Saving this to watch later, amazing! I am uninformed about this topic so i look forward to developing strong opinions and writing future comments in all caps
You seem to be taking an approach similar to Thomas Nagel, that the materialist-reductionist philosophy of knowledge is incapable of explaining consciousness; consciousness must arise from the same principles that give rise to, say, stars or rocks...treating it as merely an illusion or accidental emergent property dismisses the very real way consciousness has physical effects (we build stuff, for instance). Dr. Greenwald seems very much in the materialist-reductionist camp.
Yeah, there’s a lot of very hard to understand but irrefutable things (on my view) once you start to consider scenarios that involve recursion or super accurate prediction. Or a half dozen other things I’m not thinking of right now. In my view at least.
If you've never read Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" I recommend it. The materialist-reductionist (M-R) approach is ultimately an incomplete epistemology. This is something that guys like Harris, Dawkins, and their ilk can't accept. Things like consciousness are not only not explainable by the M-R approach, they can never be explained by the M_R approach because no amount of reduction to structure can explain consciousness. even thought it must arise from the same processes that give rise to everything else (that is, given a set of necessary and sufficient circumstances consciousness will arise in all cases), it is irreducible using our current epistemology.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the AI thing, though...intricate behavior is not consciousness. Plants, for example...they show intricate responses to stimuli but have no neural processing at all. Their responses are purely biochemical. I think AI is more like the plant response than an animal/neural response.
This falls under the category “but not like a human” to me. No matter how many times I say that people keep shoving the human frame back onto the problem.
If consciousness can’t be reduced purely to natural processes (only shown to correspond to them for those reading) then why should it be the case that awareness itself only shows up in one particular pattern under the one particular rock (humans, specifically ourselves) where we happened to look?
Trees don’t have memory or self reflection because you need memory for that but I do wonder if they have moods reported to no one.
It's not "not like human." We are talking about an awareness of self. We have to start with the framework that this requires some sort of neural network, which, granted, a computer has but something like a plant does not. But a LLM is merely responding to electrical stimuli (input). So the analogy to a plant was the biochemical responses were similar to the electrical responses that an LLM receives and responds to. Dr. Greenwald hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that consciousness requires some sort of evaluation of past behavior/self-reflection that an LLM (and a plant) lack.
You can argue that a plant has a different sort of consciousness, but that is a separate argument from whether LLMs are conscious AS WE UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS...even if that consciousness is alien (a la Nagel's what is it like to be a bat).
I think often there are a lot of confusion between those two, and being clear about which one represents "consciousness" is critical to having any discussion or we're talking about two different things. I would also argue two things: first, awareness of awareness is not the same as sentience (i.e. the degree of self-awareness that occurs in humans and some other primates, or I think what some have described as a sense of self); second, that to argue "it's a different kind of intelligence or awareness" is not helpful in advancing understanding because what, then, exactly are we discussing? You have to define the parameters, even if arbitrarily or in-exactly, in order to reach a common understanding. For me the parameters of whether something is "conscious" is that sense of self, but if I were discussing with you I'd be open to a different definition for the sake of debate. I think the sense of self takes the discussion out of the mind-body problem (differences in perception of reality and how that relates to limitations of the M-R approach) and gets to the real point of interest; is a LLM actually an entity capable of, as Dr. Greenwald put it, agency of some kind.
I should go and read your article on this; I have to admit I haven't...
1:11:25-1:11:35 Beaut 🤟🏽 And then everything you specifically said after. This is only my second exposure to your substack. I’m about to happily dive in further. Love and Laughs, Some Gal.
Still watching/listening but wanted to share that at 1:00:14, as soon as you said, “….but also the concept of determinism…”, I shouted out loud, “Yes!” Ok, continuing on…
This was a lot of fun. Apologies for my spotty audio. Next time we do this I’ll be connected to WiFi.
