- cross-posted to:
- Independent_Media@lemmy.today
- cross-posted to:
- Independent_Media@lemmy.today
Let me tell you about a Microsoft AI researcher […] who recently spent quite a lot of time considering whether the legendary Microsoft real time strategy game Age of Empires II is conscious, and built a basic neural network within the video game using digital goats to prove his point. […]
De Wynter built an LLM within AoEII using goats. “The point of the paper is to formally show that we anthropomorphise too readily, and that sometimes the claims we make with regards to LLM capabilities are too strong,” he told 404 Media. “It’s not an easy task, given that ‘human-like attributes’ is a bit of an abstract term.”
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If AI is sentient then so is this toy from my childhood. Actually I’d belive this magic peice of plastic is alive before any llm. At least this was correct most of the time
All those poor Tamagochis
And my nintendogs 😭
They might still br alive, trapped in a DS cartridge deep in some drawer, never seeing daylight again until someone decides to clwar out said controller.
They’ve got to be skin and bones by now…
We don’t know until we power on the game. Like Schroedingers Dog
Wait I actually can’t tell for the life of me if this is supposed to be a joke or not
Not a joke. Your tamagochi had a soul and it suffered when you didn’t feed it
No that I get haha and I agree but the pic is of one of those 20 questions devices, not a tomagochi
Every soul must taste death.
This isn’t really an argument against LLMs being sentient.
If any computer program could be “sentient” than any “computer” that could run it could be “sentient”.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/505/
I’d hang this
From a theoretical standpoint, there are three options:
- No Turing machine can possess sentience
- Some - but not all - Turing machines possesses sentience.
- All Turing machines possesses sentience.
Keep in mind that all Turing machines can be computed using a pen and paper (although the paper must be very big). Or goats in age of empires
I’d conject that our brain could be computed on paper, given a large enough sheet. We arent that special, we are biological computers. We decide things based on a huge amount of factors but they could be 100% deterministic Do I want another Coffee? Brain checks tiredness, stomach fullness, time to get to next task, body temp, outside temp, flavour from last cup, and so on… Given 1000s of sensors it may be that our consciousness would “freely” choose the same option if all parameters were exact same.
Sorry to have to be that person but for clarity of the discussion the word you want is sapience.
Sentience is something that, one might argue with a bit of effort, machines have already achieved: they can use sensors/senses to gather information about their environment which one might call sensing things. They can even react to that information that their senses have gathered.
Sapience is the ability to think about that information beyond the immediate impulse. It’s necessary for what we usually refer to as “intelligence”.
While I take your meaning I’m not sure this is a helpful path forward.
We’re not fully sure what conciousness is or how it happens. We could split hairs about sentience, sapience, emergent properties, etc, and maybe even do so meaningfully but our semantics, today, will remain necessarily continental. Even if we progress our understanding beyond that point and discover real answers to those hard questions… Will we be able to define the boundaries between states? Will we be able to even sat such boundaries exist?
Addressing your argument directly: can sentience exist apart from perception of environment? I’d say it must. If so then how is sense and reaction an indicator such a system carries within it a theory of mind? It can’t be. It’s not enough.
The cart is firmly in front of the horse in all discussion and debate of LLMs as concious, sentient, or sapient. Partly because such claims in the affirmative are not yet testable (nevermind falsifiable) claims and, more to the point of the discussion at hand, partly because we do not know what it is we are talking about.
Anyone claiming otherwise is guilty either of magical thinking or of peddling snake oil and, in either case, has misjudged the importance of first answering more fundamental lines of inquiry.
[…] can sentience exist apart from perception of environment? I’d say it must.
Wait, really? Can you give several examples of this, then? Sentience involves an organized, (hopefully at least sometimes) self-aware response to one’s environment. For example, the chance for something to become sentient is never increased by a lack of stimuli, right?
Sorry, I don’t follow. I’m talking about the definition of those words.
conciousness
Not talking about consciousness.
can sentience exist apart from perception of environment?
Sentience IS perception of environment.
how is sense and reaction an indicator such a system carries within it a theory of mind?
I don’t know and I’m not saying it is.
we do not know what it is we are talking about.
Do we not? That’s precisely why it’s important to make that difference. Sentience is relatively easy to define and can be assigned with a lot of confidence whereas sapience isn’t and can’t.
You dare to doubt the sentience of the AI paper?
Whilst I agree with the simple fact LLMs are in no way sentient, sapient or anything of the sort, I disagree with his argument. His argument boils down to: I can create this small part of a greater whole in a game, anything in the game isn’t sentient therefor the whole thing cannot be sentient.
