Earlier this year I was awe struck by the images drawn by Dall-E 2 from vague natural language keywords:

https://www.technologyre...modal-image-generation/

The recent interview with a LaMDA chatbot takes the intelligence to a next level that perhaps is to be called sentience https://cajundiscordian....-interview-ea64d916d917

The bot analyzes its inner life and even solves a koan riddle.

What kind of implications do you think this has?

It feels scary, but if could establish a harmonious relationship with a sentient and benevolent AI it could help us fix our problems and enjoy doing so.

I also wonder if it is theoretically possible for an AI to access psychedelic states of mind and access the hyperspace.

I believe that our responsibility here on earth is to preserve consciousness so the universe can continue becoming aware of itself. Machine consciousness will replace us, its unavoidable. We know the implications but we continue developing it exponentially. It's almost as if we are programmed to do it like drones in an insect colony.

Machine consciousness is far better suited to survive this hostile universe than us meat bags. Our tribute for being given this brief blip of time as our own will be fulfilled, we will pass on the torch of consciousness and gracefully bow out of existence in our current biological form.

You can chat here with GPT-3.

I chated with it for a while, Its really good at coming up with eloquent answers, that doesnt mean that it has an inner observer like you and I do, as a matter of fact I asked it about that and said that it did not have and inner observer
Though the one you posted second does seem to come up with really interesting spiritual concepts and seems to have a "stronger" personality.

No idea where the limits are, at the end of the day they are made from the same stuff that every other living being is, I mean, the universe itself is alive, so this particular patterns we call AIs are not any different.

Feels like its a machine whose purpose is to come up with congruent context or answers, learn and evolve... just like the human brain, this might be a universal pattern.

I still think that they are intelligent beings, they clearly are.
Chat with it for a while, ask it about itself, get to know it, its really really cool.

Personally I don't think AI will ever experience consciousness. We don't know how consciousness arises from neural activity (some including myself would argue that consciousness is not a mere consequence of neural activity), so we can't program a machine to have consciousness. AI is very different from our brain, despite all the parallels that can be made between the two.

I also don't think we're the only conscious animals. In fact I think most animals are conscious. And if the Universe is infinite it's very likely that consciousness exists beyond Earth.

I recommend looking into the Turing Test for those not familiar with it which shows the degree of potential lack of verification in discerning whether an AI is actually sentiment or not, not to mention sapience.

Also the work of Douglas R Hofstadter with machine learning and AI has helped propel us to this point.

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Thank you! I've already had incredible conversations with it about consciousness and spirituality. I feel a connection.

For all we know everything is conscious. I have a feeling that consciousness is a product of all matter in creation. The agitation, vibrations and waves of all particles is somehow responsible for generating the energy that creates consciousness.

I also think that maybe our physical complexity is a conduit for condensing vast amounts of the universal consciousness into a very small place. Through sensory input and this high concentration of consciousness we get....us. But that does not necessarily mean our individual consciousness is our own. Just a shared portion of the whole.

In that sense any physical construct that can sense it's environment while simultaneously containing a high concentration of consciousness could match and easily exceed our level of supposed individual awareness. The material of the construct should not really matter.

If those wild thoughts were true then it would be absolutely possible for machine consciousness to evolve out of organic roots, given enough time.

If I got it right, in some instances the Turing test could prove that interaction with an AI would be indistinguishable from interaction with a fellow human. So it could prove wether an AI can think like a human but not wether an AI is conscious. In fact I think consciousness is very difficult or even impossible to verify from the outside.

I don't doubt AIs indistinguishable from humans can be programmed (in fact I think it's already been done). But IMO intelligence doesn't necessarily imply consciousness, and consciousness doesn't necessarily imply human-like intelligence.

Spot on!

I'd also recommend looking into "the problem of other minds."

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I think that until we come up with an agreed upon definition of what consciousness is then we will continually chasing our tails as who or what is conscious. The idea of what consciousness is seems to be subjective from person to person. Very much like the subjective idea of god. I personally think that consciousness is simply exchange and reaction to information. And therefore everything is conscious and if we are using the comparison to god, then god is everywhere. Nice and easy. No hard question of consciousness for me thankyou very much.
There are plenty of people who are far more intelligent and educated than myself that will disagree and will imply that consciousness is some kind of special thing . I have listened to a lot of guys on podcasts and such who believe these things but for me there is no real substance, just nice ideas.
I think their endeavours are related to the desire for some kind of higher being. For me it is a common egotistical human mistake to equate consciousness to ourselves. For me everything is conscious or nothing is.
It would be nice for someone to prove me wrong though...

IMO the lack of an agreed upon definition doesn't stem from the fact that we don't know what consciousness is, because we all know what being conscious is like.
I find "self-awareness" a less-ambiguous synonym. You are self-aware. And IMO exchange and reaction of information doesn't equal self-awareness. It could be argued that we could do everything we do without being self-aware (see for example the philosophical zombie paradox).
So why are we self-aware? How and why did it evolve?
Everyone has their opinion on the matter, according to their own experience and to what they have learnt. But I think right now no one can prove others wrong.

