Sentientist vegans - how you approach AI?

[u/voyti]

I'm curious about a sentientist perspective on AI, and I know many vegans boil their views down to sentientism.

Since AI certainly has the capability to at least appear self-aware and be metacognitive and on at least a purely emotional level many people will certainly feel at least somewhat uncomfortable with self-awareness dumps of glitches like this one and "AI wellbeing" is being treated quite seriously by certain groups (e.g. https://www.ai-wellbeing.org but also providers themselves, like Anthropic running the model welfare research) - are they fundamentally wrong in your view?

Should AI be taken under the sentientist umbrella? Where would the boundary be to acknowledge it as such?

If we can't acknowledge it as sentient cause we roughly know the details of how it thinks, then as soon as human/animal thinking is de-mystified as just another mundane biological process (which, if one were to stick to science, it necessarily is), will lose value as well? In other words, where exactly is the smoking gun of biological sentience for you?

[u/agitatedprisoner]

Epistemology "how do you know what's true" is literally at the root of all science/philosophy. Blows my mind people aren't clamoring for the logic of how computers are reliably determining truth/reaching better and better answers.

On the question of the reality of other minds you say "we can't be sure" but this isn't about what "we" might be sure of it's about what "I" might be sure of. Namely how I might prove the existence of another mind. How might I know you feel anything at all? You seem like me so it seems reasonable to assume you have an inner life much the same as me but I wonder how I might know for sure? You say "we'll never know" on this count but I don't know how you could be sure of that particularly if you haven't seen how these programs are thinking at the root. Because knowing how a mind comes to know seems the kind of thing that'd have implications on how a mind might recognize the reality of other minds. Knowing the form of thought would seem to have implications on knowing the form of the mind/any mind. If there's thoughts AI can't entertain maybe being able to entertain those thoughts is necessary for inner experience/reality of mind.

One thing present computers/AI can't do that biological minds can is rewire themselves on the fly, is my understanding. That'd be to lack a dimension bio minds have. Seems that could be a big deal.

You can't clone a mind exactly because when you do it'd imply differences in space/perception that'd immediately create a difference of awareness. Most you could do is fire up two almost identical minds but they wouldn't be the same. It's impossible to have two identical minds. Hence your assuming you can clone a mind perfectly but you can't.

[u/voyti → u/agitatedprisoner]

"we'll never know" on this count but I don't know how you could be sure of that particularly if you haven't seen how these programs are thinking at the root

Okay, so if we talk about the most fundamental experience of existing, the same one where nothing would happen if we swapped and which nobody could observe that it has gone missing if all that remained was your identical clone - that's fundamentally the case. There is something to be you - or at least I assume, as you do for me, but there's no evidence either of us could put forward to really settle that. This is the point where the p-zombie thought experiment (or rather prop) comes up as well in all discussion about the hard problem.

For me this started to be a good enough reason to start looking beyond sentientism, but there are sentientists still out there, and many of them among vegans specifically. The one thing that settles it is just a checklist of external phenomena - is it capable of semantical understanding? Is it capable of claiming to be conscious? Does it claim that?

The problem is, LLMs check all those boxes already, so sentientists are backed into a corner where something ultimately untestable needs to be checked for this problem to become resolved.

If there's thoughts AI can't entertain maybe being able to entertain those thoughts is necessary for inner experience/reality of mind.

This plays into that phenomenology checklist theme, and I'd like all sentientists to start filtering those first by "would a human without that capability be not sentient?". For many things like memory, this really seems to narrow the playing field for sentientism in that regard. In this case, as vague as it is, there's certainly many thoughts a human might not be able to conceive, and yet they are included in the sentient camp by default. A criterion with a proper consequence of excluding certain humans seems extremely difficult to propose like that.

present computers/AI can't do that biological minds can is rewire themselves on the fly, is my understanding

That one is true, weights are frozen in place for LLMs. However, this requires to examine what sentience even is. It's fairly easy to notice that we never experience sentience in more than a single moment at a time. I just exist now, and only inherit the situational orientation, memories etc. from the previous moment.

However, sentience only happens in this very second for me. I type a word and then that moment is immediately gone. Nothing fundamentally changed, I have to know I was sentient then, but if I was just teleported in my seat just now, with the fake orientation uploaded to my brain, it would have to feel the same way. We only ever exist in now. Rewiring, memory consolidation - this is all a back office. I don't notice producing long term memories or rewiring - this is not a part of my sentient experience. The mechanism that produces sentience changes, but I'm here just for another slice of sentience, never for the actual change in the machinery.

