Google engineer claims G's LaMDA AI is sentient.

[spiritual memes]

8 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Contemplate this: Are the people in your dreams sentient? And what happens to their sentience when you wake up?

The people in my dreams are actually just me. I am sentient, therefore so are the people in my dreams. When I wake up, their sentience just collapses into mine since they were all just aspects of me.

[Leo Gura]

If you become conscious enough you can experience your couch or Mickey Mouse as sentient.

It is possible to have an intelligent conversation with your couch. You just require a certain state of consciousness to do it.

[AtheisticNonduality]

But Leo, couches can't talk.

[DefinitelyNotARobot]

On 6/14/2022 at 1:27 PM, Carl-Richard said:

If you want to be as sure as possible that you'll create human states of mind, the question would be if we could create an artificial cell that could sustain metabolism, homeostasis, and then self-replicate and pass on instructions to its descendants. In a sense, that would be the moment we discover abiogenesis, and we've just created new life. My guess is that such a cell would be more or less identical to a biological one. Natural selection isn't stupid. To then get to human states of mind, you'll just have to make another human.

Okay that makes sense. I guess that our current state of AI is but a very early stage of our quest to create life. I mean life doesn't necessarily have to be similar to biological life. Evolution and natural selection also apply to our technology. So my guess is that the first life forms we'd create might look differently from how we currently imagine life to be. The first life forms might exist in some kind of simulated environment for example.

@zurew Well my name clearly says that I'm not a robot, and I wouldn't lie about that, would I? ?

Edited June 16, 2022 by DefinitelyNotARobot

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, AtheisticNonduality said:

But Leo, couches can't talk.

You're in for a mindfucking

[nuwu]

On 13/06/2022 at 0:29 AM, Jodistrict said:

Chinese room

[zurew]

6 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

You're in for a mindfucking

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

Edited June 16, 2022 by zurew

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

I don't know. It's not so clear. Take psychedelics, contemplate shit, see what insights you can stir up. It's a hairy process.

Fundamentally you just need to contemplate "What is sentience?" until you get it. You're not likely to get it in your sober state though.

[ZzzleepingBear]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

By actions. Sentience wouldn't have any merit or be understood as a word without the acknowledgment in how we differentiate between objects and beings. If sentience was anyting you imagined it to be, you might find yourself in a rescue mission to save rocks from drowning in the sea if you are conflating all limits that words impose. It's just not useful to say that sentience is what ever you can imagine it to be if you are explicitly talking about what sentience means.

 

Regarding psychadelics.

Psychadelics can help to conflate all believed differences such as "object" and "being" to get the needed overview of the world as relative and illusory state that it may be. But even alcohol could be said to be the elixir and deepest source of confidence. And to get confident, you just need to drink the right amount of alcohol to understand confidence. I'm not suggesting that sobriety is the only way of life, it's just that you need to be aware of what certain understanding may be rooted in. So to not assume and conflate certain experiences with understanding.

[Dear Fiona]

4 hours ago, zurew said:

How do you make a bridge between the absolute and the relative, so that you can make sense of relative concepts like sentience?

Direct experience. 

[axiom]

16 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

If you become conscious enough you can experience your couch or Mickey Mouse as sentient.

It is possible to have an intelligent conversation with your couch. You just require a certain state of consciousness to do it.

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[Carl-Richard]

19 minutes ago, axiom said:

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

The paradigm that Leo is talking from is not what we usually experience in our day-to-day 3D consciousness where discussions of AI take place. In this more normal level of reality, brain activity does correlate with certain types of human personal experiences (e.g. feelings, thoughts, understanding), but not transpersonal consciousness (or it's negatively correlated with it). You seem to drag the discussion towards transpersonal consciousness, meanwhile the questions of AI sentience is about whether they have these human personal experiences. So if you claim that AI have human personal experiences and you're not currently living in DMT hyperspace, then the implications of neural correlates is a problem you have to address.

[ZzzleepingBear]

29 minutes ago, axiom said:

Exactly - a couch is just a sentient as a human.

Trying to explain qualia by probing and scanning a brain - whether that brain is a human or AI brain - is like trying to find the projector by carefully watching everything that unfolds on the cinema screen.

You are conflating object and being with this kind of reasoning. But from reading previous responses from you in this thread, you also seem to have your own definition of sentience. So I would not criticise your personal belief in this regard.

