this post was submitted on 04 May 2025
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Self aware consciousness on a human level. So it's still far from a sure thing, because we haven't figured consciousness out yet.
But I'm still very happy with my prediction, because AI is now at a way more useful and versatile level than ever, the use is already very widespread, and the research and investments have exploded the past decade. And AI can do things already that used to be impossible, for instance in image and movie generation and manipulation.
But I think the code will be broken soon, because self awareness is a thing of many degrees. For instance a dog is IMO obviously self aware, but it isn't universally recognized, because it doesn't have the same degree of selv awareness humans have.
This is a problem that dates back to 17th century and Descartes, who claimed for instance horses and dogs were mere automatons, and therefore couldn't feel pain.
This of course completely in line with the Christian doctrine that animals don't have souls.
But to me it seems self awareness like emotions don't have to start at human level, it can start at a simpler level, that then can be developed further.
PS:
It's true animals don't have souls, in the sense of something magical provided by a god, because nobody has. Souls are not necessary to explain self awareness or consciousness or emotions.
How do you operationally define consciousness?
To understand what "I think therefore I am" means, is a very high level of consciousness.
At lower levels things get more complicated to explain.
Good question.
Obviously the Turing test doesn't cut it, which I suspected already back then. And I'm sure when we finally have a self aware conscious AI, it will be debated violently.
We may think we have it before it's actually real, some claim they believe some of the current systems display traits of consciousness already. I don't believe that it's even close yet though.
As wrong as Descartes was about animals, he still nailed it with "I think therefore I am" (cogito, ergo sum) https://www.britannica.com/topic/cogito-ergo-sum.
Unfortunately that's about as far as we can get, before all sorts of problems arise regarding actual evidence. So philosophically in principle it is only the AI itself that can know for sure if it is truly conscious.
All I can say is that with the level of intelligence current leading AI have, they make silly mistakes that seems obvious if it was really conscious.
For instance as strong as they seem analyzing logic problems, they fail to realize that 1+1=2 <=> 2=1+1.
Such things will of course be ironed out, and maybe this on is already. But it shows the current model, isn't good enough for the basic comprehension I would think would follow from consciousness.
Luckily there are people that know much more about this, and it will be interesting to hear what they have to say, when the time arrives. 😀
The Turing test is misunderstood a lot. Here's Wikipedia on the Turing test:
One should bear in mind that scientific methodology was not very formalized at the time. Today, it is self-evident to any educated person that the "judges" would have to be blinded, which is the whole point of the text chat setup.
What has been called "Turing test" over the years is simultaneously easier and harder. Easier, because these tests usually involved only a chat without any predetermined task that requires thinking. It was possible to pass without having to think. But also harder, because thinking alone is not sufficient. One has to convince an interviewer that one is part of the in-group. It is the ultimate social game; indeed, often a party game (haha, I made a pun). Turing himself, of course, eventually lost such a game.
This connects consciousness to reasoning ability in some unclear way. The example seems unfortunate, since humans need training to understand it. Most people in developed countries would agree that the equivalence is formally correct, but very few would be able to prove it. Most wouldn't even know how to spell Peano Axiom; nor would they even try (Oh, luckier bridge and rail!)
I know about the Turing test, it's what we were taught about and debated in philosophy class at University of Copenhagen, when I made my prediction that strong AI would probably be possible about year 2035.
Here equivalent actually means indistinguishable from a human.
But as a test of consciousness that is not a fair test, because obviously a consciousness can be different from a human, and our understanding of how a simulation can fake something without it being real is also a factor.
But the original question remains, how do we decide it's not conscious if it responds as if it is?
Maybe it's unclear because you haven't pondered the connection? Our consciousness is a very big part of our reasoning, consciousness is definitely guiding our reasoning. And our consciousness improve the level of reasoning we are capable of.
I don't see why the example requiring training for humans to understand is unfortunate. A leading AI has way more training than would ever be possible for any human, still they don't grasp basic concepts, while their knowledge is way bigger than for any human.
It's hard to explain, but intuitively it seems to me the missing factor is consciousness. It has learned tons of information by heart, but it doesn't really understand any of it, because it isn't conscious.
Being conscious is not just to know what the words mean, but to understand what they mean.
I think therefore I am.
Humans aren't innately good at math. I wouldn't have been able to prove the statement without looking things up. I certainly would not be able to come up with the Peano Axioms, or anything comparable, on my own. Most people, even educated people, probably wouldn't understand what there is to prove. Actually, I'm not sure if I do.
It's not clear why such deficiencies among humans do not argue against human consciousness.
That's dubious. LLMs are trained on more text than a human ever sees, but humans are trained on data from several senses. I guess it's not entirely clear how much data that is, but it's a lot and very high quality. Humans are trained on that sense data and not on text. Humans read text and may learn from it.
What might an operational definition look like?
Just because you can't make a mathematical proof doesn't mean you don't understand the very simple truth of the statement.
I think if I could describe that, I might actually have solved the problem of strong AI.
You are asking unreasonable questions.
If I can't prove it, I don't know how I can claim to understand it.
It's axiomatic that equality is symmetric. It's also axiomatic that 1+1=2. There is not a whole lot to understand. I have memorized that. Actually, having now thought about this for a bit, I think I can prove it.
