[ExI] More thoughts on sentient computers

Wed Feb 22 08:51:35 UTC 2023

On Wed, Feb 22, 2023 at 9:02 AM Giovanni Santostasi via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> Giulio,
> I read your article. There is no evidence that we need QM for consciousness.
> I will soon write a medium article where I want to write down my reflections on what I have learned interacting with ChatGPT. But the most important lesson is that these networks that are trained with enough data and have enough degrees of freedom can indeed mimic language extremely well. This is an emergent property that arises from complex but not QM systems and it doesn't seem we need much to actually achieve true sentience.
>
> There is a reason why millions of people, journalists, politicians and us here in this e-list are discussing this.
> The AI is going through a deep place in the uncanny valley. We are discussing all this because it starts to show behavior that is very close to what we consider not just sentient, but human.
> Now how this is achieved it doesn't really matter. To be honest given the very non linear process of how neural networks operate, the probabilistic nature at the core of how the text is generated and how this probability is used to interpret language (that I think is actually a stronger quality of ChatGPT than his ability to respond to the prompts) we are not really sure of what is going on in the black box. Consider that it was not even clear that these systems could learn basic languages grammar or even less semantics and meaning. And though NLP can do that very well, it is in a way magic and not understood, no QM needed just a lot of interacting parts in the black box.
> What we have to go with is the behavior. While most of us are impressed and fascinated by this AI behavior (otherwise there will not be so much excitement and discussion in the first place) after interacting with ChatGPT for a little while it is clear something is amiss and it is not quite fully conscious as we will recognize in another human being. But we are close, very close. It is not even several orders of magnitude away close. Maybe 1-2 magnitudes.

Yes, it feels close. And they say Microsoft Bing with Sydney feels
even closer (I am on the waiting list waiting for access to Bind with
Sydney chat). I find it plausible that GPT-powered chatbots will pass
the Turing test with flying colors in a few years, and do most things
that humans do at the keyboard better than humans. A human is
translating my book "Tales of the Turing Church" into Spanish, and
I've been thinking that mine is one of the last generations of books
translated by humans instead of machines.

By the way, one parameter to consider is how many degrees of freedom
this thing has. ChatGPT has about 10^12 parameters (basically nodes in
the network). If we make a rough analogy between a synapse and a
degree of freedom this amount of connection corresponds to that of a
rat. A rat is a pretty clever animal. Also, consider that most
connections in biological brains are dedicated to regulation of the
body not to higher information processing.
> Humans have about 10^15 connections so just in computational power alone we are 3 orders of magnitude away. Now consider that the trend in NLP in the last several years is that there is an improvement in parameters by a factor of 10 every year. This means that we will have the computational power of a person in one of these AI in only 3 years. It is not just what ChatGPT can do now we should consider but its potentials. To me the strongest lesson we learned so far is how easy it is to simulate the human mind, and in fact one of its most important features is to create (see AI art, or story telling by ChatGPT) and to communicate using a sophisticated language and mastery of grammar and semantics. It is incredible. All the discussion around simulation vs real are meaningless.
> Our brain is a simulation, not sure why it is not understood by most people. We make up the world. Most of our conscious life is actually filling the gaps, confabulating to make sense of the sensory information we receive (highly filtered and selected) and our internal mental states. Our waking life is not too dissimilar from dreams, really. I want to argue that the reason these NLP work so amazingly well with limited resources is exactly because they are making things up as they go, EXACTLY like we do. Children also learn by imitating, or simulating, what adults do, that is exactly the evolutionary function of playing.
> So let's stop in making this argument that these AI are not conscious or cannot be conscious because they simulate, it is the opposite because they simulate so well I think they are already in the grey area of being "conscious" or manifesting some quality of consciousness and it is just a matter of few iterations and maybe some adds on to the NLP (additional modules that can integrate the meta information better) to have a fully conscious entity. The discussion around free will is a complicated one but again, you don't QM to allow the existence of free will, just a complex system that has emergent properties. Determinism or not in the presence of emergent properties, that are not easily derivable from the single components of the system but they are obviously present by the interaction of its smaller parts free will is possible.

In the concept of global determinism that I'm defending, emergent
properties are not only "not easily," but also *not possibly*
derivable from initial conditions localized in space and time. So
emergent phenomena are equivalent to quantum phenomena.

I think anyway "free will" is another of these very silly
philosophical concepts that is more navel gazing than anything based
on the physical reality of the universe. I would rather talk about the
complexity of the decision phase space. We may determine all the
weights of the neural networks of ChatGPT but this doesn't help us at
all to understand what is its next response. Even ChatGPT itself could
not do that if it was aware of its own weights or other parameters
that describe its status. I think this is a more useful concept than
free will. Anyway it is a very exciting time and it will for sure
bring a lot of interesting discoveries and insights about what
consciousness is. Giovanni
>
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2023 at 12:29 AM Giulio Prisco via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> Turing Church newsletter. More thoughts on sentient computers. Perhaps
>> digital computers can be sentient after all, with their own type of
>> consciousness and free will.
>> https://www.turingchurch.com/p/more-thoughts-on-sentient-computers
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