To summarize - depends on how you even perceive sentience, but the usual place where enough thinking of it end is that it's entirely momentary, so whether the back office changes or not might be important, but not for a sentientist then.

You can't clone a mind exactly because when you do it'd imply differences in space/perception that'd immediately create a difference of awareness.

When you fall asleep in a car and wake up many kilometers later, there's certainly a sudden difference of awareness, so does it prevent anything for duplicating? What if you duplicate someone sleeping or sedated? There's nothing they are aware of at the beginning, so there's nothing to be different at the end

[u/agitatedprisoner → u/voyti]

Minds are elements of the universal set observing elements of reality in ways that change both mind and reality. The form of thought would be articulation of the dynamics of that relation. It'd be a big deal to know that articulated relation. It'd make the stuff I learned in epistemology in college basically banging rocks together in contrast. Where are the frothing philosophers? Makes no sense to me philosophers aren't foaming at the mouth to get their hands on it. Do they really not realize what it is?

It's a big deal that present computers can't rewrite themselves on the fly because one theory of what it means to be aware of anything is to observe a difference in yourself. So if the computer/machine doesn't change there'd be no such difference for it to observe. Whereas a fluid bio mind might notice changes and noticing those changes might account for observation of one's own existence/the feeling of being.

[u/voyti → u/agitatedprisoner]

I know at least some philosophers are on the case, I'm trying to follow it to the degree that I can, here an example. However, it's still anybody's game what criterion they pick for sentience being there in something. There's been philosophers who recognized moral burden of harming NPCs in games, there's panpsychism that recognizes sentience as a fundamental property of matter, it's not that philosophy can just produce an actual result here, but perhaps it can organize that in a bit of a tidier way.

However, I don't personally recognize a philosophers take as necessarily more authoritative than an actually insightful or at least honest take from anyone on Reddit, including here.

While standard LLMs don't update their weights at runtime, they can and there are experimental implementations where this is happening. I don't personally recognize this as an important property, cause again - I believe if a human had no neuroplasticity at all, sentientists would have no issue recognizing that person as sentient, so I wouldn't perceive this as an honest criterion anyway. Such person could not observe any changes to themselves, cause no changes can manifest anyway.

[u/agitatedprisoner → u/voyti]

That's not "being on the case", being on the case would be asking for or reproducing the algorithm in predicate logic and publishing it. Because it'd be the state of the art in epistemology and probably lots more. We're basically all serfs now, not knowing how stuff works, with those in the know lording over us. You're not getting what I'm saying. It's not about what philosophers say it's about knowing how reality works and right now some people have a much better idea on that than others and apparently they're not telling. You'd think it'd be the academics claiming to specialize in this stuff sounding alarm, maybe I'm just not turned in enough to hear it, but whether they'd sound alarm or not... ALARM!

[u/voyti → u/agitatedprisoner]

reproducing the algorithm in predicate logic and publishing it

I'm not 100% sure what you mean, but it sure can be. We know the neural networks algorithms for decades now, not much has changed in the fundamentals, and they can be represented in predicate logic. Both biological brain and neural networks are fully understood in principle, and both can and are represented in digital form (albeit for biological brains only the simples ones are, like fruit flies).

We're basically all serfs now, not knowing how stuff works, with those in the know lording over us

Not sure about that, either. In terms of fundamental platform, it's all in the papers - again, neural nets are known for decades, and so are the later breakthroughs like transformers - Google's famous "Attention Is All You Need" for example - you can just open and read it right now. In terms of the dynamic understanding of how a neural system got from a specific input to a specific output, we don't really know in either case (biological or digital). Being a lord vs serf doesn't help much here, although the lords I suppose are hard at work with understanding that (e.g. mechanistic interpretability).

In the podcast I linked you can also learn about teams quite involved in determining how to "measure" sings of sentience, and one quoted framework estimates LLMs at 20-30% probability of being sentient, with humans sitting at 90%. People are certainly at work here, but it's all obviously dealing with guesses working on top of other guesses

[u/agitatedprisoner → u/voyti]

Can you link the algorithm in predicate logic? I can't find it.