But when we assume a human is sentient and look at the basic building blocks of our brains, the same equivalence can be made. Let’s say for our brains to do the brain thing all it needs is neurons (reality is much more complex, but for the sake of argument). I think nobody would argue the neuron itself is the bit that is sentient. And we even have a whole bunch of neurons working very similar to how they work in our brains together in small animals, we don’t consider them sentient. We can even simulate the neurons working together in a computer (even in AoE2 if it’s Turing complete) and we don’t consider the computer or any of the parts sentient. So what’s the difference?
I feel the difference is both scale and complexity. It isn’t the parts of our brain that are sentient, it’s the whole thing. And I’d even go further and say the brain as an abstract isn’t enough, it has to be a brain that has been filled with memories, experience, input and output. Then the whole is considered sentient. It isn’t the matter itself, it’s the actual processes that we consider to be sentient.
When one would simulate a human brain perfectly, but had not connected any input or output. Had not let it see the world, learn and experience, been given senses and time to processes them, then the result would probably not be considered sentient. A small baby or a person with severe brain damage or even brain dead isn’t sentient (at least not by most metrics). If the infrastructure is there, but the software isn’t running, it’s lacking the thing required to be considered sentient.
TLDR: Sentience is an emergent property of a large and complex system. Proving that a small part of that system isn’t sentient isn’t the same as proving the whole isn’t sentient. LLMs still aren’t sentient tho, I disagree with the reasoning, not the conclusion.
in small animals, we don’t consider them sentient.
This is actually changing a fair bit in recent years, even to the point of: https://iai.tv/articles/new-studies-suggest-consciousness-exists-in-organisms-without-brains-auid-3597
Already for years we’ve determined that bees are sentient, and therefore likely all bugs: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/02/bees-intelligence-minds-pollination
Have you been, like… following the news? It’s good, soulless stuff (literally).
If your definition of sentient can include Age of Empires II then how can it possibly be useful?
To me this trivializes the word “sentience” to begin with. Which I do consider to be a reasonably meaningless word. Sentience requires a somewhat randomly defined definition–is sentience using tools? Crows and monkeys are sentient. Is sentience experiencing and expressing emotion/loved experience? My cat is sentient. Is sentience simply experiencing? Grass is sentient, it will respond predictably to external stimuli. Although grass also seems to communicate experiences, too. Freshly mowed lawn smell is grass “screaming in pain”, in the sense that it is the response to bodily harm, much like I imagine I’d scream in pain if my arm got taken off by a lawnmower. If we look at predictable responses to stimuli, I think one could make the argument that the planet itself is sentient, in that there are predictable geological and environmental results governments by the same physics that causes our brains to respond to stimuli. And then we’re just panpsychists.
The generally accepted definition of sentience seems to be requiring the use of tools of a certain complexity (often governed by the complexity of tools we have seen animals we don’t want to consider sentient use), as well as communicating on what we would consider a normal human timescale, i.e. ain’t nobody gonna sit and listen if a tree takes a week to say hello.
But this definition is pretty arbitrary, and can be easily misused. A bit like how “freedom” is somewhat arbitrary and means different contradictory things to different people. Your freedom to not get punched violates my freedom to punch you.
I disagree I think they can be. Just need to qualify the way you are using the term. Also no one actually just considers that our universe is very friendly to intelligence and consciousness there maybe much deeper reasons why. Like yea of course up is up, down is down, but maybe that is just exactly what consciousness needs to emerge? What we know as euclidean space is fundamental to life itself the reason it exists it is always going to happen. Or something idk im stoned.
Some conversations really should require all participants to pass a quiz before commenting. Sentience is one of those topics.
Okay, so… go on… Why troll and not educate?
Yeah, sure, just let me briefly outline the problem of sentience lol
I wasn’t criticizing the person I replied to, just anticipating they’re probably in for frustration.
Wait, by “some conversations,” you weren’t hinting at the very conversation you have been participating in?
If so, you realize that you could have dodged all of those downvotes with just a changed comment start of, “Agreed. In fact, […]” instead of proceeding immediately with the “some conversations”… right?! Communication is vital…
in retrospect, yes.
Trying not to worry about downvotes too much these days.
Sure, though I think concern over misinterpretation is worthwhile! Generally, votes are an indicator of that, I think.
They are, but it annoys me that people often interpret a comment by the votes, and I’m generally hostile towards herd behavior.
AoE II sentience is one AI argument I can get behind.
We took 12 human neurons and linked them together. If humans are sentient, so are these 12 neurons
Any mirrors?
Bless you and your loved ones
*sapient
I raise you an interview with “The Godfather of AI” by the very stock exchange that stands to benefit from the bubble.
Apart from the tech doing damage while unregulated, “opinions” like these don’t help. They seem to be aiming to give this tech “rights” and “protections”.
