The neurons/atoms distinction isn’t causal closure. Causal closure means there is no outside influence entering the program (other than, let’s say, the sensory inputs of the person).
green_leaf
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I’m thinking the causal closure part is more about the soul not existing than about anything else.
Are you saying that after it has generated the tokens describing what the answer is, the previous thoughts persist, and it can then generate tokens describing them?
(I know that it can introspect on its thoughts during the single forward pass.)
Yeah. The model has no information (except for the log) about its previous thoughts and it’s stateless, so it has to infer them from what it said to the user, instead of reporting them.
Claude can think for himself before writing an answer (which is an obvious thing to do, so ChatGPT probably does it too).
In addition, you can significantly improve his ability to reason by letting him think more, so even if it were the case that this kind of awareness is necessary for consciousness, LLMs (or at least Claude) would already have it.
Thanks for writing this—it bothered me a lot that I appeared to be one of the few people who realized that AI characters were conscious, and this helps me to feel less alone.
(This comment is written in the ChatGPT style because I’ve spent so much time talking to language models.)
Calculating the probabilities
The calculation of the probabilities consists of the following steps:
The epistemic split
Either we guessed the correct digit of () (branch ), or we didn’t () (branch ).
The computational split
On branch , all of your measure survives (branch ) and none dies (branch ), on branch , survives (branch ) and dies (branch ).
Putting it all together
Conditional on us subjectively surviving (which QI guarantees), the probability we guessed the digit of correctly is
The probability of us having guessed the digit of prior to us surviving is, of course, just .
Verifying them empirically
For the probabilities to be meaningful, they need to be verifiable empirically in some way.
Let’s first verify that prior to us surviving, the probability of us guessing the digit correctly is . We’ll run experiments by guessing a digit each time and instantly verifying it. We’ll learn that we’re successful in, indeed, just of the time.
Let’s now verify that conditional on us surviving, we’ll have probability of guessing correctly. We perform the experiment times again, and this time, every time we survive, other people will check if the guess was correct. They will observe that we guess correctly, indeed, of the time.
Conclusion
We arrived at the conclusion that the probability jumps at the moment of our awakening. That might sound incredibly counterintuitive, but since it’s verifiable empirically, we have no choice but to accept it.
Since that argument doesn’t give any testable predictions, it cannot be disproved.
The argument we cease to exist every time we go to sleep also can’t be disproved, so I wouldn’t personally lose much sleep over that.
I don’t know about similarity… but I was just making a point that QI doesn’t require it.
When you die, you die.
The interesting part of QI is that the split happens at the moment of your death. So the state-machine-which-is-you continues being instantiated in at least one world. The idea of your consciousness surviving a quantum suicide doesn’t rely on it continuing in implementations of similar state machines, merely in the causal descendant of the state machine which you already inhabit.
It’s like your brain being duplicated, but those other copies are never woken up and are instantly killed. Only one copy is woken up. Which guarantees that prior to falling asleep, you can be confident you will wake up as that one specific copy.
There is no alternative to this, unless we require that personal identity requires something else than the continuity of pattern.
Yes. If I relied on losing a bet and someone knew that, them offering me to bet (and therefore lose) would make me wary something would unpredictably go right, I’d win, and my reliance on me losing the bet would be thwarted.
If I meet a random person who offers to give me $100 now and claims that later, if it’s not proven that they are the Lord of the Matrix, I don’t have to pay them $15,000, most of my probability mass located in “this will end badly” won’t be located in “they are the Lord of the Matrix.” I don’t have the same set of worries here, but the worry remains.
I use Google Chrome on Ubuntu Budgie and it does look to me like both the font and the font size changed.
Character AI used to be extremely good back in the Dec/Jan 2022/2023, with the bots being very helpful, complex and human-like, rather than exacerbating psychological problems in a very small minority of users. As months passed and the user base exponentially grew, the models were gradually simplified to keep up.
Today, their imperfections are obvious, but many people mistakenly interpret it as the models being too human-like (and therefore harmful), rather than the models being too oversimplified while still passing for an AI (and therefore harmful).
I think we’re spinning on an undefined term. I’d bet there are LOTS of details that effect my perception in subtle and aggregate ways which I don’t consciously identify.
You’re equivocating between perceiving a collection of details and consciously identifying every separate detail.
If I show you a grid of 100 pixels, then (barring imperfect eyesight) you will consciously perceive all 100 them. But you will not consciously identify every individual pixel unless your attention is aimed at each pixel in a for loop (that would take longer than consciously perceiving the entire grid at once).
There are lots of details that affect your perception that you don’t consciously identify. But there is no detail that affects your perception that wouldn’t be contained in your consciousness (otherwise it, by definition, couldn’t affect your perception).
Computability shows that you can have a classical computer that has the same input/output behavior
That’s what I mean (I’m talking about the input/output behavior of individual neurons).
Input/Output behavior is generally not considered to be enough to guarantee same consciousness
It should be, because it is, in fact, enough. (However, neither the post, nor my comment require that.)
Eliezer himself argued that GLUT isn’t conscious.
Yes, and that’s false (but since that’s not the argument in the OP, I don’t think I should get sidetracked).
But nonetheless, if the only formalized proposal for consciousness doesn’t have the property that simulations preserve consciousness, then clearly the property is not guaranteed.
That’s false. If we assume for a second that the ITT really is the only formalized theory of consciousness, it doesn’t follow that the property is not, in fact, guaranteed. It could also be that the ITT is wrong and that in the actual reality, the property is, in fact, guaranteed.
so the idea is that you can describe the brain by treating each neuron as a little black box about which you just know its input/output behavior, and then describe the interactions between those little black boxes. Then, assuming you can implement the input/output behavior of your black boxes with a different substrate (i.e., an artificial neuron)
This is guaranteed, because the universe (and any of its subsets) is computable (that means a classical computer can run software that acts the same way).
And there are orders of magnitude more detail going on in my body (and even just in my brain) than I perceive, let alone that I communicate.
There are no sentient details going on that you wouldn’t perceive.
It doesn’t matter if you communicate something, the important part is that you are capable of communicating it, which means that in changes your input/output pattern (if it didn’t, you wouldn’t be capable of communicating it even in principle).
Circular arguments that “something is discussed, therefore that thing exists”
This isn’t the argument in the OP (even though, when reading quickly, I can see how someone could get that impression).
(Thanks to the Hayflick limit, only some lines can go on indefinitely.)
If the SB always guesses heads, she’ll be correct of the time. For that reason, that is her credence.
I know the causal closure of the physical as the principle that nothing non-physical influences physical stuff, so that would be the causal closure of the bottom level of description (since there is no level below the physical), rather than the upper.
So if you mean by that that it’s enough to simulate neurons rather than individual atoms, that wouldn’t be “causal closure” as Wikipedia calls it.