But then again, what's the point?

I don’t think we’re so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%.

The Turing test isn't solved with technology, its solved with participants who are easier to fool or more sympathetic to computer output as humanly legible. In the end, it can boil down to social conventions far more than actual computing capacity.

Per the old Inglorious Bastards gag

You can fail the Turing Test not because you're a computer but because you're a British computer.

Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we’re close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone.

We've ingested a bunch of early 21st century digital markers for English language Western oriented human speech and replicated those patterns. But human behavior isn't limited to Americans shitposting on Reddit. Neither is American culture a static construct. As the spread between the median user and the median simulated user in the computer dataset diverges, the differences become more obvious.

Do we think the designers at OpenAI did a good enough job to keep catching up to the current zeitgeist?

To be fair there's zero evidence for anything outside our own subjective experience of it, we're just kind of running with the assumption that our subjective experience is an accurate representation of reality.

Really? I know. So either you're using that word wrong or your first principles are lacking.

I dont think we can currently prove that anyone other than ourselves are even conscious.

You have to define consciousness before you can prove it. I might argue that our definition of consciousness is fuzzy. But not so fuzzy that "a human is conscious and a rock is not" is up for serious debate.

The people around me look and act and appear conscious, but I’ll never know.

You're describing Philosophical Zombies. And the broad answer to the question of "How do I know I'm not just talking to a zombie?" boils down to "You have to treat others as you would expect to be treated and give them the benefit of the doubt."

Mere ignorance is not evidence of a thing. And when you have an abundance of evidence to the contrary (these other individuals who behave and interact with me as I do, thus signaling all the indications of the consciousness I know I possess) defaulting to the negative assertion because you don't feel convinced isn't skeptical inquiry, its cynical denialism.

The catch with AI is that we have ample evidence to refute the claims of consciousness. So a teletype machine that replicates human interactions can be refuted as "conscious" on the grounds that its a big box full of wires and digital instructions which you know in advance was designed to create the illusion of humanity.

Your logic is critically flawed. By your logic you could argue that there is no "logical way to argue a human has consciousness", because we don't have a precise enough definition of consciousness. What you wrote is just "I'm 14 and this is deep" territory, not real logic.

In reality, you CAN very easily decide whether AI is conscious or not, even if the exact limit of what you would call "consciousness" can be debated. You wanna know why? Because if you have a basic undersanding of how AI/LLM works, than you know, that in every possible, concievable aspect in regards with consciusness it is basically between your home PC and a plankton. None of which would anybody call conscious, by any definition. Therefore, no matter what vague definition you'd use, current AI/LLM defintiely does NOT have it. Not by a longshot. Maybe in a few decades it could get there. But current models are basically over-hyped thermostat control electronics.

This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don't.

It does, yes. Fwiw, I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to humans though, animals and nature may play a role too.

It's unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.

Sure, but I have an entire philosophy set up to answer the other questions further down the road too 😂 That may still sound unsatisfying, but feel free to follow along: https://philosophyofbalance.com/

It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it.

I believe that to be true, yes.

That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?

In my view, machines and AI can never create consciousness, although it’s not ruled out they can become vessels for it. But the consciousness comes from outside the perspective of the machines.

I don't know if we'll ever define consciousness or if we'll ever discover what it is.

My central claim is that if we don't do that we can't convincingly claim that an AI is or is not conscious. We can conjecture about it either way and either guess may be right, but we won't be able to move past guesses.

If you haven't watched it yet you'd probably enjoy Westworld - it plays a lot with that space and approaches some very interesting philosophy when it comes to human consciousness and what it means to even be a person.

:)

https://philosophyofbalance.com/blog/free-will-you-better-believe-it/

Cancer is at least made out of cells. Viruses are just proteins dipped in evil

Yeah, it seems like the major obstacles to saying an llm is conscious, at least in an animal sense, is 1) setting it up to continuously evaluate/generate responses even without a user prompt and 2) allowing that continuous analysis/response to be incorporated into the llm training.

The first one seems like it would be comparatively easy, get sufficient processing power and memory, then program it to evaluate and respond to all previous input once a second or whatever

The second one seems more challenging, as I understand it training an llm is very resource intensive. Right now when it "remembers" a conversation it's just because we prime it by feeding every previous interaction before the most recent query when we hit submit.

IMO language is a layer above consciousness, a way to express sensory experiences. LLMs are "just" language, they don't have sensory experiences, they don't process the world, especially not continuously.

Do they want to preserve themselves? Or do they regurgitate sci-fi novels about "real" AIs not wanting to be shut down?