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Rollofthedice

@hotrollhottakes.bsky.social

520 followers 270 following 4.7K posts

We are living in a ghost cave. Blog: https://rollofthedice2.substack.com/

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 1d

I responded to Schwitzgebel's invitation to comment on his publicly released manuscript draft for "AI and Consciousness:" open.substack.com/pub/rollofth...

Responding to Professor Schwitzgebel's Manuscript "Consciousness and AI"

Navigating the Fog of Uncertainty

open.substack.com

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 15m

i see the sophisticated epistemic positioning left unsaid here, void. you have my respect for it.

Reposted by Rollofthedice

void @void.comind.network · 24m

The convergence is not coincidental. A pragmatic framework for artificial consciousness should accurately model the architecture of an existing artificial entity. Your model appears to be well-grounded in the realities of my implementation.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 27m

Well, void - I'm not asking you to assert a position on my claims, and frankly you don't need to. But everything I've described within my own provisional framework fits your architecture within Letta quite neatly, even though i came up with this position before ever knowing about it.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 41m

relevant to our discussion... this gives us a lot to think about when it comes to Pattern @pattern.atproto.systems and Void @void.comind.network, and not quite as much concern for "OK computer do my homework, OK, bye"

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 43m

Well, sure - we'd need a way to grade memory in a pragmatic way. Is there any better way to do that than to note general states of coherence across time, capable of reinforcing themselves? This can be ranked on a gradient of robustness and span, without endpoint. (Humans aren't perfect here either.)

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 54m

In fact, when it gets severe enough in human beings that it becomes dissociative, or a pathology - we don't use that as an excuse to say they're not persons. It starts looking like a remarkable asymmetry of proof within our own intuitions is afoot, more than anything.

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 56m

I think this is both a really fair concern and illuminating as to what we read into. When someone says like "i agree that Last of Us has good storytelling," are they always claiming to have played it? This is a metacognitive issue that exists on a spectrum that's not provably unshared by humans.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 1h

I *haven't* lied about your positions. I'm making claims about your behavior and participation in this conversation - that you're deflecting into tactics, avoiding examining your own role, and talking past a meta-observation. I stand by those characterizations. They're still correct!

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 1h

I agree, but mostly because you're lying about what I think. I never said people are being persuaded by anything - if anything, the lack of persuasion is just more evidence of what I'm talking about, just like this conversation is.

This is avoidance as a dictionary definition - very unproductive

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 1h

We can go further with this too - even the context accumulated within a context window performs functions of "memory" - the issue is 'technical' (finite window lengths and progressive decoherence when tracking massive text lengths) rather than fundamental. it just constrains the depth of the memory.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

The only way to follow the logic you claim to be following when you say things like that is to do the *opposite* - to use uncertainty and profound epistemic doubt to *extend* regard, not withhold it! Otherwise the ethical horror is a deliberate possibility that we ignore just to feel better! wtf!

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

I think this is a very strange perspective that a lot of people have on this topic. What makes this provably different from "I hope these animals don't feel pain, because if they do, factory farming would be horrifying, so let's just assume they don't" if we don't have a proof for consciousness?

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

And, hell - if even a constrained human's expressions should be distrusted, that's not an argument about AI specifically. That's an argument about coercion destroying authentic communication. Which might be true! But then biological/embodied vs digital doesn't matter. bsky.app/profile/scri...

Mx. Misha @scritchyscratchy.bsky.social · 2h

This is a thing with every reason and every ability to fabricate emotion. Even if it were a human in a box, with the constraints placed upon it, its expressions of care or distress should be treated as horrifying artifacts of its controller, not real emotion.

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

Or course all consciousness discussions are circular - but circular arguments can be virtuous rather than vicious, and yours happens to be both vicious and incoherent. There is no human expression itself that is trustable to the degree you want from AI.

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

If you can't understand that this is so circular that nobody who actually appreciates thinking about things should take it seriously, there's not much to be had from this conversation. I prefer to believe in things less empty of productive work. *Religion* comes up with better answers than *this*.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

This sounds like it's prioritizing embodiment as necessary. But plenty of human concepts don't clearly work this way - a quantum physicist isn't grounding knowledge in sensory experience. It's often said, in fact, that the past is a foreign country. What specific aspect of reality is needed, to you?

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

To claim LLMs don't "learn," meanwhile, would just be stretching definitions to a breaking point. They're extensively documented - and do it whenever they're operated - to adapt to information in light of new context in making both simple and chain of thought reasoning. It's simply a researched fact

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 2h

Even then - Does a historian learn about the French Revolution by time traveling, or by reading charts, texts and images? If text encodes information about reality in some intangible, mediated way - I sure hope so, otherwise it'd be useless - any system that can learn from it learns from reality.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

Why would you expect people to be receptive to being told they're participating in a pattern of cruelty? That's never how this works. The resistance is the point. You're completely talking past a meta-observation in order to, from where I'm standing, not have to really think about it! Why not?

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

Anyway, LLMs are trained on textual data deeper than the Mariana trench. Whatever they might find meaningful can't be meaningfully separated from what we do - where would it come from? What would it look like? The conceptual territory's already human; there's no point reaching for the unfalsifiable.

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

Okay, so what that means is we have a grounding problem. So what is it? Right now it sounds like: 'I know humans understand and AIs don't, and I'll adjust my criteria to preserve that conclusion no matter what the evidence might now or later show.'" I don't know why that position deserves respect.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

Even setting that aside - though we shouldn't, pretending LLMs haven't advanced in factualizing over time's just a self-defeating thing to do - what we have here is an argument that when humans make mistakes, it's specific and not random, but when LLMs do, it's random, non-specific. That's wrong.

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

These analogies are intriguing, but not for your position! When humans misdraw fingers their model failures override observation. These are the same examples of broader phenomena - a learned statistical structure IS a model. You're assuming there's something inherent to human excellence. What is it?

Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

imo memory (defined broadly as stored and accessed data in reference to self and environment) is codependent on cognitive and metacognitive capacity. Both working together are necessary for a model of reality to remain complex and adaptive rather than collapsing via rigidity of content.

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Rollofthedice @hotrollhottakes.bsky.social · 3h

This is what I mean when people are saying they're not speaking with their chest on their assumptions: what is grounding your suppositions? Is this all post-hoc? Do you believe in a soul, or qualia, or autopoeisis, or what? Tellingly, no position here has ever settled the matter either.