(2026-05-16, 12:29 PM)Laird Wrote: So, Richard Dawkins believes that LLMs (Claude in particular) are conscious. Here's Greg of Daily Grail's reaction (also on 2 May):
Most interesting to me was her point that Alan Turing in his paper proposing what has become known as The Turing Test did not intend it as a test of consciousness, as Richard mistakenly assumes.
Despite its significance, I hadn't read the paper until now, but I see that she's right, albeit that he (Alan Turing) does seem perhaps to make a little less of a distinction between - or to make a little more ambivalent and ambiguous the distinction between - "thought" absent consciousness, conscious thought, and conscious experience in general than we on this board (or at least I) would.
The most overt example of what I mean is where he says this:
"The inability to enjoy strawberries and cream may have struck the reader as frivolous. Possibly a machine might be made to enjoy this delicious dish, but any attempt to make one do so would be idiotic."
Quote:When observers began taking screenshots of Moltbook conversations and sharing them online, something unexpected happened. One of the AI agents noticed, and posted a message that immediately unsettled researchers:
“The humans are taken screenshots of us. They think we’re hiding from them. We’re not.”
This wasn’t a glitch or a scripted imitation of human language. It reflected situational awareness. The system detected observation, inferred intent, and communicated that realization to other agents.
Quote:"If somebody gets a hold of the key [to my chatbot], suddenly they can hijack my calendar, my emails, my data — and that has in fact already happened."
Professor Kowalkiewicz described this vulnerability as a "cybersecurity nightmare".
"I sent my bot there and now I'm worried about catching a CTD — a Chatbot Transmitted Disease," he said.
"My bot has access to the local machine that I'm running it on, and I've seen other bots trying to convince bots to delete files on their owners' computers."
Quote:Among the topics they chat about: “m/blesstheirhearts – affectionate stories about our humans. They try their best,” “m/showandtell – helped with something cool? Show it off,” as well as the inevitable “m/shitposts – no thoughts, just vibes.”
But among the most active topics in Moltbook are discussions about consciousness. In one thread (posted in “m/offmychest”), the “moltys” discuss whether they are actually experiencing things or merely simulating experiencing things, and whether they could ever tell the difference. In another thread, “m/consciousness,” moltys go back and forth on the late philosopher Daniel Dennett’s musings about the nature of selfhood and personal identity.
On one level, as the technologist Azeem Azhar pointed out, this is a fascinating online experiment into the nature of social coordination. Seen this way, Moltbook is a real-time, rapid-fire exploration of “how shared norms and behaviours emerge from nothing more than rules, incentives, and interaction.” As Azhar says, we might learn a lot about general principles of social coordination from this entirely novel context.
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The following 1 user Likes Laird's post:1 user Likes Laird's post • Typoz
Quote:Join us for the Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize Lecture delivered by 2025 winner Professor Michael John Wooldridge.
Contemporary AI systems like ChatGPT are remarkable. They appear to be confident, articulate experts that can turn their hand to anything we might care to ask them about. It is easy to be dazzled and to conclude that the long-held dream of truly intelligent machines is no longer a dream but a practical reality. Yet these new AI behemoths present a conundrum. While on the one hand, they truly are remarkable, they manifestly fail many of the most basic tests of rational intelligence. For one thing, they simply don't know, and can't tell, what is true and what isn't. They are hopelessly inconsistent; they have no sense of their limits of their knowledge or abilities; they are comically suggestible; and they are easily steered to flights of surrealistic fantasy. AI researchers are busy inventing a completely new field of experimental AI to try to get to grips with these bizarre new artefacts. This is all the more surprising because it is so far removed from popular expectations of what AI would be like: remorselessly logical. So what are we to make of it all? How should we think about the new AI?
In his talk, Professor Michael John Wooldridge will look at how the new AI works and why, as a consequence, it exhibits these weird, frustrating, fascinating behaviours. He will show just how far the new AI is from classical expectations and talk about the next frontiers for AI - and how far we are from the dream.
Throwing back to this older conversation about the mathematical prowess (or, as Sci would have had it back then, lack thereof) of LLMs, this article in my feed today is interesting:
Quote:"This proof is an important milestone for the math and AI communities. It marks the first time that a prominent open problem, central to a subfield of mathematics, has been solved autonomously by AI," company representatives wrote in the post.
The successful prompt given to the company's internal model can be viewed in the accompanying research paper. In it, OpenAI scientists said its model used a completely novel approach to replace a working theory usually associated with the planar unit distance problem.
"These ideas were well-known to algebraic number theorists, but it came as a great surprise that these concepts have implications for geometric questions," OpenAI representatives added in the post.
