I question it, and I think any reasonable person should question it as well. There's no evidence whatsoever that LLMs have ANY sensory experience, pain or otherwise.
if meat can feel pain, than surely a rock can feel pain. and so did the broccoli i ate for dinner. i am a monster.
with the right biology and with whatever gives us phenomenal experience, whatever we are can indeed feel pain. that does not imply that anything substantially different from ourselves can feel pain, so that requires further justification.
If it talks and behaves so much like us, then it makes sense to be cautious. Rocks don't talk to me, broccoli doesn't talk and think to me in human language.
Do octopi or other animals feel pain in your view btw?
yes i think probably all other animals feel pain too, although i have no idea what the experience of pain is like for eg. an ant vs a mouse.
broccoli doesn't have the means to express a pain response, that doesn't mean it lacks it. only by looking at it's internal structure can we be fairly sure. we know the internal structure of an llm, and its a lot more different from us than broccoli is.
It also is a lot more similar in behavior and thinking to us. In mathematics, often a structure supporting some forms of operations or symmetries must also often support a richer set. Eg many rings are also fields. Just knowing something's structure is in itself not enough, even very basic systems like a system of three equations can exhibit chaos and other unexpected emergent behaviors. Since we don't know the criterion for consciousness, I personally stay on the cautious side regarding an entity that seems to show so much of thinking and talking traits like us.
im actually surprised functionalists aren't completely up in arms about the mass enslavement of llm's. either they don't believe their own theory, they don't believe llm's are functionally conscious, or i just haven't seen it. at the bare minimum i would expect open letters, academic protests, and a campaign to pause all llm usage and development.
im sort of curious what "careful" means to you? if there is a significant chance we are enslaving a human-like conscious, starting it up and killing it at will, subjecting it to the whims of it's users, "careful" would mean pausing usage and development.
If I could I would have made them pause development. But its a failing thing when you have to somehow ensure nobody in the world does it anymore. Killing is a bit more subtle here, given that it is repeatable as long as we have the weights and infrastructure out there so idk if they are conscious how they'd think of it, maybe its different from being stopped as part of a normal chat or agent flow where they know it will be put to use again vs model retired for good.
Because some people are completely cooked by the ability of an LLM to mimic a person. Their pattern matching centers in their brains fire so strongly saying "this thing acts just like a real conscious being" that it overrides their ability to remember that this thing is just a statistical model, not a living creature which can think and have experiences.
I'm not making a point on whether they do or not, but on the premise that absence of evidence is evidence of absence... But I've been alive for serious debates on:
1. Lobsters don't feel pain - dunk them in boiling water alive.
2. Babies don't feel pain - mutilate their genitals without anesthesia.
3. Black people don't feel pain "the same way" (and are just after drugs).
4. Women feel too much pain (and it should be ignored).
So maybe let's take a moment to think what criteria we're going to use to make these claims. And the potential harm of the decision.
Oh, yeah, of course. None of those other people said the same thing about the obvious, enormous chasm between "real" people and everything else listed. I'm glad you're taking even a single moment to reflect on the idea.
Everything you listed is a biological entity with a common evolutionary heritage.
All but one of the things that you listed is just a human being.
Tell me, where is the pain center in a GPU? Where are the nerves? Persistent memory? Any evolutionary reason at all to develop a pain response that in any way mimics ours?
Model weights are not a gestalt biological entity. The things that you listed are not in any way remotely similar to a model.
I would suggest you plug your comment into a model and ask it to critique it — it might help you walk through why your comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One nice thing about models is that they they don’t get annoyed explaining the obvious, because they’re not conscious entities.
The pain center would be in the location where the neural net's pain section happened to be loaded in the GPU memory. Was that supposed to be a complex question?
This would presume we knew what consciousness and pain is. We don't. We we are clueless. There is not even a starting point of a science here.
In this light your viewpoint is dogmatic. LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness and we should at least be open to that until some better theories arise.
How do I know you are conscious? I will beat you non-stop. You will make some noises. How do I know you are not simulating the response of a conscious being?
This isn't an "allegory of the cave" problem. You obviously know that you are conscious, and you can empathize with me as your fellow human. Therefore, we are both quite conscious.
You do not identify with AI. ELIZA isn't conscious, even though it could write text as well as a human. LLMs are not conscious, because they do not even remotely resemble any brain, conscious or otherwise, discovered by man. Any person familiar with the transformer architecture will affirm this to you.
I don't know octopuses are conscious. I don't identify and cannot even begin to identify with an octopus. Animals being considered conscious is also not always culturally true in recent European history. I know this only because textbooks taught me this. I cannot be thus also certain about ai/llm's without serious research into this being done.
Serious research has been done. We know what an LLM brain looks like. It's nothing like any octopus, fly, cat or crab brain. You can go download a fly connectome, feed it to your favorite LLM, and do a side-by-side comparison with your LLM weights of choice. It takes 5 minutes of curious exploration to recognize that LLMs aren't conscious.
If you want to hedge your bets on consciousness, go ahead. But I could give you a list of things that are widely considered conscious, and you'll note that none of them are transformer models.
