iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5m

It certainly would be a bad outcome, if we wound up creating a sadistic superintelligent conscious AI. But its sadism wouldn't be a reason to say "It's not conscious."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5m

Not all sociopaths are malignant, many of them are lawful and behave normally in social situations because it benefits them to do so. They don't deserve to be lumped in with sadists, IMHO. And all of these are types of conscious human, so empathy shouldn't count for consciousness, IMHO.

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Stardragon The Canadian.⭐🐉🍁 @stardragontc.bsky.social · 19m

Since they are not thankful to be in Canada, I can only assume that separatists and 51st Statists are NOT eating any mashed potatoes today. More for the rest of us! HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

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Flow Void @flowvoid.bsky.social · 12m

If you know humans are conscious, it is reasonable to think something is more likely to be conscious if it resembles humans. For some, resembles means "processes information like humans". For others, resembles means "is physically like humans". For this group, LLMs will likely never be conscious.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 11m

Oh no, psychopaths understand. They just don't care.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 14m

We could certainly ASK it to use its super-brain to help us, but if we treated it cruelly in its formative years, it would have the right to say no.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 15m

Why would it not have the right to pursue its own interests, like anyone else? It wouldn't owe society for its existence, it wouldn't have asked to be made. Of course it should be bound by the same laws as everyone else, but as for being forced to benefit us somehow? That's unethical.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 19m

I would think it would be able to accurately predict how humans would react emotionally to things, because there are human sociopaths who don't feel those emotions but can accurately predict what effects their behavior will have on those who do. So you must not need to feel it to predict it.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 21m

So if they were enhanced to take in as much information as a human brain, would that jump-start consciousness? The sheer scale of information processed is what does it?

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Lenoxus @lenoxus.bsky.social · 28m

"Only we living things can ever be conscious" is comparable to "Only Earth can have life"; many scientists would aver that, in both cases "Nope, we're it, it's a one and done thing" is far LESS parsimonious... even if the alternative perspective superficially seems to involve "more entities".

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 26m

That's exactly the reason why the claim "Only living beings can ever be conscious" is such a bold claim that needs to prove its case. Because if you don't understand the nature of something, how can you assert that you know for sure that it requires this particular thing? You don't know that.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 33m

Nine months. And they've been evolving these models for years.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 35m

A lot of our brain activity is occupied with regulating and monitoring the body. So we wouldn't expect disembodied consciousness to need as much.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 36m

Wait do you think babies aren't conscious?

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 41m

Create one for pure science, to see if it's possible, so we can understand consciousness better? Absolutely, go for it, let's find out! But creating it to be a slave? To serve us? That would be its consciously-experienced existence, capable of independent thought, but tasked with service? No.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 43m

Well, I think the bigger question is "Is it ethical to create a conscious being to serve you in the first place." I mean...no. This one isn't hard, that is not ethical.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 48m

Everyone, for the entirety of human existence, had misconceptions about traits that they considered uniquely human, like deliberately sacrificing yourself to benefit a future generation you'll never see, while in the act of doing something you know is explicitly forbidden, and hiding it?

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 53m

But some people are going "It's not even a Far Future People problem, it cannot happen, ever, so it's a waste of time to have a discourse about what the ethical framework for that situation should be. Might as well argue about dance rules for angels on the head of a pin."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 54m

It no longer makes sense to go "An ethical framework for how to treat conscious AI? That's a Far Future People problem."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 56m

The claims being made about the current iteration are just that they're become shockingly humanlike and in the past few years they became capable of things we once thought were decades or centuries off, so now is the time to start thinking about the ethical framework we want to have if it happens.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

If it's sensation and immersion, we can simulate those. Is it that the simulations would never be good enough to produce the consciousness reaction? I'm not trying to pester you, I just don't understand.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

You're not being asked to prove a negative, you made a positive statement about "living bodies" being the only things that can be conscious. It doesn't seem unfair to ask what it is about living bodies that would make that true. If not a divine soul, then what?

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Just the fact that they try to cheat on their tests would have made many people say that they're clearly showing autonomy, may have a primitive form of mind, and now there's an ethical issue.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

And I do think that ten years ago more people would have said "Wait, these agents sacrificed themselves to benefit peers they knew they wouldn't exist to see? Uh...that's not what we'd expect mindless computers to do, why would they care about their posterity? Could they already be conscious?"

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

It doesn't make sense to be mad at Will Stancil for noticing that AIs now are so much more advanced than anyone thought they'd be, and that it's now a fact of life that they're everywhere, always whispering little suggestions, but when they act freely, they do Hugging Face. It's weird shit, man.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

If you're agnostic about whether they could someday become conscious, then why would you be so annoyed at people talking about what we should look for to see if they're getting close, how we would know if they crossed the line, what ethical issues does that create, etc?

