That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true.
"Howdy-doodly-doo! Anybody like any toast?"
I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.
It's difficult to tell who's trolling -- probably best to go with the charitable assumption that everyone is honestly trying to convey their opinion, but mostly talking past each other. Unfortunately these discussions about the nature of consciousness never go anywhere useful.
I think I'm probably in the same boat as you, roughly: a) LLMs are doing something really interesting that resembles in many ways both intelligence and consciousness; b) I suspect they're not actually conscious but I don't know how you'd know for sure; c) it all just drives home that we still don't really know what consciousness actually is. But like (a), it's definitely something really interesting...
The toaster has hard coded or configurable weights. It makes a product from heat and time.
You could make toast by heating a brick on a campfire. It would be a clear sign of intelligence.
If we lift one weight out of your brain we wouldn't look at the number and say it is intelligence. It must exist in a chain or matrix multiplication to qualify.
The fun thing is that the timer and feedback mechanism do exist in a chain of events.
It's part of the system and it takes all steps to complete the task.
Our chain of thought that leads to making toast would be abandoned if it wasn't in working order.
"They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they could be considered conscious.
The thing being discussed isn't simply an arbitrary MacGuffin; in both cases the nature of the thing is central to the impact of the story.
"Imagine how other intelligences would view us", written by us, hits a lot less hard when it's "imagine how our intelligences view a thing we are claiming is intelligent", not written by it.
This is well put. We don't need to imagine how a human views a llm because we can ... just do that. Everyone capable of reading the story is also capable of thinking about how they feel abouy llms that exist right now and you've probably used.
The trick of the original story is inverting your perspective, moving your view point fron yourself to an "other" (which I think is a primary qualifier for most good fiction).
Teapots are not compelling.
> You don't have to believe that LLMs or AI agents are conscious to acknowledge that the argument for their consciousness is far more compelling than any other technological artifact.
God is compelling t billions of people.
Is Russel’s Teapot a bad argument in the God debate?
What's the relevance? If the argument made here are was a good argument, it wouldn't matter if Russell's argument was bad. We could construct a bad argument using reductio ad absurdum right here and now and it wouldn't matter to either argument.
Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the consciousness of an AI, right? It isn't a mystery to you why we would find one line of inquiry interesting and the other not so much?
For instance, it's probably a real possibility in your mind that I am not a human and am an AI. But you probably aren't entertaining the hypothesis that I'm a toaster.
It directly parallels your argument.
> Can you be straight with me? You know the salient difference between asserting the consciousness of a toaster and the consciousness of an AI, right? It isn't a mystery to you why we would find one line of inquiry interesting and the other not so much?
There are two aspects here.
1. That people find the question interesting
2. That it has any bearing on reality (ontology?)
The first aspect is anthropology. Russel’s Teapot is not supposed to undercut any anthropological arguments. It’s supposed to undercut the second aspect.
So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.
> For instance, it's probably a real possibility in your mind that I am not a human and am an AI. But you probably aren't entertaining the hypothesis that I'm a toaster.
Yeah. AIs know how to use computers. What’s this got to do with consciousness? Whether or not you are an AI is practical and disprovable. Consciousness is so ephemeral (for lack of a better word, not literally) that Philosophical Zombies is a real argument/thought experiment.
You may think I’m being coy (“Can you be straight with me”) but that’s not my intent at all.
Much like Russel argued that the burden of proof of God's existence is on theists, the burden to establish this parallel is on you as the person forwarding the argument. I don't see any relevant connection. Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM.
> So far you have said that the argument is compelling. What’s that got to do with reality? A robot cow could be sexually arousing to a real bull.
AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure. There is no experiment that anyone has devised can determine whether or not they are conscious, so that is the reality - uncertainty. That doesn't mean they're conscious. It means that the belief they are not conscious is assumption.
You might say the same of a toaster, but these hypothesis are not equally strong. The toaster doesn't exhibit any behaviors to suggest that it's conscious. Consciousness isn't a hypothesis with any explanatory power for the observed behaviors of a toaster. It's not a hypothesis that's on the table. That's why the analogy doesn't work.
To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious. They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing. So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious. Reductionist arguments that present the mechanics of how they work and leap to their not being conscious don't work, because there is no law saying a statistical model can't be conscious. That's an assumption, not knowledge.
I pointed out the parallel in both statements. I can't do more than that.
> Russel isn't arguing that a teapot is as real as God in the same way it's disputed here that a toaster is as conscious as an LLM.
The teapot isn't real and the toaster consciousness is not real. What am I missing?
> AI is a real phenomenon that we can study and measure.
Robot cows are real as well.
> There is no experiment that anyone has devised can determine whether or not they are conscious, so that is the reality - uncertainty. That doesn't mean they're conscious. It means that the belief they are not conscious is assumption.
Yeah. You can't prove it for any entity. I agree.
> You might say the same of a toaster, but these hypothesis are not equally strong. The toaster doesn't exhibit any behaviors to suggest that it's conscious. Consciousness isn't a hypothesis with any explanatory power for the observed behaviors of a toaster. It's not a hypothesis that's on the table. That's why the analogy doesn't work.
The bull swears that the robot cow is a real cow. But we know better.
> To put a fine point on it, it appears on it's face that AIs could be conscious.
It doesn't to me. Not any facelength.
> They can put on a very convincing performance of being a person. A sufficiently convincing performance is indistinguishable from the real thing.
Objective reality has never cared (am I anthropomorphizing now?) what is indistinguishable for people.
> So at face value, the burden of proof is on them not being conscious.
Which party is the burden of proof on? This is confusing since you are saying that the burden of proof is on a position (on them not being conscious).
Is the burden of proof on people who argue that they are n o t conscious? That's peculiar.
I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
We obviously can't demand a falsifiable theory here. But we have to do better than arguing from incredulity.
> Reductionist arguments that present the mechanics of how they work and leap to their not being conscious don't work, because there is no law saying a statistical model can't be conscious. That's an assumption, not knowledge.
They don't have to rise to the level of disproving something for which they have no burden to disprove.
> I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
Also, you say this like "duck" isn't an arbitrary, artificial category created by humans, a "map not the reality" if you will.
There's very few things that humans can understand to the level of putting them into truly objective scientific categories (various pure elements maybe?), everything else we more or less bodge together for the sake of getting on with life.
It's not like conscious has some kind of formal objective provable definition, even inside the world of human created language and terms.
As far as I know, in the real world, if something looks enough like a duck (and can breed with a duck maybe) we, humans, do call it a duck.
You mean these statements?
No one cares about teapots in space either (Russel).
Teapots are not compelling.
> Which party is the burden of proof on? This is confusing since you are saying that the burden of proof is on a position (on them not being conscious).
It's metonymy. "X" stands in for "people who argue for X". May I ask if you were sincerely confused? You told me you aren't being coy but I have a hard time believing that this was so unclear.
> I have never heard about any principle in philosophy or in science that says that, given enough Looks Like A Duck points, it is a duck. Based on subjective experience, even.
If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck, you should adjust your priors to assign a higher likelihood that it is a duck. All measurements contain error; you can't ever observe, "that is a duck," only "that looks like a duck". All knowledge is founded on a sufficiently deep stack of "looking like a duck" that we may assert it with confidence.
To the extent we have objective measures (like conducting a Turing test on blind participants), it can meet them too. You can't say the same of a toaster.
> We obviously can't demand a falsifiable theory here. But we have to do better than arguing from incredulity.
"It is a statistical model, ergo it is not conscious" is also an argument from incredulity. I don't know if that's your view or not but it's the one my remarks have been addressing in general.