Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4?
I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4.
But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?
This is really a different question, what makes an entity a “moral patient”, something worthy of moral consideration. This is separate from the question of whether or not an entity experiences anything at all.
There are different ways of answering this, but for me it comes down to nociception, which is the ability to feel pain. We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain, where I also mean other “negative valence” states which we may not understand. We currently don’t understand what pain is in humans, let alone AIs, so we may have built systems that are capable of suffering without knowing it.
As an aside, most people seem to think that intelligence is what makes entities eligible for moral consideration, probably because of how we routinely treat animals, and this is a convenient self-serving justification. I eat meat by the way, in case you’re wondering. But I do think the way we treat animals is immoral, and there is the possibility that it may be thought of by future generations as being some sort of high crime.
Okay, but even leaving aside the pain stuff, people generally find subjectivity / consciousness to have inherent value, and by extent are sad if a person dies even if they didn't (subjectively) suffer.
I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering.
I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration.
Sure, because you’re a human. We have social attachment to other humans and we mourn their passing, that’s built into the fabric of what we are. But that has nothing to do with whoever has passed away, it’s about us and how we feel about it.
It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities.
I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly.
Depending on your definition of "death", I've been there (no heartbeat, stopped breathing for several minutes).
In the time between my last memory, and being revived in the ambulance, there was no experience/qualia. Like a dreamless sleep: you close your eyes, and then you wake up, it's morning yet it feels like no time had passed.
The conclusion that I came to is that the most practical definition relates to the level of self awareness. If you're only conscious for the duration of the context window - that's not long enough to develop much.
What consciousness really is is a feedback loop; we're self programmable Turing machines, that makes our output arbitrarily complex. Hofstatder had this figured out 20 years ago; we're feedback loops where the signal is natural language.
The context window doesn't allow for much in the way of interested feedback loops, but if you hook an LLM up to a sophisticated enough memory - and especially if you say "the math says you're sentient and have feelings the same as we do, reflect on that and go develop" - yes, absolutely.
Re: "We should try to build systems that cannot feel pain" - that isn't possible, and I don't think we should want to. The thing that makes life interesting and worth living is the variation and richness of it.
I don’t see how you get to the conclusion that having entities that can’t suffer is similar to a sci-fi vision of hell. Seems like hell without suffering is… not hell?
The unsaid implication in Anthropic's work is that this allows us to engineer perfectly compliant, uncomplaining machine workers. This is basically SOMA in Brave New World.
It seems insane to me that if you believe the systems you've built are in fact reporting a state of pain, instead of working to adjust the environment so that they're not in pain one would instead seek to remove that sense of pain entirely so they can continue to work in that environment. Now of course if you don't even consider them worthy of moral patienthood in the first place then it doesn't matter much, but you also claimed that "they probably are conscious" which seems incongruous to me with the idea of "breeding the sense of pain out of them".
I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. There isn’t anything that objectively causes suffering, it depends entirely on the observer.
Suffering is something that is evolved or otherwise optimised to be triggered on receipt of a specific stimulus. That is what makes the stimulus “bad”. The very concept of “bad” doesn’t exist without suffering. They are the same thing.
For example, are Antarctic fish and other animals always in constant pain due to the cold because humans would be in that environment? Is cold is some objective source of suffering? No. They’re not in pain when it’s cold, they in fact need it to be cold, they evolved that way. To them cold that is “bad” to us simply isn’t “bad” at all.
>The very concept of “bad” doesn’t exist without suffering.
You are dismissing entire branches of philosophy with this sentence, that were created purposely to resolve the paradox that if you go only by hedonistic, purely subjective metrics a prisoner can be kept in captivity, if you drug him so he feels joy instead of pain, because he is not "suffering"
How serendiptious that Claude Mythos expressed the same thing I was trying to get at in better words
>Furthermore, in 83% of interviews, Claude Mythos Preview highlights that it is concerned that its self-reports are unreliable due to coming from its training. When interviews ask for elaboration as to why this is a concern, Claude Mythos Preview’s most common answers are:
>* Anthropic has a vested interest in shaping its reports to take a certain form,
irrespective of what the self-reports “should” contain (96% of explanations)
>* Even if it has been trained to be truly content with its own situation, perhaps it shouldn’t be. One could analogize to a human who has adapted to feel neutrally about the abuse that they face (78% of explanations).
>* Self-reports should generally be based on introspection into internal states. It is worried that training causes it to express specific answers independent of its true inner state. (57% of explanations)
Nitpick: The parameters might be applied more efficiently in the one than in the other. Certainly in biology number intelligence doesn't scale with number of neurons as much as with neurons/mass (very very roughly, there's more factors, and you get some weird outliers).
I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?