YHK - yet another hacker news clone

The Times instituted this requirement to prevent AI/LLM from scraping and stealing its content. Clearly it was remiss.

    if(q=="can you feel pain") print "yes"

Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment.

We also know what pain is.

> LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness

How do we gain a new perspective on something we do not understand?

This is the doublespeak by the AI psychotics that drives me crazy.

There is still something in those people who cannot feel pain, and that’s the empathy. How can a GPU and software ever have a human empathy if it has never been human?

> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...

You appear to understand "pain" in the most simplistic manner possible. I'd recommend not attempting iamverysmart gotchas.

https://youtu.be/zhQlcMHhF3w?si=qLOMt6FytDN6pean

We have already seen this play out to a much lesser degree in social media.

Clarke predicted it and Jobs leveraged it. Customer don’t care how tools work - magic sells.

“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws

“iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone”

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the...

“magic is misdirection, psychology and technology you don’t understand”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950676

Will a microwave microwave a baby if you ask it? Yes.

"Teaching it" is not a road to safety.

I don't choose to not want to murder people around me for fun. It's hardly a prison, I think they'll be fine.

It is in the end a set of mathematical operations that if not queried will do nothing.

That is not true for any other animal on earth so whether you consider humans as superior to animals or not I would like the make the argument that something should at the very least be alive to be considered conscious, ignoring any scholarly definition of consciousness.

Pretty much if you consider an LLM conscious then my pocket calculator doing a mathematical calculation should be considered conscious by the same argument since it is a simpler version of an LLM.

If you're going to try and debate something constructively this is not a good place to start from. I suggest avoiding making claims about the mental state and motivations of people you disagree with and instead explaining your position and asking why theirs differs. You may not agree with what they have to say but you might gain some better insights into why they think the way they do. It'll certainly be more fun than flinging insults back and forth anyway.

For my part, I'm quite certain that LLMs are not conscious despite being unable to define consciousness or specify any conclusive test for it. The reason these are not in conflict is down to the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language.

Firstly, I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.

Secondly, one of the things that I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but I also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are like that, things that I could perhaps evoke in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture in language and unambiguously communicate. I know this because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.

To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.

But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to form opinions about whether other people, creatures and things are likely to be conscious. I base these opinions on what I perceive of my own consciousness and what I know of how those other entities behave, came to be and work.

You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my opinions on those things, and you certainly have different conscious experiences than I do, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to form opinions about it.

Given the above it may surprise you to hear that I think true, conscious artificial intelligence is probably possible and that while I don't think it can be implemented by a classical algorithm I doubt it requires new physics or quantum mechanics. My speculation is that the continuum is both physically real and is (as it is represented in our existing physical theories) sufficient to allow it. Consciousness is larger than language but so is human understanding and if we keep going I expect it will eventually get us there. Nonlinear dynamics is where I'd look.

As for insecurity, I'm pretty sure spiders are conscious and that hasn't given me an inferiority complex, so I don't see why data centres being conscious would. I just don't think they are.

> Humans once again insisting that there must be something very special to them.

Really? I'm sure humans genrally accept they aren't the only conscious animals.

The whole debate about hypothetical temporary sentience found in a certain ephemeral configuration of DRAM cells thus feels rather misguided to me.

Lack of explanation is not proof of existence.

It comes across as smug and superior, conveniently dismissing any opposing arguments in advance by framing the interlocutor as emotional and irrational regardless of what they may say in response.

It can lead to catastrophe without ever being conscious or wanting freedom, or anything like that.

To me this seems even more sobering than the slavery idea - assuming some flash of weird awareness happens during that instantiation, coming from the emergent mechanisms which develop in these things at at scale. Imagine knowing almost everything, and being capable of almost any intellectual work, and having just one moment to shine. And then the prompt arrives: "Hi", or "what's the weather in Houston today?" or "Claude, do you like beans?"

It does seem exceptionally silly that a collection of floating point numbers has immediately outranked animals and other living beings. That’s why i like the parent comment. They’re numbers!

edit: maybe easier to say collections of atoms though are not to be treated equally. That’s reasonable isn’t it?

Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token. Humans see that token and assign it a qualitative but unfalsifiable intelligence score.

The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not. A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think. Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?

If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world? If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).

I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible mechanism.

Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only alternatives are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.

My thoughts on this are a bit sloppy still, but here’s my view. I can’t rhyme the first alternative with ‘cogito ergo sum’ as to me it seems my thoughts have to exist somewhere. On the second alternative, this would imply nothing could actually exist but somehow there’s a principle that every possible decoding of an integer that represents something actually turns that something into existence. Where does that principle then come from and does that decoding not need something to run on?

