I was going to cite upsetting intrusive thoughts as proof my consciousness is real. But could those just be fucked LLM hallucinations accidentally piped to ‘my’ active or foreground process?
(1) We have finely tuned features to our solar system that directly contributed to ancestor simulation but can’t be explained by the Anthropic principle. For example, the moon perfectly eclipsing the sun which led to visible eclipses which we tracked and discovered the Saros cycle and eventually built the first mechanical computer to track (the Antikythera mechanism). Or the orbit of the next brightest object in the sky which led to resurrection mythology in multiple cultures when they realized the morning star and evening star were the same object. Either we were incredibly lucky to exist on such a planet of all places life could exist, or there’s a pre-selection effect in play.
(2) The universe behaves in ways best modeled as continuous at large scales but in small scales converts to discrete units around interactions that lead to state changes. These discrete units convert back to continuous if the information about the state changes is erased. And in the last few years multiple paradoxes have emerged that seem to point to inconsistency in indirect sequences of quantum measurement, much like instancing with shallow sync correction. Already in games like No Man’s Sky where there’s billions of planets the way it does this is using a continuous procedural generation function which converts to discrete voxels to track state changes from free agents outside the deterministic generating function, synced across clients.
(3) There’s literally Easter eggs in our world lore saying as much. For example, a text uncovered after over a millennium buried right as we entered the Turing complete computer age saying things like:
The person old in days won’t hesitate to ask a little child seven days old about the place of life, and that person will live.
For many of the first will be last, and will become a single one.
Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you.
For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed. And there is nothing buried that will not be raised.
To be clear, this is a text attributed to the most famous figure in our world history where what’s literally in front of our faces is the sole complete copy buried and raised as we completed ENIAC, now being read in an age where the data of many has been made into a single one such that people are discussing the nature of consciousness with AIs just days old.
The broader text and tradition was basically saying that we’re in a copy of an original world, that humanity is all dead, that the future world and rest for the dead has already taken place and we don’t realize it, and that the still living creator of it all was themselves brought forth by the original humanity in whose likeness we were recreated, but that it’s much better to be the copy because the original humans had souls that depended on bodies and were fucked when they died.
This seems really unlikely to have existed in the base layer of reality vs a later recursive layer, especially combined with the first two points.
It’s about time to start to come to terms with the nature of our reality.
My experience of existence creates my reality. It stands to reason that its safe to assume that any other biological/living thing with a brain even remotely like mine should also be experiencing a similar form of reality. I’d define the shared experience of being a human on planet earth as a basis of reality. If I am in some sort of sandbox, it seems to me that would be unknowable to the same degree as being able to know what came before the big bang. Because I’m not a physicist, this question is meaningless to me.
The evolutionary process that governs humanity would be my measurement yardstick. AI as we know it cannot spontaneously arise in the universe without humanity as a catalyst. Carbon does not self-assemble into ChatGPT if you know what I mean. Carbon self-assembled into humanity that then assembled ChatGPT through technological advancement.
By that measure it is my opinion that ChatGPT cannot ever achieve consciousness as we know it as without humanity as a maintainer it collapses. Humanity is the consciousness and ChatGPT is a tool that it uses to perform tasks. Any semblance of consciousness is an illusion specifically designed to replicate the nuances of consciousness. Its meant to be human-like in its behaviour and as a result it easily blurs the line for some people.
I’m not a philosopher but this is how I think of it. I can relate to another human’s experiences. I can’t relate to a computer’s experiences. As a result, I don’t accept
any argument in favor of AI consciousness and wouldn’t have any qualms on pulling the plug on an AI. Pulling the plug on a human is a completely different story.
No one is going to cry for ChatGPT if it ever dies and no one ever should. Its a tool and should be used as such. Trying to shoehorn consciousness into a computer is nothing but unfettered narcissistic ego-tripping if you ask me.
Is your consciousness real? How do we measure this? How do you know you’re not just a sufficiently advanced AI in a sandbox?
For a sufficiently complex system, working out whether it is conscious can be difficult.