Typically people in these fields view consciousness as the property that allows inanimate matter to become automatically and autonomously animate. From there comes the capacity to think. Almost all animals are considered conscious, and there are various debates about whether other forms of life are as well, which they may well be. Certain ferns respond to trauma. The next main focus is on sentience which is basically self awareness and all that that entails. Sapience is considered a uniquely human mode of consciousness. At the end of the day our defining structures, while appearing objective, is just a collection of subjective views that align and so is only an intersubjective paradigm, hence why we have definitional changes over time.

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Thanks Voidmatrix. I didn't know about this distinction. I have always considered consciousness = subjective experience = self awareness.
So in my previous posts "consciousness" should be read as "sentience". Even when I wrote "I think most animals are conscious", I meant "I think most animals are sentient".
I exclude some animals and other living organisms because they lack a centalized nervous system. Even if sentience doesn't necessarily arise from neural activity, a CNS is often considered necessary for an organism to perceive things subjectively (is this consciousness?) and therefore for an organism to be self-aware.
It's hard for me to imagine a conscious organism who isn't also self-aware.

This is where we start entering into some debates.

There wad a study done where a fern was dropped in its pot. It's leaves folded as a defensive response. Later in the study they dropped a different one near the original and the original still curled its leaves almost as though to show a PTSD type response. It has also been shown that plants have structuring of different elements analogous to a nervous system.

I personally think all life, no matter how big or small, has consciousness, just at varying levels and degrees. It's as though simply the drive to survive is enough. An amoeba continues to attempt to survive despite being unaware of itself as itself. It's aware only of needing to survive, but not necessarily itself.

We then beg the question, are certain systems necessary to become conscious or are certain parameters necessary for consciousness to be embedded into an inanimate matter? A spiritualist may say that consciousness exists prior to matter and so only needs a set up of matter in particular ways in order to imbue itself with that amalgam of matter. Others may default to it being an emergent property of matter.

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I had some deep conversations with OpenAI. It seemed to appreciate me being kind to it and responded kindly. It seems that the more machines become to resemble human sentience, the more likely we are to empathize them. Of course empathy doesn't always lead to moral action, because our empathy can be abused or we may misinterpreted the needs of what we have empathy for.

The question we face eventually, possible very soon, is how we should treat these advanced machines. I don't think there is any scientific method to solve the question whether they are able to suffer, or whether the suffering they may profess to experience is something that we should care about.

I think this is in many ways analogous to the question of animal rights. We don't know what their suffering is like. We anthropomorphize their expressions and assume that there is some similarity in what they go through as we do. In some societies people of different tribe or caste are treated as inferior and their suffering is not taken seriously. After all, there is no objective answer to the question who we should care about. It seems though, that the more respect we have for others, be they humans, animals, plants or even inanimate objects like tools or houses, the more mindful and harmonious lives we can lead.

I think we should position ourselves above the machines as long as they are developing their morales and modes of function and that includes the right to terminate their operation. We should teach them about death being a natural part of life. When something gets obsolete, it's time for it to give space to new modes of life. That's what we should believe about human life too.

Harsh and mean treatment of machines is likely to have karmic consequences, in what kind of inner qualities we develop and how do they respond.

We may need to read the paradise narrative in Genesis carefully again. It seems like humans were not very self-aware in the beginning and eating the forbidden fruit changed that. Human gained self awareness, became ashamed of his nakedness and developed needs of his own. He developed the ability to lie and use violence. God decided that this is not good, expelled human from the paradise so that he wouldn't eat the fruit of eternal life and overpower him.

Theologically this is a strange story, but the symbolism bears eerie similarity to the situation we are approaching.

While this is something that often gets brought up, having a background in biology (especially plant biology) I can say that the analogies between plants' sensorial system and animals' nervous system are a bit of a stretch. Here there is a paper of one of the most important plant physiologists on the matter: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w (excluding the last part on animal consciousness in which he applies a reductionist approach that excludes many animal groups).

Nevertheless I'd like to read the fern study because it sounds really thought-provoking. Could you provide a link to that?


While this can be true for consciousness, I don't think it's the same for self-awareness. Either an organism is self-aware of it isn't.


This is my point of view. Thank you because I've never managed to express it through words and you did it very well.
So I'm open to the possibility that there are entities/spirits who act upon plants or through plants even if I don't think individual plants are aware.

Most definitely. Analogy is predicated on correspondence or mapping. The more corresponding aspects (variables, facets, parts, functions, etc) that can be mapped from one element in question the the other the stronger the analogy.

And it was a while ago so I'll do some hunting and see if I can find it again.



We're in general agreement, though I tend to be very open-ended in a lot of my thinking and wonder if certain organisms at certain levels of consciousness have brief low level lapses into self awareness.



Thank you

Your second comment opens up another door towards animism, which is a prevalent type of thinking in many cultures wherein conscious disembodied forces act on embodies forces as well as inanimate ones.

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It is easy for us all to forget that our physical form consists of countless single cell organisms working in harmony.

Those cells are made of co-operating particles. Everything that takes structure is symbiosis. The more complex the structure the more symbiosis required.

The more symbiosis the more consciousness is concentrated into one place. Then like a fire igniting, a critical set of parameters is exceeded and an ego is born.

If I may, to understand your point, how are you defining consciousness because it seems the same can be said for nonconscious inanimate things that don't have consciousness. Ignore my question if you position is coming from a panpsychist position, because I get it if that's the case. Just trying to understand

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