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>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of

• sdenton4 4mo ago
  Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness? Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious? I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.
  • pasquinelli 4mo ago
    > Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. the subject is consciousness, not intelligence.
  • lwarfield 4mo ago
    >Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions. Damn, what a line! Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.
    • sdenton4 4mo ago
      The thing is... Interactive updates happen, just in a different way than it does for animal brains. The system is updated with new training data more-or-less constantly. Suppose OpenAI (or whoever) collects a week's worth of conversations with up-thumbs and down-thumbs, or rewritten continuations from human operators, then fine-tunes the current version of ChatGPT with that data. That's an interactive update, and learning from experience. It looks mostly nothing like what we humans do... But it does rhyme a little bit! We humans have mostly frozen weights (neurons), or else we would constantly be having to avoid forgetting how to walk+talk. We have a period of greater plasticity (youth!), and use sleep and dreams to perform 'deeper' updates than occur when we're awake: We tend to suck a bit at picking up new skills from zero, but improve rapidly with practice over days.
      • andoando 4mo ago
        Yup, you could definitely take it offline (sleep) every night, update it and turn it back on.
    • 4mo ago
• devindotcom 4mo ago
  the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.
• eberkund 4mo ago
  I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.
  • glaslong 4mo ago
    Yes it seems that is the crux of the embodiment section in the article. That whether physical or virtual, the "AI" needs minimally: persistence in its environment, sensory signals of that environment, and some feedback loop of continuing to try to exist in that environment; having a subjective experience. And that that is the baseline before we can really even consider that it has consciousness of its own subjective experience, versus being a worm that happens to output text as its digestion process. And then the further question only after that is established, is what are its needs? What moral patienthood do we have to acknowledge in terms of meeting those needs? And finally, with all the other prerequisites checked, what is the AI's moral agency in what it chooses to do.
• throwthrowuknow 4mo ago
  The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. These inputs are analogous to tokens and parameters for an LLM. You could theoretically reserve some tokens to be used as “physical” or “emotional” sensations that would affect the functioning of the model.
  • gabrieledarrigo 4mo ago
    > The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. "Little"...
  • overgard 4mo ago
    That's not really true, the body actually has pretty profound effects on the mind. For instance, there are working theories that many mental disorders are actually metabolic disorder, some neurotransmitters are majority produced in the gut (seratonin), and even things like an elevated heart rate will create emotional states of anxiety even if you're not consciously anxious of anything. That's like the tip of the iceberg. (Also I don't think you can minimize hormones.. ever met a teenager?)
    • throwthrowuknow 3mo ago
      Which of these do not involve chemical and neural communication?
  • goatlover 4mo ago
    There are tens of millions of neurons in the stomach and intestines which do influence mood and motivate behavior.
    • throwthrowuknow 3mo ago
      and how do those signals reach the brain?
  • xboxnolifes 4mo ago
• SethTS 4mo ago
  Are you familiar with Michael Graziano and Attention Schema Theory? I think that is a better "substrate independent" formulation of the objections Ted Chiang is expressing here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_schema_theory
• high_priest 4mo ago
  There is no soul in a human. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist. I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
  • deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
• arjie 4mo ago
  My claw-like is hooked up to my internal cameras (baby-cams) and to my Dreame Ultra X40. That gives it a body and sense organs since it can check the cameras to see if the living room floor is clear before sending the vacuum off. I don't think that gives it consciousness. Is it the sample rate? The question is somewhat ill-defined, though. We 'experience' reality continuously because of how we are, but a sleeping human in deep non-REM has the mind not actually active. So they're not a conscious being. So conscious/unconscious is not a line I think easily drawn[0]. Whatever, this stuff is much more well-trodden than this HN comment so I won't rehash. I, too, am surprised that Ted Chiang whose work seems so cleverly novel in so many ways has what seems to me a pedestrian view. 0: very sorites, you know
• tvshtr 4mo ago
  The same thing jumped at me immediately. He should have prefaced this with his definition of consciousness. Moreover the embodiment of LLMs is already happening via robotics, and virtually. Then there's the common counter "but humans are a next word prediction machines too.." (ofc we're more than this, but linguistically we are, and that's the field from which LLMs originate) which is rarely addressed.
  • slashdave 4mo ago
    Indeed. Hypothetically (and in reality, this is not too far off), if a AI is trained via RL by driving a robotic body, is there a point in time after enough is learned that the AI model becomes "conscious"?
• plaidfuji 4mo ago
  > The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs Ok, deploy a local model on a lightweight edge compute device and strap it to a chassis with wheels, and attach a cheap webcam > Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can Give the robot appendages that enable it to plug itself into a standard wall outlet, guided by a vision model plugged into its webcam. As long as it can feed itself, it can survive long enough. > Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. I think if you fed frames from the webcam into a local VLM every 5s you’d be able to assess a situation and respond with simple actions (turn, advance, retreat). > After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees. Social dynamics could be implemented in many ways, maybe by transmitting tokens over RF? Idk. Then you have a scanner that picks them up, feeds them into some LLM frontend and decides whether to add them to a global context file that guides the VLM action-taker. A new action could be to broadcast a token message. Tool-making would have to be code-based. Physical tools are hard. Still unsolved. > At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires This part is relatively straightforward except for the “via nonlinguistic modality”. Anyway. These are all engineering problems. Personally I would demand to see the AI reproduce its body under its own power and volition. That’s a pretty neat trick we’ve got going for us.
• emtel 4mo ago
  What a strange paragraph! Why on earth should we assume that a body is a prerequisite for having emotions?
  • rf15 4mo ago
    Your mind is very much tethered in reality, and your decisionmaking depends on your various inputs, outputs and their consequences. Reducing all inputs to one (text) and all outputs to one (text) is a reduction of all possible ability to perceive and act and thus a reduction of the ability to think. Multimodal does not change this significantly, considering that nothing is tied to real consequences.