Thanks for your response. I want to continue the conversation on bats so I won't respond about the other stuff.
Take a look at this. The bats are walking on all fours: https://youtu.be/ewmydjekJnU?t=62 This is not a vulnerable position as they crawl on all fours on cave walls rather then the ground. On the ground they are vulnerable, on the wall or ceiling of some cavernous structure they are safe.
True, but the volume of information in the world today is too overwhelming for one person to evaluate correctly. We live in the information age after all. Most people don't have the faculties to do a proper evaluation that includes both you and me. Would you trust your self to logically evaluate the capabilities of a nuclear reactor design if you yourself aren't an expert? No. You would hire an expert.
Therefore when it comes to technology that we our selves clearly aren't experts in, then the best method is to utilize the logic of other "experts" as a subroutine given that our own faculties are less efficient and less accurate.
Unless you yourself are an expert who has experience building an LLM on the scale of chatGPT trusting the opinions of experts is your best bet.
Most people have a common bias towards trusting their logic above the logic of others and this is actually ironically irrational. There are people who's entire lives around a certain subject matter and if you aren't that person, then for that subject matter the expert is better. That is the the most rational conclusion and I would venture to say if you aren't arriving at that conclusion yourself then likely you are suffering from the aforementioned bias.
I'm ok with your language. I found the "competent in English" rather immature and juvenile, but it's not a big deal and really minor.
I also understand that you might not realize how heated this sub thread was as the other guy deleted half his posts and flagged one of mine (therefore possibly making it invisible to you). So adding a little heat to something that looks tame isn't a big deal. I won't continue the flame war but I will continue the discussion.
It's not my interpretation. It's about the interpretation by Merriam Webster. I believe not only is it your interpretation that is incorrect when compared to official sources, but you didn't fully read the official definition either.
The eagle is not a quadruped. The definition in Merriam Webster says it has to be on a quadruped for it to be a paw. Hence your example is completely irrelevant. Please correct your mistake.
>I absolutely disagree. Sometimes your only choice is fight or submit, and I would rather live free than die a slave.
Sometimes that is the only choice. On that we can agree.
Unfortunately when it comes to China that is clearly not only Not the only choice, but also the stupidest and most harmful choice to both sides.
Think about it.
>Conflict to resolve a dispute when one party is coerced is justified.
Whatever did China do to you? And whatever did you do to China? Mostly nothing. Just a trade war. I think China's biggest crime is attempting to get a GDP per capita bigger than the United States. Or stealing and copying technology being a big second. But China has been stealing tech since before the US-China rivalry so I think most of it spawns from the economic rivalry. These aren't legitimate coercion's, it's all dick size comparisons.
>And that is the point. When you say people, you are referring to Han people. That's the ethno in ethno-fascist.
What is this? That's obviously bullshit. So when it says "We the people" on the declaration of independence it's only referring to White males? That makes the US a ethno-sexist-corporate dystopia. Come on man.
Although the "All men are created equal" part of the declaration literally, refers to white males. It's written on a historical document. If I used this to argue with you to make the claim that the US is a white supremacist country of males it'd be disingenuous and lacking nuance. I am telling you that's exactly the kind of arguments you are parroting from the US propaganda machine.
Nobody knows the exact definition of consciousness. It's a made up word with a vague definition. The catch is the vagueness of the definition is also made up so it's all bullshit anyway.
Either way when we communicate in English we have a vague feeling of what consciousness actually is. Most humans, save the most pedantic ass hole, is still able to communicate about consciousness based off of this vague and fuzzy feeling.
You are Not a pedantic ass hole, definitely not, and neither am I, so let's not get into that rabbit hole. Let's just leave it at the fact that you aren't stupid so you know what I'm talking about even when I don't get into the the fine grained details about what the definition of "consciousness" is.
Bro, everyones on the censorship side of the boot. You're on the "not knowing anything side" because you don't live there you just read the bullshit headlines. I've lived and experienced it.
The majority doesn't really care about censorship because it doesn't effect peoples daily lives. Most people aren't protestors or part of organizations with an agenda.
Not to mention free speech isn't something that's available on HN too. Watch if this thread becomes too heated, dang will swoop in and shut it down. You're not free to say whatever you want. The government in China is much the same way except it's global law. You think if you have a huge problem with the administration here on HN you're free to talk about it openly? This almost never happens because everyone knows free speech isn't available on HN, it's a private forum.
Some things are worse in China other things are worse in the US. Think about it. A chinese guy is telling you like it is right to your face but you stubbornly refuse to even consider it. How is this different then say Big Oil denying climate change or Big Tobacco denying the addictiveness and health effects of tobacco? At the very least none of what I said should flip your beliefs but a wise person should begin to question it.
>I feel these statements at least partly stem from contrarian origins. We have a huge supply of facts as to why China indeed is a fascist totalitarian state - look at what happened to Hong Kong as an example. Pooling these facts into ”US propaganda” is borderline intellectually dishonest.
Of course theirs plenty of evidence. There's also plenty of evidence that the US is a nation of violent psychopaths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_war_crimes. That's just one example of the bad things in the US.
The US is far from great and when viewed through the right lens there's tons and tons of stuff. The Chinese are fed this stuff and all of it is true. All of it. The problem here is that this information isn't a full characterization of the US. It's a small slice of the pie.
What I'm saying is that the information you are being fed is also a small slice of the pie. It's nearly impossible to prove this to both you and your Chinese counterpart being fed anti-American propaganda. So I can only tell you about my perspective and hopefully you can at the very least consider the fact that your universe of information is limited.
