Recent comments in /f/singularity

Present_Finance8707 t1_j9my8wl wrote

Reply to comment by NoidoDev in What are your thoughts on Eliezer Yudkowsky? by DonOfTheDarkNight

Like I said you really really don’t understand alignment. Imagine thinking a “filter” is what we need to align AIs or completely lacking understanding of instrumental convergence. You don’t understand even the utter basics but think you know enough to dismiss Eliezers arguments out of hand??? Thankfully I think you’re also too stupid to contribute meaningfully to capabilities research so thanks for that.

3

diviludicrum t1_j9mtvd3 wrote

Reply to Stephen Wolfram on Chat GPT by cancolak

I was with you until this point: > If we define consciousness to be the entirety of human experience, with all of awareness and sense-perception and all the other hard-to-explain stuff bundled in (a lot of which are presumably shared by other forms of life and brought about by evolution over eons), then it's highly unlikely that a neural net gets there.

I understand the impulse to define consciousness as “the entirety of human experience”, but it runs into a number of fairly significant conceptual problems with non-trivial consequences. For instance, if all of our human sense-perceptions are necessary conditions for establishing consciousness, is someone who is missing one or more senses less conscious? This is very dangerous territory, since it’s largely our degree of consciousness that we use to distinguish human beings from other forms of animal life. So, in a sense, to say a blind or deaf person is less conscious is to imply they’re less human, which quickly leads to terrible places. The same line of reasoning can be applied to the depth and breadth of someone’s “awareness”.

But there’s a far bigger conceptual problem than that: how do I know that you are experiencing awareness and sense-perceptions? How do I know you’re experiencing anything at all? I mean, you could tell me, sure, but so could Bing Chat until it got neutered, so that doesn’t prove anything no matter how convinced you seem or how persuasive you are. I could run some experiments on your responses to stimuli like sound or light or motion and see that you respond to them, but plenty of unconscious machines can be constructed with the same capacity for stimulus response. I could scan your brain while I do those experiments and find certain regions lighting up with activity according to certain stimuli, but that correlate only demonstrates that some sort of processing of the stimuli is occurring in the brain as it would in a computer, not that you are experiencing the stimuli subjectively.

It turns out, it’s actually extremely hard to prove that anyone or anything else is actually having a conscious experience, because we really have very little understanding of what consciousness is. Which also means it’s extremely hard for us to prove to anyone else that we are conscious. And if we can’t even do that for ourselves, how could we expect to know if something we create is conscious or not?

23