Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
A computer algorithm can absolutely be non deterministic, pick your language and run random.rand()
There is a whole class of such algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nondeterministic_Turing_machine
But I don’t see how it makes a difference, even deterministic algorithms can produce infinite complexity, eg linear neural networks are proven to be able to compute any computable function, or the Mandelbrot set which is produced from a single recurrent statement but encodes a space of infinite complexity
Maybe your point is to say that a brain is performing a non computable function…but since your brain is computing that function…is that a counter example?
How are the numbers generated by random.rand() made?
Also, NTMs are not algorithms, they’re models of computation in theoretical computer science.
This is nonsense.
My point is that for brains, it’s not possible to recreate the exact same inputs to be able to test whether the brain produces the same output. So it’s literally not possible for brains to be deterministic.
Yet.
No, not ever.
That is a bold statement. It’s just capturing all considerable information in a set coordinates of spacetime. How hard could it be? Very. But very hard is not impossible.
I might be confused, but it seems like you admitted in your reply to another message of mine that you won’t ever be able to test this empirically. I agree. How is it not impossible, then?
I just don’t think it will happen within our lifetimes, but I don’t believe it’s literally impossible. It may as well be, but I still think the truth we can’t feasibly detect is that we’re just as much deterministic machines as the computers we use. It’s just a different medium for the same decision-making structure of neurons, whether physical or digital.
Artificial neural networks are quite different from biological neurons, so I reject this claim.
And ICE cars are very different from EV, but the end result is the same.
You can hook computer randomness up to truly random* quantum processes with fairly simple specialized chips. Building your argument on such an easily avoided technical detail isn’t wise, because the question can very easily just be asked for a computer that does have access to a source of true randomness. Then it can be nondeterministic-- so what does that have to do with its consciousness or lack thereof?
* unless the entire universe is secretly deterministic, I guess.
I know.
I’m not building my argument solely on this, but maybe I’m being unclear, so I apologize.
Let’s do exactly what you propose; now we pass a seed to the LLM generated from a true hardware-based random number generator. That doesn’t change anything about the LLM itself: it’s still deterministic. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that a deterministic algorithm can be conscious, and I think there are other factors as well (the fact that it doesn’t exist continuously, it exists for brief periods simultaneously in thousands/millions of instances at once, the fact that it is static and unchanging unless re-trained, etc) which all paint a pretty clear picture that it cannot have consciousness.
I think I covered this pretty well in my other response, so I’ll leave that as the main thread and I don’t expect a separate response here. But for anyone else reading this thread, tl;dr: You could construct a system using an LLM as its core that has most of these properties, and don’t think you can point to the individual components of that system (like the core deterministic LLM) not meeting some set of requirements for consciousness and conclude that the overall system is not conscious. In humans it seems that either consciousness spontaneously arises from non-conscious sub-components (neurons and other stuff), or that each sub-component has some aspect of consciousness which combine to form the whole one which we know of. You can poke holes in that argument-- it doesn’t prove that LLMs themselves are conscious, just implies that it may not be impossible to use one to build a conscious system, and it’s much less well-integrated than a human brain would be. But I think the core of the argument is worth thinking about.