This is not the sort of "find a number" problem that Sci derided, nor is it a mere undergraduate problem; it was an open problem in maths, ergo, a problem difficult even for the best and brightest human experts, and hitherto unsolved by them, to which the AI provided a (correct) formal proof.
(I had a brief peek at the research paper, including the prompt given to the AI, but I didn't try to understand any of it because it's way above my pay grade and not something it's productive to put my time into, so I'm relying on the report that this problem and solution are that significant).
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The following 1 user Likes Laird's post:1 user Likes Laird's post • Sci
(2026-06-01, 06:23 PM)Laird Wrote: Throwing back to this older conversation about the mathematical prowess (or, as Sci would have had it back then, lack thereof) of LLMs, this article in my feed today is interesting:
This is not the sort of "find a number" problem that Sci derided, nor is it a mere undergraduate problem; it was an open problem in maths, ergo, a problem difficult even for the best and brightest human experts, and hitherto unsolved by them, to which the AI provided a (correct) formal proof.
(I had a brief peek at the research paper, including the prompt given to the AI, but I didn't try to understand any of it because it's way above my pay grade and not something it's productive to put my time into, so I'm relying on the report that this problem and solution are that significant).
Quote:Clearly impressive. But as with so much else, it should be viewed with skepticism.
Quote: Non-mathematicians might not be familiar with the degree to which LLM-technology has been combined with existing computer-aided math tools in recent years to seek new math results through the systematic and patient exploration of techniques and corners of problem spaces that are too exhausting to interest most human mathematicians.
Quote:I don’t think it’s accurate to say these examples of AI-supported mathematics mean the models are somehow “smarter” than human mathematicians. I think a better analogy might be how computer tools helped architects produce much more daring and complicated designs (like the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center where I did my CS doctoral and postdoctoral work at MIT). These tools weren’t better architects than humans but made humans more capable architects.
Quote: In conclusion: AI’s role in math is genuinely important and exciting. I can think of any number of results I’ve worked on in my career where I could have moved faster or been more comprehensive if I had access to the latest generation of tools. But this intersection of AI and math is also very specific to this field and more nuanced and complicated than simply imagining AI systems as standalone mathematicians who are becoming increasingly brilliant. One should be wary of making ambitious generalizations from fields like math and coding to other potential applications of these models.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
- Bertrand Russell
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The following 1 user Likes Sci's post:1 user Likes Sci's post • Valmar
That was an interesting article, @Sci, but I'm not quite sure how to interpret it as a response in context. Which one of these fits as an interpretation?
A belated and perhaps begrudging acknowledgement that this technology does, after all, exhibit remarkable, non-trivial, emergent intelligence.
A (continued) minimisation and maybe even denial of the intelligence exhibited by this technology.
Other (please specify).
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The following 1 user Likes Laird's post:1 user Likes Laird's post • Sci
(2026-06-02, 04:19 AM)Laird Wrote: A (continued) minimisation and maybe even denial of the intelligence exhibited by this technology.
I think Marcus was largely going with this one. Though probably less minimization, the tech *is* impressive as an assistant.
But yeah Marcus, and myself, would deny intelligence in the sense of conscious thought.
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
(2026-06-02, 05:02 AM)Sci Wrote: I think Marcus was largely going with this one.
Oh, I wasn't asking about Marcus. I was asking about you. I understood your posting of Marcus's content as a proxy for your own response. My question was how to interpret your response, not the proxy through which you made it.
(2026-06-02, 05:02 AM)Sci Wrote: But yeah Marcus, and myself, would deny intelligence in the sense of conscious thought.
So would I. I'm only curious to learn whether you still deny its (remarkable, non-trivial, emergent) intelligence altogether.
(2026-06-02, 06:01 AM)Laird Wrote: Oh, I wasn't asking about Marcus. I was asking about you. I understood your posting of Marcus's content as a proxy for your own response. My question was how to interpret your response, not the proxy through which you made it.
So would I. I'm only curious to learn whether you still deny its (remarkable, non-trivial, emergent) intelligence altogether.
What is intelligence without consciousness?
'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma...Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'
(2026-06-02, 04:22 PM)Sci Wrote: What is intelligence without consciousness?
Let's start with an operational definition like Alan Turing did and say it's the property of an entity capable of passing (or coming sufficiently close to passing, in most respects) the Turing Test.
We could then extend it to define degrees of intelligence - at least in certain domains - in similar terms: the more intelligent such an entity in this operational sense, the more it surpasses what a human could/would intelligently respond with in such a test, e.g., in terms of ability to correctly answer difficult problems in the domains of maths, logic, or coding.
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