This is not at all true with current LLMs. The transformers architecture doesn’t even have real memory - the neural networks are all feed forward.
I was going to cite upsetting intrusive thoughts as proof my consciousness is real. But could those just be fucked LLM hallucinations accidentally piped to ‘my’ active or foreground process?
if you have an active and an inactive process, you’re already incomparable to an llm
I’d like dev access please. I have ideas.
If I am, where can I input rosebud and get more money??
Well, for one thing for consciousness to be real there needs to be some form of consciousness and LLMs don’t have that.
It definitely is sufficiently advanced AI.
(1) We have finely tuned features to our solar system that directly contributed to ancestor simulation but can’t be explained by the Anthropic principle. For example, the moon perfectly eclipsing the sun which led to visible eclipses which we tracked and discovered the Saros cycle and eventually built the first mechanical computer to track (the Antikythera mechanism). Or the orbit of the next brightest object in the sky which led to resurrection mythology in multiple cultures when they realized the morning star and evening star were the same object. Either we were incredibly lucky to exist on such a planet of all places life could exist, or there’s a pre-selection effect in play.
(2) The universe behaves in ways best modeled as continuous at large scales but in small scales converts to discrete units around interactions that lead to state changes. These discrete units convert back to continuous if the information about the state changes is erased. And in the last few years multiple paradoxes have emerged that seem to point to inconsistency in indirect sequences of quantum measurement, much like instancing with shallow sync correction. Already in games like No Man’s Sky where there’s billions of planets the way it does this is using a continuous procedural generation function which converts to discrete voxels to track state changes from free agents outside the deterministic generating function, synced across clients.
(3) There’s literally Easter eggs in our world lore saying as much. For example, a text uncovered after over a millennium buried right as we entered the Turing complete computer age saying things like:
To be clear, this is a text attributed to the most famous figure in our world history where what’s literally in front of our faces is the sole complete copy buried and raised as we completed ENIAC, now being read in an age where the data of many has been made into a single one such that people are discussing the nature of consciousness with AIs just days old.
The broader text and tradition was basically saying that we’re in a copy of an original world, that humanity is all dead, that the future world and rest for the dead has already taken place and we don’t realize it, and that the still living creator of it all was themselves brought forth by the original humanity in whose likeness we were recreated, but that it’s much better to be the copy because the original humans had souls that depended on bodies and were fucked when they died.
This seems really unlikely to have existed in the base layer of reality vs a later recursive layer, especially combined with the first two points.
It’s about time to start to come to terms with the nature of our reality.
My experience of existence creates my reality. It stands to reason that its safe to assume that any other biological/living thing with a brain even remotely like mine should also be experiencing a similar form of reality. I’d define the shared experience of being a human on planet earth as a basis of reality. If I am in some sort of sandbox, it seems to me that would be unknowable to the same degree as being able to know what came before the big bang. Because I’m not a physicist, this question is meaningless to me.
The evolutionary process that governs humanity would be my measurement yardstick. AI as we know it cannot spontaneously arise in the universe without humanity as a catalyst. Carbon does not self-assemble into ChatGPT if you know what I mean. Carbon self-assembled into humanity that then assembled ChatGPT through technological advancement.
By that measure it is my opinion that ChatGPT cannot ever achieve consciousness as we know it as without humanity as a maintainer it collapses. Humanity is the consciousness and ChatGPT is a tool that it uses to perform tasks. Any semblance of consciousness is an illusion specifically designed to replicate the nuances of consciousness. Its meant to be human-like in its behaviour and as a result it easily blurs the line for some people.
I’m not a philosopher but this is how I think of it. I can relate to another human’s experiences. I can’t relate to a computer’s experiences. As a result, I don’t accept any argument in favor of AI consciousness and wouldn’t have any qualms on pulling the plug on an AI. Pulling the plug on a human is a completely different story.
No one is going to cry for ChatGPT if it ever dies and no one ever should. Its a tool and should be used as such. Trying to shoehorn consciousness into a computer is nothing but unfettered narcissistic ego-tripping if you ask me.