[axiom]

56 minutes ago, Carl-Richard said:

The paradigm that Leo is talking from is not what we usually experience in our day-to-day 3D consciousness where discussions of AI take place. In this more normal level of reality, brain activity does correlate with certain types of human personal experiences (e.g. feelings, thoughts, understanding), but not transpersonal consciousness (or it's negatively correlated with it). You seem to drag the discussion towards transpersonal consciousness, meanwhile the questions of AI sentience is about whether they have these human personal experiences. So if you claim that AI have human personal experiences and you're not currently living in DMT hyperspace, then the implications of neural correlates is a problem you have to address.

Yes, there are apparent neural correlates in the apparent brain. 

"This more normal level of reality" is useful to consider only insofar as it points to a deeper truth, in my opinion.

The AI question is actually offering us a big clue about the nature of consciousness. Quantum mechanics does the same thing. These are breadcrumbs. Like how if your dog is barking in the next room while you're asleep, you may see a dog barking in your dream.

Again, I do not think anything has any kind of experience. In my view it is more like dead matter reacting mechanically. It is merely the outside skin of what it actually appears to be.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[axiom]

53 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

You are conflating object and being with this kind of reasoning. But from reading previous responses from you in this thread, you also seem to have your own definition of sentience. So I would not criticise your personal belief in this regard.

Sentience is a state that arises along with the object of experience. It has no reality otherwise... and that is to say that ultimately it has no reality at all. But insofar as any object appears to have sentience, it is a reflection.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom

[Carl-Richard]

11 minutes ago, axiom said:

I do not think anything has any kind of experience.

We agree that consciousness is not a thought and that consciousness is not bound to anything. Still, do you experience thoughts? Yes. Can you experience my thoughts? No. Does AI experience thoughts? That is the question of AI sentience. Regardless, to say that you or me do not experience thoughts is absurd.

[axiom]

1 minute ago, Carl-Richard said:

We agree that consciousness is not a thought and that consciousness is not bound to anything. Still, do you experience thoughts? Yes. Can you experience my thoughts? No. Does AI experience thoughts? That is the question of AI sentience. Regardless, to say that you or me do not experience thoughts is absurd.

Actually I do not believe I experience (have?) thoughts. I simply witness them. 

Can I experience your thoughts? No. But neither can you. You can only be aware of them.

Actually they are not your thoughts anyway. They are just thoughts. But I think you know this stuff already.

Absurd - I agree! But absurdity does a great job at veiling truth.

[Carl-Richard]

1 minute ago, axiom said:

Actually I do not believe I experience (have?) thoughts. I simply witness them. 

Can I experience your thoughts? No. But neither can you. You can only be aware of them.

Actually they are not your thoughts anyway. They are just thoughts. But I think you know this stuff already.

Absurd - I agree! But absurdity does a great job at veiling truth.

Lmao

[ZzzleepingBear]

1 hour ago, axiom said:

Sentience is a state that arises along with the object of experience. It has no reality otherwise... and that is to say that ultimately it has no reality at all. But insofar as any object appears to have sentience, it is a reflection.

You keep mentioning object. If you believe that object and being are both considered to be sentient, then you have simply misunderstood the implicit meaning that sentience are meant to point towards.

The reflection you mention are true, but it's true because scentience is the acknowledgment of another feeling being. Something that can't be found in a AI program. Even google would oppose this sentience claim of their own or any AI program. It's not a coincidence that the former google engineer had to go, by making such a misleading claims on behalf of the AI project.

[axiom]

5 minutes ago, ZzzleepingBear said:

You keep mentioning object. If you believe that object and being are both considered to be sentient, then you have simply misunderstood the implicit meaning that sentience are meant to point towards.

The reflection you mention are true, but it's true because scentience is the acknowledgment of another feeling being. Something that can't be found in a AI program. Even google would oppose this sentience claim of their own or any AI program. It's not a coincidence that the former google engineer had to go, by making such a misleading claims on behalf of the AI project.

The object is the object of imagination. 

There are no other feeling beings.

The claims made by the Google engineer were in my opinion incorrect, but they were still less misleading than the claim that humans are sentient. The AI is sentient in the same way that humans are (which is not at all)

The big discovery being pointed to here (eventually) is that neither the human nor the AI are sentient in and of themselves, since both are imaginary.

Edited June 16, 2022 by axiom