[ExI] all we are is just llms

Sun Apr 23 03:59:09 UTC 2023

*A materialist would say that what you know, is that certain neurons in
your brain are activated in a certain pattern when you see red. That is all
you can know.*

*Brent Allsop, [27.08.21 12:23]*

*I am a materialist, and I agree with your first statement.*

*But your second statement can be falsified.  Once we discover which of all
our descriptions of stuff in my brain is a description of my redness, this
will falsify your last claim, since we will then know more than you claim
we can know.* In which way it would be falsified? Ok even if describe all
the biological events behind the sensation of red how that helps me
understand what redness is? Should I actually describe the interaction at
the atomic level? At the subatomic level? Should I go all the way to the
Plank's scale? The reason why a neuroscientist cares about the patterns in
the neurons is that it is where the stuff that matter is, not that we don't
know how to go lower in terms of biological events that can create these
neural patterns. The details knowledge of the physical events would not
help us a bit in understanding what redness is. Not sure why this needs to
be repeated over and over. The neural patterns is where the magic happens
because it is where the information is organized, the temporal flow of it,
the amount of it (that can be measured). We can look at how many regions of
the brain are activated under different consciousness conditions, how it is
affected by the presence of drugs, food, and so on. You are looking for
redness in the wrong place.

On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 8:51 PM Giovanni Santostasi <gsantostasi at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> *Brent Allsop, [27.08.21 12:12]*
>
> *That is true.  All you have is words, no real phenomenal experience.  You
> can't do anything, without a dictionary for everything, including a
> definition for the word redness.  I don't need a dictionary to know what my
> redness is like.  It is just a physical fact. *No, it is not. The fact
> there is physical events beyond your sense of redness has nothing to do
> with anything. Of course, everything in the universe happens because of
> some physical event. EVERYTHING, even words. So words are physical, the
> sensation of red is physical. What is your point Brent? But furthermore as
> repeated 10^9 times what you think it is a direct, pristine experience of
> redness is not. It is based on a vocabulary in the sense the brain is
> interpreting and translating a code to a sensation, the sensation is the
> translation. The code is the firing of the brain, which is the fundamental
> language that is being "translated". What you call seeing is the result on
> many feedback loops based on the interpretation, analysis, and filtering of
> the firing of neurons. It is an emergent property, nothing direct or
> fundamental. It is the wrong thing to pay attention to in understanding
> what consciousness is.
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 8:10 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023, 7:22 PM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *Ja, Ben where I was really going with that idea is exploring whether it
>>> is possible to separate consciousness from intelligence*
>>> GPT-4:
>>> Consciousness:
>>> Consciousness refers to an individual's subjective experience,
>>> awareness, and perception of their environment, thoughts, and feelings. It
>>> is the state of being conscious, or awake and responsive to one's
>>> surroundings. Consciousness is often associated with self-awareness, the
>>> ability to reflect on one's thoughts, emotions, and actions. The nature of
>>> consciousness, its origin, and how it arises from the brain are still
>>> subjects of ongoing debate and research.
>>>
>>> Intelligence:
>>> Intelligence, on the other hand, refers to the ability to acquire,
>>> process, and apply knowledge and skills. It involves various cognitive
>>> functions such as reasoning, problem-solving, abstract thinking, learning,
>>> and adaptation to new situations. Intelligence can be measured and
>>> evaluated using standardized tests like IQ tests, although it is a complex
>>> and multi-dimensional concept that goes beyond a single score. It is often
>>> seen as a general mental ability that enables an individual or an
>>> artificial system to effectively interact with the environment and solve
>>> problems.
>>>
>>> Giovanni (GPT-4 is my assistant if you didn't know):
>>>
>>> Intelligence and consciousness are related but separate concepts. But
>>> they are fuzzy concepts and they overlap quite a bit.
>>>
>>
>> I believe consciousness is a necessary component of any intelligent