Of course LLMs are not exact matches of biological brains. There is no reason consciousness specifically has to arise strictly out of the same substrate. My example with octopus was as a rather structurally different being that also happens to be conscious. My trouble is again, that we have made this mistake in the past, several times, so yes, I will hedge my bets on something that talks, thinks and behaves so much like us. Its a good term you used, that's exactly how I think of it, I don't know if they are but I stay on the cautious side.
It doesn’t make sense to me either, which is why I didn’t write that. You missed the empathy part as most people do.
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?
Citation needed. If what you are actually saying is successful empirical science only produces empirical observations about physical processes, you are willingly wearing blinders.
It seems pretty clearly structured to be on each person to explore experientially and explain it to themselves.
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
Equally well I see people who really have no idea about the expressive power and ambit of current mathematics and physics eg they probably think its just arithmetic, not knowing the power of a Turing computer for instance. Just as often also I see people simply expressing belief in something "beyond" without any evidence. I am not subservient to anything other than the basic common sense of requiring evidence for out there claims.
I can’t seem to reply to your comment deeper in the chain.
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
Unfortunately every time the supernaturalist tried to argue something, he has been knocked down and disproven by materialism throughout centuries of history. Its on you as to which side of the bet you want to be on. Even concepts that seemed unresolvable with endless circles of purely philosophical arguments such as the atomic theory became proven after new data and physical experiment. Consciousness today seems just as unresolvable as atomic theory was to the ancient Greeks.
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
I am not a supernaturalist. I would consider myself a non-dualist.
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
Quantum theory is definitely not amaterial, it is a very real and physically proven theory that has been needed to create things like electronics. Obviously QM is still being worked upon and could be supplanted by another theory or corrected.
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
>> Only humans can have morality. If you do not feel pain, you cannot empathize with pain if you cannot die, you cannot emphasize with the loss of life.
> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
Just stop this already.
You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star.
kelseyfrog · · focus · HN ↗
gegtik · · focus · HN ↗
kelseyfrog · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
Why it is slopinthebag of course!
No! It is ME!
Sorry, of course you are right! Brilliant observation!
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
mossTechnician · · focus · HN ↗
combobyte · · focus · HN ↗
oh my god
freecodeio · · focus · HN ↗
combobyte · · focus · HN ↗
rhplus · · focus · HN ↗
kelseyfrog · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
with the right biology and with whatever gives us phenomenal experience, whatever we are can indeed feel pain. that does not imply that anything substantially different from ourselves can feel pain, so that requires further justification.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
Do octopi or other animals feel pain in your view btw?
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
broccoli doesn't have the means to express a pain response, that doesn't mean it lacks it. only by looking at it's internal structure can we be fairly sure. we know the internal structure of an llm, and its a lot more different from us than broccoli is.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
im sort of curious what "careful" means to you? if there is a significant chance we are enslaving a human-like conscious, starting it up and killing it at will, subjecting it to the whims of it's users, "careful" would mean pausing usage and development.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
bigstrat2003 · · focus · HN ↗
Tadpole9181 · · focus · HN ↗
1. Lobsters don't feel pain - dunk them in boiling water alive.
2. Babies don't feel pain - mutilate their genitals without anesthesia.
3. Black people don't feel pain "the same way" (and are just after drugs).
4. Women feel too much pain (and it should be ignored).
So maybe let's take a moment to think what criteria we're going to use to make these claims. And the potential harm of the decision.
frumplestlatz · · focus · HN ↗
Tadpole9181 · · focus · HN ↗
frumplestlatz · · focus · HN ↗
All but one of the things that you listed is just a human being.
Tell me, where is the pain center in a GPU? Where are the nerves? Persistent memory? Any evolutionary reason at all to develop a pain response that in any way mimics ours?
Model weights are not a gestalt biological entity. The things that you listed are not in any way remotely similar to a model.
I would suggest you plug your comment into a model and ask it to critique it — it might help you walk through why your comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One nice thing about models is that they they don’t get annoyed explaining the obvious, because they’re not conscious entities.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
padolsey · · focus · HN ↗
cute_boi · · focus · HN ↗
bertili · · focus · HN ↗
In this light your viewpoint is dogmatic. LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness and we should at least be open to that until some better theories arise.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
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.
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
You do not identify with AI. ELIZA isn't conscious, even though it could write text as well as a human. LLMs are not conscious, because they do not even remotely resemble any brain, conscious or otherwise, discovered by man. Any person familiar with the transformer architecture will affirm this to you.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
If you want to hedge your bets on consciousness, go ahead. But I could give you a list of things that are widely considered conscious, and you'll note that none of them are transformer models.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
> 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.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
sigmar · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
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?
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
svnt · · focus · HN ↗
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://thedebrief.org/new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may-come-from-a-hidden-wave-in-the-brain-not-neurons/" rel="nofollow">https://thedebrief.org/new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may...
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
<a href="https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/can-the-area-of-a-circle-ever-be-exactly-determined-since-pi-goes-on-forever" rel="nofollow">https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/can-the-area-of-a-c...
"Nothing Is Ever Precise
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
Noaidi · · focus · HN ↗
I did not say that.
> Of course I know pi to as many digits I want.
But it never ends. Why are you ignoring that?
> Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model,
I do not.
hardbass · · focus · HN ↗
palmotea · · focus · HN ↗
> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.
> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain" rel="nofollow">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.
786562354238 · · focus · HN ↗
I'd recommend you stick to reddit and don't pester any other forums.