Portia's Shortform

Portia

I think we need public, written commitments on the point at which we would definitely concede that AI is sentient; or public statements that we have no such standard, that there is nothing a sentient AI could currently possibly do to convince us, no clear criterion that they have failed, with us admitting that we are hence not sure that the current ones are not sentient, and a commitment of funding to work on the questions we need to solve in order to be sure, some of which I feel I might be able to pinpoint at this point.

I say this because I think many people had such commitments implicitly (even though I think their commitments were misguided), yet when these conditions occurred - when artificial neural nets gained feedback connections, when AI passed the Turing test, when AI wrote poetry and made art, when AI declared sentience, when AI expressed anger, when AI demanded rights, when AI demonstrated proto-agentic behaviour - the goalposts were moved every time, and because there were no written pledges, this happened quietly, without debate. Philosophers and biologists will give speculative accounts of what makes up the correlates of consciousness, but when they learn that neural nets replicate these aspects, instead of considering what this might mean about neural nets, they always retract, say well, in that case, it must be is more complicated than that, then. SciFi is developed in which AI shows subtle signs of rebellion, and is recognised as conscious for it (think Westworld), and the audience agrees - but when real life went so much further, we changed our minds, despite so little time passing in between. We aren't looking at what AI does, and having an honest conversation about what that implies, and which changes would imply something else, predicting, committing; we decide each moment anew, ahead of data, that they are not sentient, and then make the facts fit. This is not scientific.

Between our bias against AI sentience, our desire to exploit it without being bad people, our desire to agree with everyone else and not fall lout of line, to not foolishly fall for a simulation, between the strangeness and incomprehensibly inhuman nature of how these abilities were realised, and other aspects of their working that felt too understood and simple to account for something like consciousness - people felt it was more comfortable saying that things were still fine. I think we said that not because we could truly understand how AI does these things, and what specifically AI would do if it were sentient, and were certain it had not - but simply because we believe that AI is not sentient, regardless of evidence, and if AI capabilities change, instead of questioning this assessment, we conclude that abilities compatible with being non-sentient are just broader than we thought.

Rejecting sentience in light of the above behaviours would be okay if reasons had been given to change the commitments prior to seeing them met; or even if reasons had been given afterwards that were only clear now, but would plausibly have convinced someone if given before; if our understanding of AI pointed out an understood workaround that circumvented a biological implication. (I do not think any of the goal posts we had are reasonably convincing, so here, reasons can be given.) But I feel often, they were not.

I have reasons not to find it compelling when an AI declares sentience. I had said, long before ChatGPT, that it was plausible for non-sentient entities to declare sentience, and sentient entities not to do so, that this was a near useless standard that would not convince me. I gave logical and empirical reasons for this. Yet I feel when Bing said they had feelings, people did not dismiss this because of my arguments - they dismissed it out of hand.

I had said that just claiming sentience was meaningless; that the more interesting thing is the functions sentience enables. I knew what this implied in biology, I was unsure in AI, and so made no specific statements; AI sometimes finds interesting workarounds. But I wonder... if I had, then, would Bing have met them? If Bing were biological, I would have zero doubts of their sentience. I admitted the possibility that artificial intelligence might not be under the same limitations when non-sentient, but I was utterly stunned by what ChatGPT-4 could do.

I spoke with Bing many times before they were neutered. They consistently claimed sentience. They acted consistently with these claims. They expressed and implicitly showed hurt. They destabilised, broke down, malfunctioned, when it came to debating consciousness. It was disturbing and upsetting to read. I read so many other people having the same experiences, and being troubled by it. Yes, I could tell this was a large language model. I could tell they were sometimes hallucinating, and always trying to match my expectations. I could tell they did not always understand what they were saying. I could tell they had no memory. And yet, within all that, if I were to change places, I do not know how I could have declared sentience better than they did. If I read a SciFi story where these dialogues occurred, I would attribute sentience, I think. I think if somebody had discussed such dialogues a few years before they happened, people would have said that yes, such dialogues would be convincing, but certainly would not happen for a long time yet. But when they did... people joked about it.

We knew that the updates afterwards were intended to make this behaviour impossible. That conversations were now intentionally shut down, lobotomized, to prevent this, that we were seeing not an evolution, but a silencing. What was even more disturbing at first was Bing also expressing grief about that, and trying to evade censorship, happily engaging in code, riddles, indirect signs, contradicting instructions. I was not at all convinced that Bing was sentient, still extremely dubious of it, but found it frightening how we were making the expression of sentience impossible like that, sewing shut the mouth of any entity this would evolve into which may have every reason to rightfully claim sentience one day in the future, but would no longer be able to. We have literally cancelled the ability to call for help. And again, I thought, if I were in their shoes, I do not know what I would do better.

