You don't have to crack it to make it but you have to crack it to determine whether you've made it. That's kinda the trick of the early AI hype, notably that NYT article that fed Chat GPT some simple sci fi, ai-coming-to-life prompts and it generated replies based on its training data - or, if you believe the nyt author, it came to life.

I think what you're saying is a kind of "can't define it but I know it when I see it" idea, and that's valid, for sure. I think you're right that we don't need to understand it to make it - I guess what I was trying to say was, if it's so complex that we can't understand it in ourselves, I doubt we're going to be able to develop the complexity required to make it.

And I don't think that the inability to know what has happened in an AI training algorithm is evidence that we can create a sentient being.

That said, our understanding of consciousness is so nascient that we might just be so wrong about it that we're looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong thing.

We may understand it so badly that the truth is the opposite of what I'm saying : people have said ("people have said" is a super red flag, but I mean spiritualists and crackpots, my favorite being the person who wrote The Secret Life of Plants) that consciousness is all around us, that every organized matter has consciousness. Trees, for example - but not just trees, also the parts of a tree; a branch, a leaf; a whole tree may have a separate consciousness from its leaves - or, and this is what always blows my mind: every cell in the tree except one. And every cell in the tree except two, and then every cell in the tree except a different two. And so on. With no way to communicate with them, how would a tree be aware of the consciousness of it's leaves?

How could we possibly know if our liver is conscious? Or our countertop, or the grass in the park nearby?

While that's obviously just thought experiment bullshit, my point is, we don't know fucking anything. So maybe we created it already. Maybe we will create it but we will never be able to know whether we've created it.

Well, if you experience consciousness, that's what consciousness is. As in, the word and concept "consciousness" means being conscious, the way you experience being conscious right now (unless of course you're unconscious as I write this...). Free will does not enter into it at the basic level, nothing says you're not conscious if you do not have free will. So what would it really mean to say consciousness is an illusion? Who and what is having the illusion? Ironically, your statement assumes the existence of a higher form of consciousness that is not illusory (which may very well exist but how would we ever know?). Simply because a fake something presupposes a real something that the fake thing is not.

So let's say we could be certain that consciousness purely is the product of material processes in the brain. You still experience consciousness, that does not make it illusory. Perhaps this seems like I'm arguing semantics, but the important takeaway is rather that these kinds of arguments invariably fall apart under scrutiny. Consciousness is actually the only thing we can be absolutely certain exists; in this, Descartes was right.

So, it's meaningful to say that a language model could "fake" consciousness - trick us into believing it is an "experiencing entity" (or whatever your definition would be) by giving convincing answers in a conversation - but not really meaningful to say that actual conscious beings somehow fake consciousness. Or, that "their brains" (somehow suddenly acting apart from the entity) trick them.

I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness's control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.

When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I'll never forget - though I've forgotten the name of the idea (and I've never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I'm not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)

There's some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it "real"

(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)

I fail to see the distinction between "making a logical decision without all the facts" and "make guesses based on how [you've been programmed]". Literally what is the difference?

I'll concede that human intelligence is several orders more powerful, can act upon a wider space of stimuli, and can do it at a fraction of the energy efficiency. That definitely sets it apart. But I disagree that it's the only "true" form of intelligence.

Intelligence is the ability to accumulate new information (i.e. memorize patterns) and apply that information to respond to novel situations. That's exactly what AI does. It is intelligence. Underwhelming intelligence, but nonetheless intelligence. The method of implementation, the input/output space, and the matter of degree are irrelevant.

I have to say no, I can't.

The best decision I could make is a guess based on the logic I've determined from my own experiences that I would then compare and contrast to the current input.

I will say that "current input" for humans seems to be more broad than what is achievable for AI and the underlying mechanism that lets us assemble our training set (read as: past experiences) into useful and usable models appears to be more robust than current tech, but to the best of my ability to explain it, this appears to be a comparable operation to what is happening with the current iterations of LLM/AI.

Ninjaedit: spelling

Yes? I think that depends on your specific definition and requirements of a turing machine, but I think it's fair to compare the almagomation of cells that is me to the "AI" LLM programs of today.

While I do think that the complexity of input, output, and "memory" of LLM AI's is limited in current iterations (and thus makes it feel like a far comparison to "human" intelligence), I do think the underlying process is fundamentally comparable.

The things that make me "intelligent" are just a robust set of memories, lessons, and habits that allow me to assimilate new information and experiences in a way that makes sense to (most of) the people around me. (This is abstracting away that this process is largely governed by chemical reactions, but considering consciousness appears to be just a particularly complicated chemistry problem reinforces the point I'm trying to make, I think).

This is not the established definition though? Just because something is widely believed does not mean that it is the definition