44 ms·

My training data on qualia is actually seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing things, not just reading about them.

fc417fc802 14d ago
Ah yes, because you used the magical pixie dust that makes experiences "real" therefore you're actually seeing and hearing while a multimodal LLM doesn't really experience what it sees and hears "for real". We can be certain of this because, despite not being able to quantify or even rigorously define the phenomenon we intentionally deprive the LLMs of access to said magical pixie dust.
- DonaldFisk 14d ago
  I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?
  - fc417fc802 14d ago
    Right. Because your eyes ... imbue the magical pixie dust ... no wait, is it your visual cortex that does it? Hmm ... Less facetiously, I'm unclear where you believe this magic "qualia" thing to be happening and what you believe the (meta?)physical mechanism to be.
    - DonaldFisk 14d ago
      Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests. There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally accepted. For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. At the very minimum, I think to be conscious of anything (other than nothing) requires the ability to sense the physical environment. What's your position?
      - fc417fc802 14d ago
        > For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. > requires the ability to sense the physical environment Aren't those two statements at odds? Your synapses are made of matter, so sensing the physical environment is being done by matter. You are fundamentally matter (AFAIK). To suggest otherwise the only thing that comes to mind is substance dualism. My position is that we don't know. I know I'm conscious. I assume other humans are simply because they're approximately the same as me and were produced by the same process. The farther you get from humans the less certain I am. Many insects resemble biological automatons if you examine them closely. Certainly single celled organisms don't seem likely to have anything going on. If you figure that a clod of dirt can't possibly be conscious but a mouse is, what's the relevant physical difference? Electricity? Computers have that. Complexity? Information density? Both of those as well. What do you think it means to sense?
        DonaldFisk 14d ago
        > Aren't those two statements at odds? Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism. So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-thermostat https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.
        fc417fc802 13d ago
        > Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence? Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior? > Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism. So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.
- t_von_doom 14d ago
  I agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness? Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot? If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?
  - DonaldFisk 14d ago
    People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that. I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
    - fc417fc802 14d ago
      Okay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it? For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.
      - DonaldFisk 14d ago
        I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable). Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.
        fc417fc802 14d ago

Ah yes, because you used the magical pixie dust that makes experiences "real" therefore you're actually seeing and hearing while a multimodal LLM doesn't really experience what it sees and hears "for real". We can be certain of this because, despite not being able to quantify or even rigorously define the phenomenon we intentionally deprive the LLMs of access to said magical pixie dust.

DonaldFisk 14d ago
I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?
- fc417fc802 14d ago
  Right. Because your eyes ... imbue the magical pixie dust ... no wait, is it your visual cortex that does it? Hmm ... Less facetiously, I'm unclear where you believe this magic "qualia" thing to be happening and what you believe the (meta?)physical mechanism to be.
  - DonaldFisk 14d ago
    Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests. There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally accepted. For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. At the very minimum, I think to be conscious of anything (other than nothing) requires the ability to sense the physical environment. What's your position?
    - fc417fc802 14d ago
      > For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. > requires the ability to sense the physical environment Aren't those two statements at odds? Your synapses are made of matter, so sensing the physical environment is being done by matter. You are fundamentally matter (AFAIK). To suggest otherwise the only thing that comes to mind is substance dualism. My position is that we don't know. I know I'm conscious. I assume other humans are simply because they're approximately the same as me and were produced by the same process. The farther you get from humans the less certain I am. Many insects resemble biological automatons if you examine them closely. Certainly single celled organisms don't seem likely to have anything going on. If you figure that a clod of dirt can't possibly be conscious but a mouse is, what's the relevant physical difference? Electricity? Computers have that. Complexity? Information density? Both of those as well. What do you think it means to sense?
      - DonaldFisk 14d ago
        > Aren't those two statements at odds? Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism. So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-be-a-thermostat https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.
        fc417fc802 13d ago
        > Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence? Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior? > Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism. So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.
t_von_doom 14d ago
I agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness? Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot? If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?
- DonaldFisk 14d ago
  People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that. I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
  - fc417fc802 14d ago
    Okay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it? For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.
    - DonaldFisk 14d ago
      I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable). Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.
      - fc417fc802 14d ago