I'm a Chinese American. Meaning I was born in the US to immigrant parents from China. I have many immigrant friends from China, many friends that were born here and lived in China (myself included) and I can only tell you that if you lived in China and it's not what you think. It's quite normal living in China, it's not some imagined fascist dystopia so many misinformed Americans fantasize about.
It's unlikely you'll change your opinion based off this one post. But perhaps this post can be a seed for the future where you might become more informed about what it's really like.
Perhaps I can convince you to at least mistrust western propaganda. Western propaganda is highly, highly sophisticated because it's fed to you under the guise of Freedom of the press. It's more sophisticated then Chinese propaganda because the Chinese on a certain level are aware of lies and censorship. It's actually not violating any freedom of press policies. Government sponsored lies in the press is still technically freedom of the press. Take a look at these sources:
I guess the best way to break out of that mode is to have several Chinese friends from china here. Ask them what it's like.
>In happiness, China ranked 82nd out of 146 countries in 2023.
If you lived in China you'll know it's not because of the government. It's actually because of capitalism. China is a dog eat dog competitive society. People are overworked there. The unhappiness is the same sort of unhappiness that corporate drones feel here for their 9-5 job but 1000x worse. The Chinese aren't unhappy because of "lack of freedoms" or anything like that.
> I think most people would say that when you don't experience time passing, you're not conscious at that time. (For example, when you're asleep and not dreaming.) It's pretty clear that a chatbot cannot experience time as we do.
There is a time delta that occurs when LLMs processes input. The LLM does experience time in that sense in the same way you experience time when you process a query given to you by another person.
There isn't anything known to science that happens instantaneously. All processes and change go through a time delta.
>Also, it actually is the case that ChatGPT API calls are stateless. This means it can't have any extra short-term memory other than what's written down in the chat session. It doesn't forget what it wrote in a few minutes, for forgets it immediately.
If it remembers what's in the chat Session then that is in itself memory. Everyone is aware it forgets things between sessions, I never denied that. Either way, again, there are examples of humans who have shorter memories than a chat session. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anterograde_amnesia
>I'm not sure what we should conclude from people who have severe memory problems? I've read about them, but I have hardly any direct experience. How about you?
Look at the video yourself. Do you think the subject (who has Anterograde amnesia) is not conscious? I don't think so. Thus the argument of memory is orthogonal to consciousness. It has nothing to do with it.
Bats are quadrupeds. When they walk they walk like a pterodactyl with the elbow of the wing. They don't stand on their hind legs. See the vampire bat. Additionally the "broad" definition from Merriam Websters covers it.
These aren't pedantic details we are just nitpicking on either. ChatGPT's response considered the nuance the definition encompasses, which to keep on topic is thoroughly impressive and relevant to the overall conversation.
Off-topic:
The person you queried mentioned "intentional goading." Which is what you're continuing to do with that Calvin and Hobbes link. I think this, the flag and accusing me of trolling is taking it too far. A little minor goading is ok during a debate, (I actually don't completely agree with the absolutist politeness policies of HN). While I returned the goad (which I shouldn't have), ultimately I didn't really have a problem with it. I think, now though, it has escalated now past the point of no return. I'll be exiting this thread because of this. Farewell.
Not true. This is irrational. A program runs when you input a query and it generates a response. There is nothing that says consciousness must be always running. When you ask me a question and I answer it... In that time span of processing you're query all humans are conscious. Therefore it is a possibility that LLMs are too.
What is obvious here is that the consciousness an AI exhibits because it is not always running is clearly different from human consciousness because a human is always running. That is logically the biggest possible statement against consciousness. We simply do not have enough information to say it is absolutely unconscious. Such a claim is illogical.
>We also know that they immediately forget anything they didn't write down. A chatbot has no memory of any internal calculations. If you ask it why it wrote something, it's guessing.
False. First Chatgpt has limited memory in the span of a chat session. Outside of that it forgets things.
Second. Consciousness does not require memory. There are many examples of people with retrograde amnesia or even memories that only last minutes and these people are still considered conscious. Therefore a comment about memory is orthogonal to the concept of consciousness.
>People sometimes believe that an AI-generated character is conscious because the writing is convincing, along with some wishful thinking. But writers and characters aren't the same thing, and there's no writer waiting for your reply when you read the character's dialog. This essentially the same thing that happens when reading fiction.
A convincing facade of consciousness is the first prerequisite of consciousness. That is absolutely the first step. We obviously don't consider if rocks are conscious because rocks don't put up a convincing facade. In this respect many LLMs in a certain sense fulfill to varying degrees this first prerequisite.
The second step is to understand what's going on within the neural nets. In this regard we do not fully understand what is going on and we have made little progress.
So in conclusion we cannot know if these things are conscious. We are in an state of not understanding what's going on.
A statement of saying we do know that it is absolutely unconscious is irrational and illogical at this point. Such is the nature of your reply.
I'm curious about the AI at Google that was claimed by a person who has since been fired to be conscious.
I mean I know everyone was attacking him but in a way I suspect it's similar to a lot of the unreasonable dismissive attitudes towards chatGPT.
We really can't say anything either way until we are able to access and play with that version of AI that Google is hiding. I believe it's called lambda?
The point is that Google may already be holding something very very similar to being conscious.
Birds don't have paws because they aren't quadrupeds according to websters.
Bats walk on fours. They are quadrupeds therefore they have paws according to Merriam Webster.
Why don't you address the point I brought up? I already completely understand your definition no need to reiterate it. However, there is a clear disconnect between your definition of paw and the definition from Merriam Webster. Please address it.