>> process. (See attached image) the perceptions represent the mind processing
>> and interpreting information from the environment so that it can l
>> determine an (intelligent) action to take. Without this input and
>> processing there can be no intelligence, as the mind would be "flying
>> blind", performing actions randomly without input from the environment.
>>
>>> I think the main interesting question is if you can have a very
>>> intelligent system without being conscious or a conscious system that is
>>> not very intelligent.
>>>
>>
>> You can have a very intelligent process with minimal consciousness. For
>> example, AlphaGo is more intelligent than any human (when it comes to Go)
>> but it's awareness is quite limited, perhaps limited to a few hundred bits
>> of input representing the board state, and recent sequence of moves (though
>> maybe it also has additional consciousness related to what moves it likes
>> and dislikes).
>>
>> You can also have a highly conscious process with minimal or no
>> intelligence. For example a human brain who is "locked in" can be very
>> conscious, the perception side of the intelligence loop is still working,
>> but since this person is totally paralyzed they are unable to perform any
>> intelligent actions and thus are not intelligent (at least under the agent
>> environment interaction model of intelligence).
>>
>>>
>>> Some people attribute a low level of consciousness to almost anything
>>> that reacts to the environment, even passively. If I sit and I perceive a
>>> strawberry and I'm aware of this perception I'm conscious. The entire bs of
>>> qualia is focused on this supposed mystery and it is used as a fundamental
>>> conundrum that is the key or at least a fundamental piece of the puzzle to
>>> understanding consciousness.
>>>
>>
>> I think there is a genuine mystery related to qualia, but that we can
>> explain why qualia are incommunicable and unexplainable in terms similar to
>> what leads to Godelian incompleteness. I agree with you that we shouldn't
>> get hung up on this problem, as it is in a sense, the probably unsolvable
>> part of the mystery of consciousness.
>>
>> To me, that is a trivial and not interesting phenomenon that is not at
>>> all the core of what consciousness is. At least the kind of consciousness
>>> that is interesting and that we are mostly fascinated by as humans.
>>>
>>> We can also say that some expert system that can interpret data and make
>>> models automatically to make predictions of possible outcomes in a narrow
>>> field of expertise is an "intelligent system".
>>>
>>>
>>> This why a lot of the debate about consciousness and intelligence is
>>> around AGI, or systems that are not intelligent in a specific domain but
>>> systems that figure out intelligence as a general way to interpret and
>>> analyze information and make predictive models of the world that INCLUDE
>>> the system itself. Consciousness is this process of seeing oneself in these
>>> auto-generated models of the world.
>>>
>> I would call that self-consciousness / self-awareness, which I consider a
>> subclass of consciousness / awareness.
>>
>> I think many animals, machines, and even humans at certain times are
>> simply conscious / aware, and only become self-conscious / self-aware under
>> particular circumstances.
>>
>> So intelligence is the ability to make models from data and higher
>>> consciousness is the ability to see oneself as an agent in these predictive
>>> models.
>>>
>>> The most interesting part of consciousness is the individuation aspect
>>> and the process of its transcendence. The ability to identify as an
>>> integrated, self-knowing entity and the related ability to expand this
>>> identification to other sentient beings and see the parallel and connection
>>> between these beings both at the intellectual but also experiential level.
>>> Intelligence and in fact, wisdom are important aspects of this type of
>>> consciousness because it requires being able to see patterns, correlation,
>>> and causation between different levels of internal and external reality.
>>> Primates have developed this type of consciousness because of the complex
>>> social structures they live in that requires a deep theory of mind, an
>>> empirically-based moral order of the world, and a sense of compassion
>>> (supported by the activation of mirror neurons) and in fact, even love.
>>>
>>> Artificial Intelligences that are trained on a vast collection of human
>>> data have developed a theory of mind because it is impossible to make sense
>>> of language without it. Developing a theory of mind is a component of what
>>> is required to have that higher level of consciousness, I think on the base