What makes the difference between a human learning these things and an AI being trained for them?
Then how will you know the difference between strong AI and not-strong AI?
I've already stated that that is a problem:
From a previous answer to you:
Because I don't think we have a sure methodology.
I think therefore I am, is only good for the conscious mind itself.
I can't prove that other people are conscious, although I'm 100% confident they are.
In exactly the same way we can't prove when we have a conscious AI.
But we may be able to prove that it is NOT conscious, which I think is clearly the case with current level AI. Although you don't accept the example I provided, I believe it is clear evidence of lack of a consciousness behind the high level of intelligence it clearly has.
I don't think there's an agreed definition.
Strong AI or AGI, or whatever you will, is usually talked about in terms of intellectual ability. It's not quite clear why this would require consciousness. Some tasks are aided by or maybe even necessitate self-awareness; for example, chatbots. But it seems to me that you could leave out such tasks and still have something quite impressive.
Then, of course, there is no agreed definition of consciousness. Many will argue that the self-awareness of chatbots is not consciousness.
I would say most people take strong AI and similar to mean an artificial person, for which they take consciousness as a necessary ingredient. Of course, it is impossible to engineer an artificial person. It is like creating a technology to turn a peasant into a king. It is a category error. A less kind take could be that stochastic parrots string words together based on superficial patterns without any understanding.
Indeed, I do not see the relation between consciousness and reasoning in this example.
Self-awareness means the ability to distinguish self from other, which implies computing from sensory data what is oneself and what is not. That could be said to be a form of reasoning. But I do not see such a relation for the example.
By that standard, are all humans conscious?
FWIW, I asked GPT-4o mini via DDG.
Screenshot
I don't know if that means it understands. It's how I would have done it (yesterday, after looking up Peano Axioms in Wikipedia), and I don't know if I understand it.
You do it wrong, you provided the "answer" to the logic proposition, and got a parroted the proof for it. Completely different situation.
The AI must be able to figure this out in responses that require this very basic understanding. I don't recall the exact example, but here is a similar example, where the AI fails to simply count the number of R's in strawberry, claiming there are only 2, and refusing to accept there is 3, then when explained there is 1 in straw and 2 in berry, it made some very puzzling argument, that counting the R in Straw is some sort of clever trick.
This is fixed now, and had to do with tokenizing info incorrectly. So you can't "prove" this wrong by showing an example of a current AI that doesn't make the mistake.
Unfortunately I can't find a link to the original story, because I'm flooded with later results. But you can easily find the 2 R's in strawberry problem.
Yes, but if you instruct a parrot or LLM to say yes when asked if it is separate from it's surroundings, it doesn't mean it is just because it says so.
So need to figure out if it actually understands what it means. Self awareness on the human level requires a high level of logical thought and abstract understanding. My example shows this level of understanding clearly isn't there.
As I wrote earlier, we really can't prove consciousness, the way to go around it is to figure out some of the mental abilities required for it, if those can be shown not to be present, we can conclude it's probably not there.
When we have Strong AI, it may take a decade to be widely acknowledged. And this will stem from failure to disprove it, rather than actually proof.
You never asked how I define intelligence, self awareness or consciousness, you asked how I operationally define it, that a very different question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_definition
I was a bit confused by that question, because consciousness is not a construct, the brain is, of which consciousness is an emerging property.
Also:
Seem to me to be able to define that for consciousness, would essentially mean to posses the knowledge necessary to replicate it.
Nobody on planet earth has that knowledge yet AFAIK.
Well, that's the same situation I was in and just what I did. For that matter, Peano was also in that situation.
Not quite. It's a fundamental part of tokenization. The LLM does not "see" the individual letters. By, for example, adding spaces between the letters one could force a different tokenization and a correct count (I tried back then). It's interesting that the LLM counted 2 "r"s, as that is phonetically correct. One wonders how it picks up on these things. It's not really clear why it should be able to count at all.
It's possible to make an LLM work on individual letters, but that is computationally inefficient. A few months ago, researchers at Meta proposed a possible solution called the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT). We'll see if anything comes of it.
In any case, I do not see the relation to consciousness. Certainly there are enough people who are not able to spell or count and one would not say that they lack consciousness, I assume.
That's true. We need to observe the LLM in its natural habit. What an LLM typically does, is continue a text. (It could also be used to work backwards or fill in the middle, but never mind.) A base model is no good as a chatbot. It has to be instruct-tuned. In operation, the tuned model is given a chat log containing a system prompt, text from the user, and text that it has previously generated. It will then add a reply and terminate the output. This text, the chat log, could be said to be the sum of its "sensory perceptions" as well as its "short-term memory". Within this, it is able to distinguish its own replies, that of the user, and possibly other texts.
Can you lay out what abilities are connected to consciousness? What tasks are diagnostic of consciousness? Could we use an IQ test and diagnose people as having or not consciousness?
The brain is a physical object. Consciousness is both an emergent property and a construct; like, say, temperature or IQ.
You are saying that there are different levels of consciousness. So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable. I assume a consciousness test would be similar to IQ test in that it would contain selected "puzzles".
We have to figure out how consciousness is different from IQ. What puzzles are diagnostic of consciousness and not of academic ability?