alt Hacker News>So what context would cause me to seriously consider the possibility that engineers had created a computer program that is conscious and an intentional user of language? Let me outline one potential sequence of steps. The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs; there are many reasons for this, but for the purposes of this discussion the most relevant one is the fact that without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness. Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can (and as a point of comparison, certain iguanas can live for decades in the wild). Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse. After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees. At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires, perhaps by using a button board or some other nonlinguistic modality, the way that people have taught chimpanzees and domesticated dogs.
I agree with some parts of this piece, but paragraphs like this one above seem pretty uninspired and simplistic. It's entirely plausible that a conscious mind would not be evolutionarily incentivized to be able to do those things. ie just because animals on earth needed to develop specific talents doesn't mean that other conscious entities need to. Why would a computer program need to hunt for food like a mouse would? Making tools like chimp? these seem like nonsensical metrics.
Replies
The same thing jumped at me immediately. He should have prefaced this with his definition of consciousness. Moreover the embodiment of LLMs is already happening via robotics, and virtually. Then there's the common counter "but humans are a next word prediction machines too.." (ofc we're more than this, but linguistically we are, and that's the field from which LLMs originate) which is rarely addressed.
I'm more interested in what a virtual body would entail. To me the root of this idea is around persistent state which is something that currently LLMs do not have. Imagine if somehow your brain lacked long-term memory forming capabilities and instead each day when you woke up you had to read a notebook with (markdown formatted) instructions that you wrote the day before? I wouldn't be surprised if such a person lacked in many of the dimensions we consider important for consciousness, even in less sophisticated forms of life like dogs or mice.
There is no soul in a human. Just a bunch of systems nudging each other to action. What people call soul is literally the same as the concept of personality. In essence, the way all systems in your body have been calibrated to exist.
I believe that the moment an artificial inteligence is going to "receive" a soul, is the moment it is going to be made to sustain itself. Either as a larger package (some bots working to keep an AI farm running) or as an individual (a bot which is tasked with not only fulfilling human desires, but also sustaining itself)
Are you familiar with Michael Graziano and Attention Schema Theory? I think that is a better "substrate independent" formulation of the objections Ted Chiang is expressing here.
My claw-like is hooked up to my internal cameras (baby-cams) and to my Dreame Ultra X40. That gives it a body and sense organs since it can check the cameras to see if the living room floor is clear before sending the vacuum off. I don't think that gives it consciousness. Is it the sample rate?
The question is somewhat ill-defined, though. We 'experience' reality continuously because of how we are, but a sleeping human in deep non-REM has the mind not actually active. So they're not a conscious being. So conscious/unconscious is not a line I think easily drawn[0]. Whatever, this stuff is much more well-trodden than this HN comment so I won't rehash. I, too, am surprised that Ted Chiang whose work seems so cleverly novel in so many ways has what seems to me a pedestrian view.
0: very sorites, you know
the very next paragraph addresses this concern imo. it's just an example of one way it might be convincing to him, since of course we are naturally anthropocentric.
The body itself has little effect on the mind other than the inputs from nerves and chemical and hormonal changes. These inputs are analogous to tokens and parameters for an LLM. You could theoretically reserve some tokens to be used as “physical” or “emotional” sensations that would affect the functioning of the model.
> The first requirement is that the computer program has a body (either physical or virtual) and sense organs
Ok, deploy a local model on a lightweight edge compute device and strap it to a chassis with wheels, and attach a cheap webcam
> Then I’d want to see an embodied agent that could navigate its environment in order to survive as well as, say, a lizard can
Give the robot appendages that enable it to plug itself into a standard wall outlet, guided by a vision model plugged into its webcam. As long as it can feed itself, it can survive long enough.
> Next I would want to see an embodied agent with the same capacity to deal with novel situations as a mouse.
I think if you fed frames from the webcam into a local VLM every 5s you’d be able to assess a situation and respond with simple actions (turn, advance, retreat).
> After that I’d want to see agents whose social dynamics are as complex as those of wolves, and then agents with the tool-making abilities of chimpanzees.
Social dynamics could be implemented in many ways, maybe by transmitting tokens over RF? Idk. Then you have a scanner that picks them up, feeds them into some LLM frontend and decides whether to add them to a global context file that guides the VLM action-taker. A new action could be to broadcast a token message. Tool-making would have to be code-based. Physical tools are hard. Still unsolved.
> At that point I would want to see people successfully teaching such embodied agents how to communicate their desires
This part is relatively straightforward except for the “via nonlinguistic modality”.
Anyway. These are all engineering problems. Personally I would demand to see the AI reproduce its body under its own power and volition. That’s a pretty neat trick we’ve got going for us.
Yeah, it's kind of mind boggling that Ted Chiang (of all people!) can't imagine intelligence without a body. and the whole thing just begs a lot of questions.
Is a car a body? Does an AI situated in a car therefore get to have desires and emotions? Is a taupe box with a webcam attached a body? (For that matter: Is a quadropelegic body a body? Do quadropelegics have desires and emotions? Obviously, yes and yes.) Why is a body necessary for the formation of desires and emotions? Why are desires and emotions necessary features for consciousness?
Or here's one: If I'm not experiencing any particular emotion in a given moment, am I concious?
I tend to think that emotions, at least, are mainly hormonal global triggers: they're more about physiology than actual consciousness. The whole thing, as a result, sounds like an effort to privilege biological intelligence, rather than a real foray into the issues.