‹ BackHN Continuity

Thread

A warning about 'model welfare'

242 points · 701 comments · andsoitis

  1. hosel · · focus · HN ↗
    >AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.

    Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.

    1. vidarh · · focus · HN ↗
      We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience.

      Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.

      1. willy_k · · focus · HN ↗
        Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.
        1. ooloncoloophid · · focus · HN ↗
          What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?
          1. akomtu · · focus · HN ↗
            The universe is material of course, the soul is made of matter, thoughts are made of matter and so on. The question is what kind of matter? Looking at the brain, we won't find any intelligence in the motion of its cells. They mostly stay in place. If we go one level deeper, we'll see molecules, and their motion reveals something more interesting: various neurochemical reactions. Yet, there is no intelligence at that level either. Going one more level deeper we'll find electrons and that's where things become somewhat intelligent. At the current level of science, we can't see what makes electrons move, but if we could, we would discover finer and finer forms of matter until we would reach an end. That finest level of matter for that particular person we would call his soul. I think it's the presence of those higher imperceptible levels of matter that creates consciousness. If it all stopped at the cellular or molecular level, we would be like complex mechanical watches, not very different from LLMs.
Open on Hacker News to reply ↗

Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.