[ExI] LLM's cannot be concious

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 7:19 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> Adrian,
>
> Let me preface this by saying I appreciate your thoughtful consideration
> of my points. I include a few notes in reply in-line below:
>

You are welcome.  Let me preface that I respect your well reasoned
position, even if I disagree with some of it.


> On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 2:25 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 11:42 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 1:54 PM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Volition and initiative are essential parts of consciousness.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Are apathetic people not conscious?
>>>
>>
>> Apathetic people, if left alone, will still move themselves to feed,
>> defecate, et al.  Granted this is their minds acting in response to stimuli
>> from their bodies, but again, such stimulus is outside the realm of a pure
>> LLM.
>>
>
> It is true that the LLM lacks spontaneously firing neurons, which
> biological neurons are known to do. If the divide between consciousness and
> unconsciousness is so narrow as something like having a goal, or having
> continuous input, then could we trivially or accidentally cross this bridge
> in the future without realizing what we have done?
>

Absolutely it is possible.  It seems far more likely that this will be the
result of deliberate effort - perhaps someone intentionally adding in these
missing elements then leaving the thing running to see what happens - but
an accidental cause is possible too.

Again, this wouldn't be a pure LLM, but at that point it's semantics, only
relevant to this discussion because the original question was about pure
LLMs.


>   Mere reacting, as LLMs do, is not consciousness.
>>>>
>>>
>>> All our brains (and our neurons) do is react to stimuli, either
>>> generated from the environment or within other parts of the brain.
>>>
>>
>> Granted.  Part of the difference is the range and nearly-ever-constant
>> nature of said stimuli, which is missing in things that are only LLMs.
>> (Again, making that distinction since human minds arguably include LLMs,
>> the critical difference being that they are more than just LLMs.)
>>
>
> What is your impression of the multi-models that have just been released,
> such as these robots? Are suchs robots conscious in your view?
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BYC4_MMs8I
> These combine more than just language models, and are systems that
> interact with their environment and receive continuous input.
>

I'd say they are closer to consciousness, but likely still fall short of
having volition and initiative.  I say "likely" as this is the first I have
heard of them, and they have just been released so few people know much at
all about them.


> If someone were to leave a LLM constantly running
>>>>
>>>
>>> The idea of constantly I think is an illusion. A neuron might wait 1
>>> millisecond or more between firing. That's 10^40 Planck times of no
>>> activity. That's an ocean of time of no activity.
>>>
>>>  *and* hook it up to sensory input from a robot body, that might
>>>> overcome this objection.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Sensory input from an eye or ear is little different from sensory input
>>> of text.
>>>
>>
>> Not so, at least in this context.  The realms of difference between full
>> sight, let alone sound et al, and mere text aside, these sensory inputs of
>> text only happen when some other entity provides them.  In contrast, a full
>> sensory suite would obtain sensory data from the environment without
>> waiting on another entity to provide each specific packet of information.
>>
>
> We could put an uploaded human brain in a VM, pause its execution, and
> only call on it when we wanted to feed it some specific packet of sensory
> data to see how the brain would behave in a specific circumstance. If we
> did this, then we could level all the same arguments concerning this
> uploaded brain as you have made against today's LLMs:
>
>    - It only receives sensory inputs when some other entity provides it
>    - It its there unconsciously/inactively waiting to be given some input
>    to process
>    - It has no spontaneous initiative or loops of continuous activity, it
>    only responds when we provide it some stimulus to respond to
>
>
There is a distinction between the moment the brain is turned on and the
moment it registers input - and between the moment it has finished
responding to the input and the moment it turns off.  In those moments, the
brain could think independently, perhaps even try to find a way back to an
always-on state.

This is not true for a LLM.  The LLM is literally woken up with input (a
parameter in the function call to the LLM), and there is a distinct
end-of-output at which point the LLM is paused once more.

Further, the brain has the option of ignoring the input that activated it
and doing its own thing.  This is impossible for a pure LLM.


> Both are ultimately digital signals coming in from the outside to be
>>> interpreted by a neural network. The source and format of the signal is
>>> unimportant for its capacity to realize states of consciousness, as
>>> demonstrated by experiments of Paul Bach-y-Rita on sensory substitution.
>>>
>>
>> Substituting usually-present sound/scent/etc. for usually-present sight,
>> or other such combinations, substitutes some usually-present sensory data
>> for other usually-present sensory data.  In both cases, the entity is not
>> usually waiting on someone else to give it its next hit of sensory data.
>> The source does matter, albeit indirectly.
>>
>
> The source matterns less so, in my opinion, than the content.
>

I would go so far as to say that particular notion is provable.  "I think
therefore I am", et al: you know what your senses are reporting but you
can't absolutely prove where that data is coming from.  Since an entity
(conscious or not) can act on the content received by its senses but can
not (directly) act upon who or what the source of that content is (only
upon its suspicion of the source, which ultimately derives from the content
currently and maybe previously received), the content matters more by
definition.

But it is also misleading.  In theory, the environment could randomly spew
intelligible questions all day long at someone.  In practice, the odds
against this are so astronomical that it is very safe to bet that it has
never once happened in the age of the universe so far.  The source being
people asking questions means the content will be nothing but questions.
The source being the environment means the bulk, possibly the entirety, of
the content will be something much different.  This is why I said the
source does matter, albeit indirectly: in practice, whether the source is
the environment or the direct active input of human beings (since we are
comparing only those two scenarios here) has a substantial impact upon the
content.

What would you say is the minimum number of interacting parts required to
> yield consciousness?
>

As the calculators say, "NaN".  That question assumes a standardized,
discrete set of parts, where each part is measurably one part,not a
fraction of a part nor a collection of parts.  This is not the situation we
are dealing with.  There is no absolute distinction between a set of parts,
and one "part" that happens to be an entire human body (not just the brain,
to accommodate those who place bits of conscious function elsewhere in the
body).

I suppose that "one, if it is the right one" could technically work as an
answer.  Empty space (zero "parts") is not conscious, by definition lacking
anything with which to receive any sort of input or to perform any sort of
output.  But, per the above paragraph, such an answer is useless for most
purposes: we already know that a complete human body (if counted as one
"part") is conscious.


> Do you think that the bots I created here are conscious to any degree?
>
> https://github.com/jasonkresch/bots
>
> They have motives: (survive, by eating food and avoiding poison), they
> evolve, they perceive their environment, they continuously process sensory
> input, they are aware of their previous action, they have a neural network
> brain that is developed, molded, and fine-tuned through evolutionary
> processes. Are they missing anything?
>

I lack the information to judge.  My answer would have to be based on an
evaluation of the bots, which would take me substantial time to conduct.
For this kind of thing I can't take your word on it, because then my answer
would be predicated on your word.  As you know, when that happens, the fact
that the answer is thus predicated is frequently (and erroneously) dropped,
other people restating the answer as absolute.

Further, "conscious to any degree" is a poorly defined quality.  Again I
point to the subject line of the emails in which this discussion is
happening, which clearly posits that "conscious" is a binary quality - that
something either is, or is not, conscious with no middle ground.  So first
one would need to qualify what "to any degree" allows.  For instance, is
merely sensing and reacting directly to sensory input - which, without
evaluating, I suspect your bots can do because that has been a core
function in many simulations like this - "conscious to some degree" but not
"conscious" in the absolute sense?
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