AI "consciousness"
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” the writer Arthur C Clarke memorably said. And, yes, when they’re not hallucinating or telling you to eat rocks for dinner, AI chatbots can feel like magic. They can feel very human. But let’s go back to that idea of “stochastic parrots” from Gebru’s paper. “To parrot something is to repeat it without understanding,” says Gebru. This is essentially what LLMs are doing. “They have been taught to calculate how likely sequences of text are based on the data they were trained on.” Because they’ve been fed enormous quantities of data, these models are very sophisticated but that “doesn’t mean consciousness or understanding or anything like that”.
"Magic". Great analogy. A magician saws a person in half on stage--in front of our eyes. We saw it happen. But what didn't we see?
Good opinion piece: No, Richard Dawkins. AI is not conscious
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"Consciousness," depending on context and purpose, may or may not be desirable.
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"Chat bots" are but one of AI's many possible manifestations. There are a lot of work being done to make AI "understand." (E.g., read up on "world models.")
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With or without "understanding," with or without "consciousness," AI has taken over a lot of work that people do, and it will continue to take over more.
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From a quick AI assisted google search (lol) - “ Knowledge is the information, facts, and skills you acquire through education and experience. Intelligence is the mental capacity to process that information, adapt to new situations, and solve problems effectively.”
I would argue that AI absolutely has intelligence. That’s the kind of the whole point of using it. Its ability to process and problem solve. AI’s can train other AI’s - Google AI swarm - the capability of this technology is fascinating. It’s a whole new world, and it’s changing FAST.
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AI cannot form opinions. That tells us a lot. It is, as I have often said, a fancy pants data retrieval system. If you view data retrieval as intelligence, then you can call it intelligent. I don't. AI does not know when it is wrong (or right). It is oblivious to it's functioning. Years ago we could write SQL statements asking for information "LIKE" something and the database software would find occurrences that were similar to what we were searching for. Was it intelligent? No. It was rudimentary AI (as it's called), mere pattern matching with rules. It gave the appearance of intelligence without actually being intelligent. Like everything else that is artificial, it isn't the thing it simulates.
Questions to ask about AI': If it is intelligent, where does it's intelligence lie? If it is conscious, where does it's consciousness lie? In the data store? In the hardware that processes the code and data? In the software that controls it? In the human that programmed it? (In which case, we're talking about human intelligence, not machine intelligence.)
The industrial revolution cheapened everything.
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My intelligence or lack thereof is not artificial. Lol.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Therefore, it not stands to reason that any argument made about, or debate about, knowledge is a philosophical argument, or debate. I maintain that "AI" is not human, that intelligence is a construct of consciousness, and that every time two words are deliberately, and at a specific moment in time, combined, artificially, in English, there is a game afoot, i.e. there is an agenda.
In other words, I agree with Bernard.
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AI cannot form opinions. That tells us a lot. It is, as I have often said, a fancy pants data retrieval system. If you view data retrieval as intelligence, then you can call it intelligent. I don't. AI does not know when it is wrong (or right). It is oblivious to it's functioning. Years ago we could write SQL statements asking for information "LIKE" something and the database software would find occurrences that were similar to what we were searching for. Was it intelligent? No. It was rudimentary AI (as it's called), mere pattern matching with rules. It gave the appearance of intelligence without actually being intelligent. Like everything else that is artificial, it isn't the thing it simulates.
Questions to ask about AI': If it is intelligent, where does it's intelligence lie? If it is conscious, where does it's consciousness lie? In the data store? In the hardware that processes the code and data? In the software that controls it? In the human that programmed it? (In which case, we're talking about human intelligence, not machine intelligence.)
AI cannot form opinions.
Sometimes, having an opinion is overrated and/or counterproductive. Depending on the circumstances, not having an opinion is a feature, not a bug.
Questions to ask about AI': If it is intelligent, where does it's intelligence lie? If it is conscious, where does it's consciousness lie?
Where do your intelligence and consciousness lie? Do you know?
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I disagree that intelligence arises from consciousness. An entity could (in theory) have one and not the other. Consciousness is subjective experience, in Nagel’s famous formulation, what it ‘is like’ to be something. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, model the world, adapt, plan, reason, etc.
Also, to give Chalmers his due, the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ would prevent us from ever knowing if a machine were to develop consciousness.
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AI cannot form opinions.
Sometimes, having an opinion is overrated and/or counterproductive. Depending on the circumstances, not having an opinion is a feature, not a bug.
Questions to ask about AI': If it is intelligent, where does it's intelligence lie? If it is conscious, where does it's consciousness lie?
Where do your intelligence and consciousness lie? Do you know?
Where do your intelligence and consciousness lie? Do you know?
I believe one of the main current areas of interest is some small area between the two hemispheres of the brain. I forgot what it's called. At this point, intelligence and consciousness probably need to discussed separately, since they are not the same thing.
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I asked ChatGPT where its intelligence lie and got the answer below from ChatGPT. In it ChatGPT also states that it does not have consciousness.
My “intelligence” isn’t located in a single place or stored like a database of facts. It comes from patterns learned during training and from computation happening when you ask a question.
At a high level:
- I’m a large neural network created by OpenAI.
- During training, the model processed enormous amounts of text and learned statistical relationships between words, concepts, reasoning patterns, coding structures, writing styles, and more.
- Those learned patterns are encoded in billions of numerical parameters (“weights”). That distributed pattern of weights is the closest thing to where my “knowledge” or “intelligence” resides.
- When you send a message, the model runs computations across those parameters to predict the most useful next pieces of language.
So my intelligence is:
- Distributed across the network’s parameters,
- Activated dynamically during inference (the moment you interact with me),
- And hosted physically on servers/GPUs in data centers rather than in a single machine or location.
It’s also important that I don’t “understand” in the human sense:
- I don’t have consciousness, emotions, beliefs, or self-awareness.
- I don’t experience thoughts internally the way humans do.
- I generate responses by modeling patterns and relationships in language and data.
One way to think about it:
- A traditional database stores explicit facts.
- A human brain stores memories through biological neural structures.
- A model like me stores compressed statistical structure across many layers of artificial neurons.
The “intelligence” emerges from the interaction of all those layers together, not from a central core.
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@Daniel
Oh, good, tell me where (you think or believe) your intelligence and consciousness lie.
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