Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…Ah, great and hard question. Coming from philosophy, I don’t know, part of me is like, we have to set aside panpsychism. Because if panpsychism is true, then the answer is yes, because it’s sore tables and chairs and everything else. I guess a view that seems a little bit odd to me is the idea that the only place… When I think of consciousness, I think of phenomenal consciousness, these images in the brain, the weird cinema that somehow we have going on inside. I guess I can’t see a reason for thinking that the only way you could possibly get that is from a certain biological structure, as in if I take a very similar structure and I create it from different material, should I expect consciousness to emerge? My guess is yes. But then, that’s an easy thought experiment because you’re imagining something almost identical where it is mimicking what we got through evolution, where presumably there was some advantage to us having this thing that is phenomenal consciousness. Where was that? And when did that happen? And is that a thing that language models have? We have fear responses, and I’m like, does it make sense for a language model to have a fear response? They’re just not in the same… If you imagine them, there might just not be that advantage. Basically, it seems like a complex question that I don’t have complete answers to, but we should just try and think through carefully is my guess. We have similar conversations about animal consciousness, and there’s a lot of insect consciousness. I actually thought and looked a lot into plants when I was thinking about this. Because at the time, I thought it was about as likely that plants had consciousness. And then I realized, I think that having looked into this, I think that the chance that plants are conscious is probably higher than most people do. I still think it’s really small. But I was like, oh, they have this negative, positive feedback response, these responses to their environment. It’s not a nervous system, but it has this functional equivalence. This is a long-winded way of being… Basically, AI has an entirely different set of problems with consciousness because it’s structurally different. It didn’t evolve. It might not have the equivalent of, basically, a nervous system. At least that seems possibly important for sentience, if not for consciousness. At the same time, it has all of the language and intelligence components that we normally associate probably with consciousness, perhaps erroneously. So, it’s strange because it’s a little bit like the animal consciousness case, but the set of problems and the set of analogies are just very different. It’s not a clean answer. I don’t think we should be completely dismissive of the idea. And at the same time, it’s an extremely hard thing to navigate because of all of these disanalogies to the human brain and to brains in general, and yet these commonalities in terms of intelligence. When Claude, future versions of AI systems, exhibit consciousness, signs of consciousness, I think we have to take that really seriously. Mm-hmm.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.