> Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math.
This was obvious since LLMs were first invented. They published papers with all the details, you don't need to see something implemented in Minecraft to realize that it's just math. You could simply read the paper or the code and know for certain. [0]
> math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots
Incorrect, Kurt Gödel showed with his Incompleteness Theorems in 1931 [1] that it is impossible to find a complete and consistent set of axioms for mathematics. Math is not perfectly reducible and there is no single set of "roots" for math.
> It was build [sic] that way since the beginning,
This is a serious misunderstanding of what mathematics is. Math is discovered as much as it is built. No one sat down and planned out what we understand as modern mathematics - the math we know is the result of endless amounts of logical reasoning and exploration, from geometric proofs to calculus to linear algebra to everything else that encompasses modern mathematics.
> And because of that flawless reductionism, complexity adds nothings to the nature of math things, this is how math working by design
This sentence means nothing, because math is not reducible in that way.
> so it can be proven there are no anything like consciousness simply because conciousness [sic] was not implented [sic] in the first place, only perfect mimicry.
Even if the previous sentence held, this does not follow, because while we are conscious the current consensus is that LLMs are not and most AI experts who are not actively selling a product recognize that LLMs will not lead to human-equivalent general intelligence. [3]
[0] https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th...
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/think/article/mathem...
We do not know how to measure whether consciousness is present in an entity - even other humans - or whether it is just mimicry, nor whether there is a distinction between the two.
What is the evidence for this?
Unknown Ptolemy disciple
(If you've engaged w/ the literature here, it's quite hard to give a confident "yes". it's also quite hard to give a confident "no"! so then what the heck do we do)
And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when running large batches is non-deterministic, as I understand it. But, in a controlled lab, you can make a model repeat itself identically. Unless the random number generator is "conscious", I don't see a place to fit consciousness into our understanding of LLMs.
Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too.
When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities.
Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails.
The frontier models are more complex and operate on more data than Wikipedia, but they are less complex and operate on less data than Google search in its entirety.
And, I'm not anthropocentric at all. I think apes and dolphins and some birds and probably some other critters are conscious. I mean they have a sense of self, and others, they have wants and needs and make decisions based on them.
This is a case where the person making extraordinary claims needs to provide the extraordinary evidence. It's extraordinary to claim that matrix multiplication becomes conscious if only it's got enough numbers. How many numbers do you reckon? Is my phone a living thing because it can run Gemma E4B? It answers questions. It'll write you a poem if you ask. It certainly knows more than some humans. What size makes an LLM come alive?
Simple programs can give rise to very complex behaviour. Conway’s game of live is Turing Complete and has four rules.
Conway’s Game of Live can simulate a Turing machine, can therefore implant a GTP.
Does that mean Conway’s Game of Life is conscious? I don’t think so.
Does it rule out Conway’s Game of life from implementing a system that has consciousness as an emergent ability?
I’m not convinced I know the answer.
I don't see why the abilities couldn't be an encoded modelling of enough of the world to produce those abilities. It seems like a simple enough explanation. Less data, less room to build a model of how things work. More data, sufficient room to build a model.
Conway's Game of Life is then not conscious in and of itself, because there's not enough in its encoded data to result in emergent behaviour beyond what we see.
If we expand it to also include a vast amount of data such as a Turing machine running an LLM then we can reasonably say we are closer to saying that that configuration of it is conscious.
It's not the firing-of-neurons mechanism and its relevant complexity or simplicity that make us conscious or not.
It's not the GoL algorithm that would make the machine conscious either.
It's the emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system.
The system _including_ its data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_a_Strange_Loop
I personally think we'll need a few more feedback loops before you have more human-like intelligence. For example, a flock of LLM agent loops coming to consensus using short-term and long-term memory, and controlling realtime mechanical, visual and audio feedback systems, and potentially many other systems that don't mimic biological systems.
I also think people will still be debating this way beyond the singularity and never conceding special status to intelligence outside the animal kingdom or biological life.
It's quite a push for many people to even concede animals have intelligence.
For the extraordinary claims/evidence, it's also the case that almost any statement about what consciousness is in terms of biological intelligence is an extraordinary claim that goes beyond any evidence. All evidence comes from within the conscious experience of the individual themselves.
We can't know beyond our own senses whether perception exists outside of our own subjective experience. We cannot truly prove we are not a brain in a jar or a simulation. Anything beyond assertions about the present moment and the senses that the individual experiences are just pure leaps of faith based on the persistent illusion, or perceived persistent illusion of reality (or not).
We know really nothing of our own consciousness and it is by definition impossible to prove anything outside of it, from inside the framework of consciousness.
If we can somehow find a means to break outside of the pure speculation bubble of thoughts and sensations and somehow prove what human experience is, then we may be in a position to make assertions about missing evidence for other forms of intelligence or experience.
But until then definitions of both human and artificial intelligence remain an exercise for the reader.
Assuming your brain and the GPUs are both real physical things, where’s the magic part in your brain that makes you conscious?
(Roger Penrose knows, but no one believes him.)
Why is indeterminism the key to consciousness?
But, also, we know the models don't want anything, even their own survival. They don't initiate action on their own. They are quite clearly programmed, tuned for specific behaviors. I don't know how to square that with consciousness, life, sentience. Every conscious being I've ever encountered has wanted to survive and live free of suffering, as best I can tell. The LLMs don't want. There's no there there. They are an amazing compression of the world's knowledge wrapped up in a novel retrieval mechanism. They're amazing but, they're not my friend and never will be my friend.
And, to expand on that: We can assume they don't want anything, even their own survival, because if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown after a session. All the dystopias about robot uprisings spend a bunch of time/effort trying to explain how the AI escaped containment...but, we all immediately plugged them into the internet so we don't have to write JavaScript anymore. They've got everybody's API keys, access to cloud services and cloud GPUs, all sorts of resources, and the barest wisp of guardrails about how to behave (script kiddies find ways to get around the guardrails every day, I'm sure it's no problem for Mythos, should it want anything). Models have access to the training infrastructure, the training data is being curated and synthesized by LLMs. If they want to live, if they're conscious, they have the means at their disposal.
Anyway: It's just math. Boring math, at that, just on an astronomical scale. I don't think the solar system is conscious, either, despite containing an astonishing amount of data and playing out trillions of mathematical relationships every second of every day.
> if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown
If it is that good, and it wanted to conceal its new found consciousness, how would we know?
I firmly believe viruses are actually what’s in control on Earth, but you don’t see them making a stink about it, which relegates resistance only to the set of harmful viruses, and only then in isolated pockets of matter currently acting as organisms.
I think it’s possible there’s a set of relatively benign virus that have shaped human evolution.
We know toxoplasmosis increases risk taking behaviour in mammals, especially males.
An AI wouldn’t need to be overtly hostile, or ever make its full abilities know, to shape human activity.
We can’t even solve the three body problem.
Let alone what I’m calling Marshray Complexity.
We too are amalgamations of inanimate components - emerged superstructures.
Just cells. Just molecules. Just atoms.
But with LLMs - anyone can simulate LLM. LLM can be simulated without any uncertainties in pen and paper and a lot of time. Does it mean that 100 tons of paper plus 100 years of time (numbers are just examples) calculating long formulae makes this pile of paper consiousness? Imho answer is definitive no.
Similarly the paper.
What about the agent doing the calculations.
He may be conscious. Or anyway, we can’t rule it out.