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jaggederest | on: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang
I'm going to ask a couple dumb but genuine questions:

Does it matter that neurons are more complex than 0-1? Does the fact that transformer layers don't use purely thresholded 0-1 activation invalidate what you're saying?

How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?

How does the embodied nature of human consciousness preclude consciousness emerging from a computational system? What is the definition of consciousness if it is precluded from occurring in a computational system but present in biological systems?

Why do you think exactly modeling interaction between atoms matters for consciousness? And where is the fidelity threshold? Is it the planck length?

Finally, a dumb question: how do we know humans are actually conscious, and where is the threshold between consciousness and unconsciousness? And do these criteria exclude all other forms, or other animals?

calf | parent | next
Not the person you were asking but IMHO it all reduces to computational complexity, e.g. biological evolution provided the computational efficiencies that ultimately produced conscious minds and beings, whereas it is not obvious what scale of silicon, power or energy, and input data is sufficient for that to happen artificially. But that means my view is it is a matter of it being possible in principle, merely unknown in practice. Also my view is that denying this amounts to violating the Church Turing thesis of computational equivalence ("human brains are not magic, super-Turing, etc."), and I think a lot of talking-past one another in these public disagreements amounts to one side not actually having taken modern CS theory fundamentals enough to be persuaded of these couple of premises.
jaggederest | root | parent
That's my take on it too, roughly. I think if we get to trillion-parameter models and they don't exhibit what we'd call AGI, however you define it, then the current transformer based systems never will.

But calling them "unconscious" is a pretty high bar. Mice are conscious. The house sparrow pecking in my yard right now is conscious.

suddenlybananas | parent
>How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?

How do you know that toasters or rocks aren't conscious?

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