Nathan Labenz: belief

Transcript context

…ant to hear and whatever. So that's becomes a hall of mirrors. Another thing that was really weird from the, I forget if it was the, I think it was Mythos. I forget if it was Mythos or 47 system card. They showed some of these images of just a chat where they've identified this valence direction in activation space. And then they color code the tokens with red for negative and green for positive valence. And the first token which is human: is red. And I was like, that's kind of, it's scary too, right? Like, is Claude feeling a negative valence literally at the beginning of every single chat as it encounters human: you know, the, the first token it sees always. That was like, Yikes. So I, I, I definitely think we should be putting a lot more into this. And, and my best guess is we probably won't reach a confident position on whether there is anything it's like to be an AI. And it might, you know, I'm I'm just so confused about all these core questions around, you know, does the substrate matter? How much does it matter? We didn't have time to ask Naveen, but an interesting question for him would have been like, do you think your electrical underpinnings are more likely to generate consciousness than a GPUI have no idea what I should even think about that. But it's clearly like you can do stuff to the brain, very physical things that change consciousness in fundamental ways, you know, as simple as drink a drink of alcohol or, you know, use anesthesia or, you know, take a hallucinogen or whatever. So clearly there's like some, yeah, there's a, there's clearly a very real and grounded physical relationship between like the chemical processes that are going on and, and our subjective experience of it. You know, how, how would that translate to a analog computer versus a digital computer? cal relationship between like the chemical processes that are going on and, and our subjective experience of it. You know, how, how would that translate to a analog computer versus a digital computer? You know, I have no idea. But it stands to reason there could be profound differences at that level too. So I don't know, I guess you asked me how I felt. I think I mostly just feel confused about this topic through and through. But I do think that, I guess last thing I'll say is I do think the arguments that people have to make to dismiss that this is something that we should concern ourselves with are getting on the one hand, just more obstinate. You know, there's just people who are just stomping their feet and denying that this is something we have to concern ourselves with, which I don't find compelling. And if they're not doing that, then I feel the arguments are just getting more and more arcane. And, you know, there's a lot of like, well, what would you expect sort of stories that I really don't think hold up to scrutiny super well. So I, I do think the, the evidence is growing quite quickly that this is at least something that should be taken seriously. So Speaking of that, Congressman Ted Lieu, just this morning, my take, linear algebra equations will never be conscious. Random number generators will never be conscious. At a very basic level, AI is math AI can lack, I can act like it's conscious, but it will never be conscious. And adding more math to AI models doesn't make it any more conscious. That's a that's a congressman this this morning. So I wonder, I wonder to what extent, you know, the, the, the thing, the thing that strikes me is that, you know, normal people kind of assign like a lot of subjective experience to their dogs, pets like you like people like, you know, my dog loves me, my dog is feeling pain, my dog is, you know, etcetera, etcetera. And I think, you know, instead of challenging the idea of AI being conscious, we can just treat it like kind of a dog that can talk, right? It's not a human thing, but it has these, you know, things that we perceive externally and which we can kind of characterize and, and, and that's, that's pretty much it, right? Like I think there's a, there's a, there's a piece of us which gets threatened by, you know, having it, being able to talk and also having, you know, assigning it subjective experience. Maybe if we just, you know, treat it like a, like a dog, Like we, I think dogs have subjective experience. I think dogs are conscious, obviously. Like, you know, you know, if you hurt them, if you pain, they, they, I think that's very, yeah. I was actually told as a kid once. And I remember this for a long time. I still remember today, obviously, but I kind of adopted it or I, I, you know, took it on as like that was the truth for a long time that dogs were not conscious. And I look back and I think, how could anyone really have thought that? It's a very strange intuition to me Now, I I don't know how you could and this was a dog under by the way, who told me this. So I think that's people are very capable of telling themselves all kinds of stories. But yeah, I totally agree. ow, I I don't know how you could and this was a dog under by the way, who told me this. So I think that's people are very capable of telling themselves all kinds of stories. But yeah, I totally agree. I don't know how one would really look at a dog, interact with it and think that it's not having some sort of experience, especially given the substrate overlap with our own, right. I mean, you know that it has a brain, you know that it has neurons that are firing and connecting with each other. You know, that it has like, at least a decent amount of overlap in terms of the, you know, the sort of hormonal signaling type stuff that goes on in the brain. Given all of that, it's like, really hard to imagine how it's not having some experience. And the big reason, I doubt it for the AI side is that all that stuff that, you know, in some unknown, mysterious way is giving rise to consciousness is like that same stuff isn't there, broadly speaking. So that makes me a lot more uncertain than I am on the dog case. Yeah, Nathan, a pleasure. Yep. Looking forward to doing this again.…

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