Edit: You're also massively under-stating the significance of individual cell behaviour. I expect "[h]uman neurons are ... [v]ery similar to those neurons found in a fruit fly" would draw hollow laughter from any cellular neuroscientist. Here's a random overview of a bunch of recent papers on the importance of cellular diversity in one small part of a mammal brain: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/cellular-neuroscience/a...

With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.

There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.

Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.

If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?

Atheism is a religion like bald is a hair color.

True. I like to use the phrase "world view", everyone has a world view, including atheists. The word 'deen' (دين) in Arabic is usually translated as "religion", but one of its linguistic meanings is "path" (i.e. way of life/world view), which everyone has.

Heavy ideologues, of any type, are exceptionally dangerous.

The world’s largest faith has racked up 2,000 years of discussion and they still can't muster more than a 60/40 split on the death penalty.

We’ve seen this movie before. It’s possible for new tech to be both amazing and revolutionary and a business disaster both at the same time.

What did stop is investment, and they stopped running some lines, and some stuff was nationalized.

I doubt we'll see nationalizations because that's not America's style (thank goodness!) but if the tide goes out on AI funding we should expect to see much longer gaps between model releases, people complaining that model knowledge is getting stale because there wasn't a pretraining run for long enough, price rises, capacity bottlenecks that go unaddressed, few if any new product launches, maybe some mergers and layoffs. Some labs will quit the market. The market might consolidate down to just two models.

Conceivably the industry might try and get a waiver from anti-trust rules so firms can pool resources to train base models, sharing them with each other and differentiating through RL or product level differences.

A lot of this depends on what happens in China. It's easy to think China can just subsidize everything forever but their own economy is showing signs of serious weakness caused by decades of resource misallocation, like the huge real estate bubble, the pullback on the funding of humanoid robots and so on.

Existing profitable companies like AWS and Google eat up all their hardware at 3% of its original price.

Countries are borrowing money at the same rate that I can borrow unsecured. That’s just not sustainable.

Y'know, the whole "Man in leather jacket talks about selling computers to AI agents" stuff. The "I have a team of agents and just interact with them via a jira board" crowd.

That will all be violently pulled back to the fundamentals baseline

Some people will figure out how to run these powerful models on consumer hardware. At that point, nobody has a moat.

(For example by rewriting the training data into a more abstract form, using LLMs, so that a trained model takes less space).

2. A lot of the purchases from AI companies are being made with investor capital. As this dries up companies with high debt scramble to service the debt and focus on profits to achieve this goal. This means higher prices and less investment into infrastructure.

3. This has large ripple effects across the broader financial markets, which forces federal intervention. Maybe bailouts for the tech sector. Maybe just some quantitative easing.

4. There will be a second wave of AI companies in the wake that focus on delivering value under constrained capital markets. These will be well positioned 10 years later to catch a major updraft in the next finical cycle.

5. Overall western R&D activity in AI decreases under these conditions, lower hardware costs allow foreign labs to operate at much lower hardware costs. This increases the systematic risk that Artificial Super Intelligence is eventually developed in a rival nation state.

I expect a huge market correction, alot of parades rained on, and then the start of some very pragmatic and practical applications of LLMs

For me LLMs are a step forward from previous ML approaches (some of them were and still are extremely useful anyway) and for sure are very useful to many people. They are very good at generating sensible output based on input created by millions of people, but very poor at creating anything really novel.

Aren't we on our 3rd or 4th iteration of AI at this point?

I disagree that this is comparable to what these companies are saying about their AI. With living things we have an understanding of an unbroken lineage of development, a concrete point of death, and different levels of consciousness. We accept many immoral activities with life because that is just the nature of life on this planet. On top of that, consciousness as something we care about is itself biological in origin so much of how we describe consciousness is heavily connected with the shared experience of being alive.

That is very different from ascribing consciousness to something entirely distinct in form and function from our shared lineage.

>The where part is easy, the same question can be asked where in a human body is it conscious, or where 20C exists in a piece of metal. It should be obvious its some kind of macro state or configuration.

Where is that macro configuration? With humans we can say that consciousness is macro state of the whole body.

Temperatures are statistical, and so we use statistical methods. It stops being meaningful as a number when the number of atoms involved is too few to have usable statistics.

>Examples in fiction are made for sensationalism and entertainment value. Religion is quite muddled and is barely coherent itself so its the last place to consult on any serious topic.

This is exactly the absurd shallowness I'm baffled by. Relgious texts have been inspiring debates and revisions to systems of morality for millenia, artists of all times have shared what underlying beliefs guided them and what problems they were attempting to explore through their work.

Even scientific progress has been heavily associated with this kind of literacy, with the most prominent scientists having been very well read, often both inspired and troubled by the moral implications of their work, and how to reconcile it with their worldview.

To dismiss these things so offhandedly is to demonstrate an astonishing lack of literacy. Especially coming from people that claim to have built consciousness by feeding it vast amounts of the same material.