning it.
Outrageous_Nothing26 t1_jdvi8qx wrote
Well the truth, it doesn’t really matter, we could be living in a the magical world of harry potter and your anhedonia would do the same. I was just kidding with the skill issue but it sounds like depression, i had something similar happen but it’s just my unsolicited opinion and it doesn’t carry thar much weight
SplendidPunkinButter t1_jdv6qck wrote
We are a long way from having showed such a thing definitively
Outrageous_Nothing26 t1_jdvb8cl wrote
What less magical?? It takes a massive amount of computing power and data to train those things. Now try doing that without any templates to follow. How is that not complex enough?
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