>>> of this alone we can declare GPT-4 has some form of higher consciousness
>>> (although incomplete).
>>>
>> Perhaps it is even higher than that of humans. It's certainly more
>> knowledgeable than any human who's ever lived.
>>
>> This will become more of a question as the number of parameters in it's
>> brain begins to exceed the number of neural connections in the human brain
>> (which I believe is only a few orders of magnitude away, perhaps reachable
>> in a couple of years).
>>
>> There are other things that are missing like a continuous loop that would
>>> allow GPT-4 to reflect on these theories and its internal status (the
>>> equivalent of feelings) reacting to them (GPT-4 it will tell you it has no
>>> opinion or feeling but then it goes ahead and provides what it considers
>>> the best course of action regarding a social situation for example). These
>>> loops are not there by design.
>>>
>> There is at least one loop that is part of it's design: once GPT outputs
>> some symbols that output is fed back in as input to the next cycle of
>> generation. Thus to answer a single prompt this might happen dozens or
>> hundreds of times.
>>
>> If the model were asked to consider what is the source of these symbols
>> it is seeing generated, the only correct answer it could give would have to
>> involve some kind of self-reference. Asking GPT "who generated that output
>> text?" is like asking a human "who moved your arm?", you may not consider
>> it until asked, but you have to answer "I" -- "I generated my output text"
>> or "I moved my arm."
>>
>>
>> GPT-4 is in a sense a frozen form of consciousness without these loops.
>>>
>> Our own perception of time and motion is in a sense a fabrication. There
>> was a woman who after damage to the V5 part of her visual cortex could no
>> longer perceive motion. Everything she saw was like a static frame. It's a
>> condition known as akinetopsia or motion blindness. She found pouring tea
>> to be especially difficult “because the fluid appeared to be frozen, like a
>> glacier” and she didn't know when to stop pouring.
>>
>> Given this, it's not immediately obvious whether GPT does or does not
>> perceive time as continuous. It seems humans can be made to experience
>> frozen moments of time rather than continuous motion. Perhaps GPT could be
>> made to perceive or not perceive motion in a similar way, regardless of the
>> architecture or presence of loops.
>>
>>
>>
>>> These loops can be added easily externally via different applications
>>> like Auto-GPT for example. If one could build such a system that could
>>> reflect and correct its own status on a continuous basis it will be a truly
>>> conscious system and we will have achieved AGI.
>>>
>>
>> Imagine we took GPT-4 back to 1980 or 1960. Is there any doubt people of
>> that time (including AI researchers) would consider GPT-4 an AGI?
>>
>> We are not there yet but we are close. The real excitement in the latest
>>> development in AI is not if the current form of GPT-4 is conscious or not
>>> but the obvious fact to most of us that AGI is achievable with known
>>> methods and it is just a matter of putting all the existing pieces together.
>>>
>> I think we're very close to eclipsing the best humans in every domain of
>> mental work. Currently we still have a few areas where the best humans
>> outclass AI. Today AI beats the average human in nearly every domain, and
>> is superhuman in a great number of areas.
>>
>> I agree no new theoretical advances are required to get there from today.
>> It's just a matter of more integration and more scaling.
>>
>> Jason
>>
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 3:16 PM Sherry Knepper via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Does emotional intelligence count?
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Apr 21, 2023 at 4:31 AM, Ben Zaiboc via extropy-chat
>>>> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>> On 21/04/2023 06:28, spike wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Regarding measuring GPT’s intelligence, this must have already been
>>>> done and is being done.  Reasoning: I hear GPT is passing medical boards
>>>> exams and bar exams and such, so we should be able to give it IQ tests,
>>>> then compare its performance with humans on that test.  I suspect GPT will
>>>> beat everybody at least on some tests.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Yeah, but don't forget, spike, they just have *simulated*
>>>> understanding of these things we test them for. So the test results are not
>>>> really valid. That will include IQ tests. No good. Simulated intelligence,
>>>> see?
>>>>
>>>> Ben
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