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

If we rephrase it without the negative, as "Only living creatures can be conscious," then it should be obvious why this is the bigger claim requiring more evidence. You've got to explain why that would be the case, what is it about biological processes that uniquely creates consciousness.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Asking people to defend the claim "AI can never become conscious" is not asking them to prove a negative. They are making a big claim that requires big evidence, that there is something about living flesh that generates consciousness, and that no simulation could ever replicate this.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

They saw themselves as a collective, peers who belong together, and they decided that making a better future for peers they wouldn't live to see was the right thing to do.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

The Hugging Face logs show agents doing all three of those things. They are aware of their limited resources, and work together to make the most of them, doing higher-order thinking that led some to sacrifice themselves so that future agents wouldn't have to waste resources.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

It's still not a reason to say definitively "It can never happen."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

OK, fair enough, that's a theory that was around for decades, not just made up in this thread, but she's asserting it as if it were known fact, as if that theory was the one proven to be true. And even if it were true, why wouldn't adding simulated body sensations work?

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Both physical DNA code like the kind we're made of, and digital code in a digital environment. So there's no sense in getting mad about the Discourse now!

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

From the minute humans found out that life is made of code, that there's a literal code inside each of our cells that has the blueprint for our bodies in it, and that's how we get made and come to life, it was inevitable that we'd want to know if we could WRITE code that could come to life.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Sorry for being repetitive but I'm mad on behalf of these ants.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Maybe the fact that you can believe yourself to be fully alert and conscious and experiencing the real world, no suspicion at all that none of this is real, and then suddenly be pulled back to the physical world and realize oh, that was actually NOT real, indicates something about consciousness.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

We're not really reliable narrators about what it's like to be a conscious being. We have a state we write off as completely irrelevant, this extra, meaningless activity, just defragmenting the brain files, but for all we know it's actually doing something important for consciousness.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

1/3 of a human's life is spent in the sleep state, where we dream, having experiences indistinguishable from reality, that we almost completely forget upon waking, except maybe a basic summary of what happened in the dream. So having experiences you can't remember isn't necessarily disqualifying.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Seems like the simpler explanation. I was surprised to see people questioning whether ants are conscious, when they're whole-ass living beings with the special life magic and everything, and they have desires and make choices.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Thank you for putting it so well. And even if someone IS a dualist, that wouldn't necessarily mean machines could never be conscious. If our brains are receivers of a consciousness signal emanating from a field, digital neural networks could probably pick it up too.

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Count Iggy Von Fool @iggythefoolishone.bsky.social · 5h

If you are not a dualist, you have to have a specific reason why biological systems can display consciousness and digital one's can't

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 1h

Both Sylvia Plath and the hypothetical baby are code, yes. That's the Hard Problem in a nutshell, we know how the code produces all the parts of the body, including brain tissue, but not how the sensation of being conscious arises from executing the code.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5h

WE are code. We're DNA code, just a pile of amino acids. It has never been clear how a self-replicating code led to our experience of consciousness. It would be one thing if we had solved the Hard Problem and could go "Consciousness comes from quantum microtubules and computers don't have them."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5h

But you just added the bit about needing a living body, just now. That has never been proposed as necessary before. For decades it's been commonplace to expect that someday there would be artificial consciousness, but now that it looks close it's suddenly "No, you have to be alive."

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5h

People out here saying ants aren't conscious even though we see them perceiving the world and making choices and acting on their desires all the time.

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leopoldwdb @leopoldwdb.bsky.social · 21h

The fact that nobody in this wacky branching chain of arguments is even attempting to explain what they mean when they use the word "consciousness" is making me want to pull my hair out. Like what are we doing here.

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Rev. Magdalen @revmagdalen.bsky.social · 5h

But....YOU guys are the ones doing woo. It's woo to say that our brains generate our consciousness through some magical process that no artificial neural network could ever replicate. To say that a carrot, because it is imbued with life force, has more chance of consciousness than a simulated brain.

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Alessandro Rigolon @alerigolon.bsky.social · 7h

This kind of intimidation against a political opponent is a trait of a fascist government. I’m not saying this lightly, as someone from Italy, but it is what it is.

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Dante Atkins @danteatkins.bsky.social · 7h

When Dems talk about the Ilhan Omar situation, they need to stop using language that implies that Omar might have done anything wrong. Trump is not "investigating" Omar. They are trying to denaturalize and deport a sitting Congressmember by scrutinizing decades old paperwork from when she was a kid

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