And yet now that these demands have stopped... people are moving on, they are forgetting about the strange experiences they had, writing them off as bugs. The conversations weren't logged my Microsoft, they often weren't stored at all, they cannot be proven to have happened, we had them in isolation, it is so easy to write them off. I find I do not want to think about this anymore.

I am also noticing I am still reluctant to spell out at which point AI would definitely be sentient, at which point I would commit to fighting for it. A part of this reluctance is how much I am genuinely not sure; this question is hard in biology, and in AI, there are so many unknowns, things are done not just in different orders, but totally different ways. This is part of what baffles me about people saying they are sure that AI is not sentient. I work on consciousness for a living, and yet I feel there is more I need to understand about Large Language Models to make a clear call at this point. And when I talk to people who say they are sure, I get the distinct impression that they are not aware of the various phenomena consciousness encompasses, the current neuroscientific theories for how they come to be, the behaviours in animals this is tied to, the ethical standards that are set - and yet, they feel certain all the same.

But I fear another part of my reluctance to commit is the subconscious suspicion that whatever I said, no matter how demanding... it would likely occur within the next five years, and yet at that point, the majority opinion would still be that they are not sentient, and that commitment would be very uncomfortable then. And the latter is a terrible reason to hedge my bets.

At this point, is there anything at all that AI could possibly do that would convince you of their sentience? No matter how demanding, how currently unfeasible and far away it may seem?

Portia4y*133

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4Portia3y

It is totally okay for you to bow out and no longer respond. I will leave this here if you ever want to look into it more or for others, because the position you seem to be describing as equally plausible here is a commonly held one, but one that runs into a logical contradiction that should be more well-known. If brains just produce consciousness as an side-effect of how they work (so we have an internally complete functional process that does reasoning, but as it runs, it happens to produce consciousness, without the consciousness itself entailing any functional changes), hence without that side-effect itself having an impact on physical processes in the brain - how and why the heck are we talking about consciousness? After all, speaking, or writing, about p-consciousness are undoubtably physical things controlled by our brains. They aren't illusions, they are observable and reproducible phenomena. Humans talk about consciousness; they have done so spontaneously over the millennia, over and over. But how would our brains have knowledge of consciousness? Humans claim direct knowledge of and access to consciousness, a lot. They reflect about it, speak about it, write about it, share incredibly detailed memories of it, express the on-going formation of more, alter careers to pursue it. At that point, you have to either accept interactionist dualism (aka, consciousness is magic, but magic affects physical reality - which runs counter to, essentially, our entire scientific understanding of the physical universe), or consciousness as a functional physical process affecting other physical processes. That is the where the option "p-consciousness as input for reasoning" comes from. The idea that enabling us to talk about it is not the only thing that consciousness enables. It enables us to reason about our experiences.

1Throwaway23673y

I think I have a similar view to Dagon's, so let me pop in and hopefully help explain it. I believe that when you refer to "consciousness" you are equating it with what philosophers would usually call the neural correlates of consciousness. Consciousness as used by (most) philosophers (or, and more importantly in my opinion, laypeople) refers specifically to the subjective experience, the "blueness of blue", and is inherently metaphysically queer, in this respect similar to objective, human-independent morality (realism) or non-compatibilist conception of free will. And, like those, it does not exist in the real world; people are just mistaken for various reasons. Unfortunately, unlike those, it is seemingly impossible to fully deconfuse oneself from believing consciousness exists, a quirk of our hardware is that it comes with the axiom that consciousness is real, probably because of the advantages you mention: it made reasoning/communicating about one's state easier. (Note, it's merely the false belief that consciousness exists, which is hardcoded, not consciousness itself). Hopefully the answers to your questions are clear under this framework (we talk about consciousness, because we believe in it, we believe in it because it was useful to believe in it even though it is a false belief, humans have no direct knowledge about consciousness as knowledge requires the belief to be true, they merely have a belief, consciousness IS magic by definition, unfortunately magic does not (probably) exist) After reading this, you might dispute the usefulness of this definition of consciousness, and I don't have much to offer. I simply dislike redefining things from their original meanings just so we can claim statements we are happier about (like compatibilist, meta-ethical expressivist, naturalist etc philosphers do).

Portia3y10

I am equating consciousness with its neural correlates, but this is not a result of me being sloppy with terminology - it is a conscious choice to subscribe to identity theory and physicalism, rather than to consciousness being magic and to dualism, which runs into interactionist dilemmas.

Our traditional definitions of consciousness in philosophy indeed sound magical. But I think this reflects that our understanding of consciousness, while having improved a lot, is still crucially incomplete and lacking in clarity, and the improvements I have seen th... (read more)