As long as the minivans never go away
Saving this to watch later, amazing! I am uninformed about this topic so i look forward to developing strong opinions and writing future comments in all caps
I’m also just pulling it out of my ass, so please enjoy
You seem to be taking an approach similar to Thomas Nagel, that the materialist-reductionist philosophy of knowledge is incapable of explaining consciousness; consciousness must arise from the same principles that give rise to, say, stars or rocks...treating it as merely an illusion or accidental emergent property dismisses the very real way consciousness has physical effects (we build stuff, for instance). Dr. Greenwald seems very much in the materialist-reductionist camp.
Yeah, there’s a lot of very hard to understand but irrefutable things (on my view) once you start to consider scenarios that involve recursion or super accurate prediction. Or a half dozen other things I’m not thinking of right now. In my view at least.
If you've never read Nagel's "Mind and Cosmos" I recommend it. The materialist-reductionist (M-R) approach is ultimately an incomplete epistemology. This is something that guys like Harris, Dawkins, and their ilk can't accept. Things like consciousness are not only not explainable by the M-R approach, they can never be explained by the M_R approach because no amount of reduction to structure can explain consciousness. even thought it must arise from the same processes that give rise to everything else (that is, given a set of necessary and sufficient circumstances consciousness will arise in all cases), it is irreducible using our current epistemology.
I'm not sure I agree with you on the AI thing, though...intricate behavior is not consciousness. Plants, for example...they show intricate responses to stimuli but have no neural processing at all. Their responses are purely biochemical. I think AI is more like the plant response than an animal/neural response.
But I'm just a biologist, what do I know?
This falls under the category “but not like a human” to me. No matter how many times I say that people keep shoving the human frame back onto the problem.
If consciousness can’t be reduced purely to natural processes (only shown to correspond to them for those reading) then why should it be the case that awareness itself only shows up in one particular pattern under the one particular rock (humans, specifically ourselves) where we happened to look?
Trees don’t have memory or self reflection because you need memory for that but I do wonder if they have moods reported to no one.
It's not "not like human." We are talking about an awareness of self. We have to start with the framework that this requires some sort of neural network, which, granted, a computer has but something like a plant does not. But a LLM is merely responding to electrical stimuli (input). So the analogy to a plant was the biochemical responses were similar to the electrical responses that an LLM receives and responds to. Dr. Greenwald hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that consciousness requires some sort of evaluation of past behavior/self-reflection that an LLM (and a plant) lack.
You can argue that a plant has a different sort of consciousness, but that is a separate argument from whether LLMs are conscious AS WE UNDERSTAND CONSCIOUSNESS...even if that consciousness is alien (a la Nagel's what is it like to be a bat).
I need to write another post I think.
Awareness and awareness of awareness are two different things.
I think often there are a lot of confusion between those two, and being clear about which one represents "consciousness" is critical to having any discussion or we're talking about two different things. I would also argue two things: first, awareness of awareness is not the same as sentience (i.e. the degree of self-awareness that occurs in humans and some other primates, or I think what some have described as a sense of self); second, that to argue "it's a different kind of intelligence or awareness" is not helpful in advancing understanding because what, then, exactly are we discussing? You have to define the parameters, even if arbitrarily or in-exactly, in order to reach a common understanding. For me the parameters of whether something is "conscious" is that sense of self, but if I were discussing with you I'd be open to a different definition for the sake of debate. I think the sense of self takes the discussion out of the mind-body problem (differences in perception of reality and how that relates to limitations of the M-R approach) and gets to the real point of interest; is a LLM actually an entity capable of, as Dr. Greenwald put it, agency of some kind.
I should go and read your article on this; I have to admit I haven't...
1:11:25-1:11:35 Beaut 🤟🏽 And then everything you specifically said after. This is only my second exposure to your substack. I’m about to happily dive in further. Love and Laughs, Some Gal.
Still watching/listening but wanted to share that at 1:00:14, as soon as you said, “….but also the concept of determinism…”, I shouted out loud, “Yes!” Ok, continuing on…
I’m glad I could help, one dork to another.
Interesting conversation; Dr. Greenwald pretty early on brought up the "mind-body" problem without calling it such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind%E2%80%93body_problem