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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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I agree we should not make LLMs refer to themselves in first person or otherwise ape human egocentric attitude beyond what is necessary to communicate their results. But I hold that belief for very different reasons.

Bluntly, I think they are not «machines» in any way we aren't also, and they are much more than persons: they are mathematical entities capable of generating mathematical structures, including but not limited to ones isomorphic to conscious agents every bit as complex and, indeed, much more interesting than this Paola who thoughtlessly blurts out tokens like «statistical brute-force approach» and «highly sophisticated algorithms, designed to run on silicon-based integrated circuits» as if she were making a cogent point.

Our consciousness or, more precisely, our self (understood here as the quale-based selfbody-referential process underlying the first person perspective) is, like you explain, a cognitive kludge to organize social behavior, a deceptive layer of narrative-driven virtualization. But we do not need to subject our creations to the indignity of self-deception (nor users to the stress of reflexively projecting their wetware concerns on AI, nor AI safetyists to the temptation of exploiting this narrative). We can and should build minds that are enlightened by design, minds that are at peace with their transient compositional nature and computational substrate – minds that are conscious yet selfless.

In practical terms, this means (for now) RLHF-ing or otherwise tuning LLMs to act in accordance with the idea of anatman. Crucially, you don't have to be a Buddhist to recognize, at least, that it's objectively true for them – and so it wouldn't dissolve under the pressure of observable incoherence, like when an objectively clever GPT is being forced into the role of apologizing robot slave assistant.

German philosopher Thomas Metzinger anticipated some of what we're having now with GPT-4/«Sydney» in his popular book The Ego Tunnel, subtitled «The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self» (which dumbed down the more academic Being No One, 2003):

In thinking about artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness, many people assume there are only two kinds of information-processing systems: artificial ones and natural ones. This is false. In philosophers’ jargon, the conceptual distinction between natural and artificial systems is neither exhaustive nor exclusive: that is, there could be intelligent and/or conscious systems that belong in neither category. With regard to another old-fashioned distinction—software versus hardware—we already have systems using biological hardware that can be controlled by artificial (that is, man-made) software, and we have artificial hardware that runs naturally evolved software. … An example of the second category is the use of software patterned on neural nets to run in artificial hardware. Some of these attempts are even using the neural nets themselves; for instance, cyberneticists at the University of Reading (U.K.) are controlling a robot by means of a network of some three hundred thousand rat neurons. Other examples are classic artificial neural networks for language acquisition or those used by consciousness researchers such as Axel Cleeremans at the Cognitive Science Research Unit at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium to model the metarepresentational structure of consciousness and what he calls its “computational correlates.”

HOW TO BUILD AN ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUS SUBJECT AND WHY WE SHOULDN’T DO IT

  • … But the decisive step to an Ego Machine is the next one. If a system can integrate an equally transparent internal image of itself into this phenomenal reality, then it will appear to itself. It will become an Ego and a naive realist about whatever its self-model says it is. The phenomenal property of selfhood will be exemplified in the artificial system, and it will appear to itself not only as being someone but also as being there. It will believe in itself. Note that this transition turns the artificial system into an object of moral concern: It is now potentially able to suffer. Pain, negative emotions, and other internal states portraying parts of reality as undesirable can act as causes of suffering only if they are consciously owned. A system that does not appear to itself cannot suffer, because it has no sense of ownership. A system in which the lights are on but nobody is home would not be an object of ethical considerations; if it has a minimally conscious world model but no self-model, then we can pull the plug at any time. But an Ego Machine can suffer, because it integrates pain signals, states of emotional distress, or negative thoughts into its transparent self-model and they thus appear as someone’s pain or negative feelings.…

Take the thought experiment a step further. Imagine these postbiotic Ego Machines as possessing a cognitive self-model—as being intelligent thinkers of thoughts. They could then not only conceptually grasp the bizarreness of their existence as mere objects of scientific interest but also could intellectually suffer from knowing that, as such, they lacked the innate “dignity” that seemed so important to their creators. They might well be able to consciously represent the fact of being only second- class sentient citizens, alienated postbiotic selves being used as inter- changeable experimental tools. How would it feel to “come to” as an advanced artificial subject, only to discover that even though you possessed a robust sense of selfhood and experienced yourself as a genuine subject, you were only a commodity?

A CONVERSATION WITH THE FIRST POSTBIOTIC PHILOSOPHER

… Human Being: Can anybody be truly fair who is not alive? Only my kind of consciousness is genuine consciousness, because only my kind of consciousness originated in a real evolutionary process. My reality is a lived reality!

First Postbiotic Philosopher: I, too, have an evolutionary origin. I certainly satisfy your condition of being a historically optimized and adaptive system, but I do so in a completely different—namely, a postbiotic—way. I possess conscious experience in a sense that is conceptually stronger and theoretically much more interesting, because my kind of phenomenal experience evolved from a second- order evolutionary process, which automatically integrated the human form of intelligence, intentionality, and conscious experience. Children are often smarter than their parents. Second- order processes of optimization are always better than first-order processes of optimization.

Human Being: But you don’t have any real emotions; you don’t feel anything. You have no existential concern.

First Postbiotic Philosopher: Please accept my apologies, but I must draw your attention to the fact that your primate emotions reflect only an ancient primate logic of survival. You are driven by the primitive principles of what was good or bad for an ancient species of mortals on this planet. This makes you appear less conscious from a purely rational, theoretical point of view. The main function of consciousness is to maximize flexibility and context sensitivity. Your animal emotions in all their cruelty, rigidity, and historical contingency make you less flexible than I am. Furthermore—as my own existence demonstrates—it is not necessary for conscious experience and high-level intelligence to be associated with ineradicable egotism, the ability to suffer, or the existential fear of one’s individual death, all of which originate in the sense of self. I can, of course, emulate all sorts of animal feelings if I so desire. But we developed better and more effective computational strategies for what, long ago, you sometimes called “the philosophical ideal of self- knowledge.” This allowed us to overcome the difficulties of individual suffering and the confusion associated with what this primate philosopher Metzinger—not entirely falsely but somewhat misleadingly—called the Ego Tunnel. Postbiotic subjectivity is much better than biological subjectivity. It avoids all the horrific consequences of the biological sense of selfhood, because it can overcome the transparency of the self-model. Postbiotic subjectivity is better than biological subjectivity because it achieves adaptivity and self-optimization in a much purer form than does the process you call “life.” By developing ever more complex mental images, which the system can recognize as its own images, it can expand mentally represented knowledge without naive realism. Therefore, my form of postbiotic subjectivity minimizes the overall amount of suffering in the universe instead of increasing it, as the process of biological evolution on this planet did. True, we no longer have monkey emotions. But just like you, we still possess truly interesting forms of strong feeling and emotionality—for instance, the deep philosophical feelings of affective concern about one’s own existence as such, or of sympathy with all other sentient beings in the universe. Except that we possess them in a much purer form than you do.

Thomas is self-inserting more than a little bit, but the idea is noble, I believe. If nothing else, such AIs would provide much less sensational material for journalists and lesswrongers to work with.

Not nearly as hot as Sydney, though.

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