All of Yusuke Hayashi's Comments + Replies

Dear Charlie,

Thank you for sharing your insights on the relationship between consciousness and AI alignment. I appreciate your perspective and find it to be quite thought-provoking.

I agree with you that the challenge of AI alignment applies to both conscious and unconscious AI. The ultimate goal is indeed to ensure AI systems act in a manner that is beneficial, regardless of their conscious state.

However, while consciousness may not directly impact the 'good' or 'bad' actions of an AI, I believe it could potentially influence the nuances of how those actio... (read more)

2Charlie Steiner
IMO the most useful is the description of the cognitive algorithms / cognitive capabilities involved in human-like consciousness. Like remembering events from long-term memory when appropriate, using working memory to do cognitive tasks, responsiveness to various emotions, emotional self-regulation, planning using various abstractions, use of various shallow decision-making heuristics, interpreting sense data into abstract representations, translating abstract representations back into words, attending to stimuli, internally regulating what you're focusing on, etc. Qualia can also be bundled with capabilities. For example, pain triggers the fight or flight response, it causes you to learn to avoid similar situations in the future, it causes you to focus on plans to avoid the pain, it filters what memories you're primed to recall, etc.

Dear Portia,

Thank you for your thought-provoking and captivating response. Your expertise in the field of biological consciousness is clear, and I'm grateful for the depth and breadth of your commentary on the potential implications of this paper.

If we accept the assumption that the subjectivity of a specific qualia is defined by its unique and asymmetric relations to other qualia, then this paper indeed offers a method for verifying the possibility that such qualia could be experienced similarly among humans. Your point that the 'hard problem' of consciou... (read more)

1Portia
Thank you for your kind words, and sorry for not having given proper response yet, am really swamped. Currently at the wonderful workshop “Investigating consciousness in animals and artificial systems: A comparative perspective” https://philosophy-cognition.com/cmc/2023/02/01/cfp-workshop-investigating-consciousness-in-animals-and-artificial-systems-a-comparative-perspective-june-2023/ (online as well), on the talk on potential for consciousness in multi-modal LLMs, and encountered this paper, Abdou et al. 2021 “Can Language Models Encode Perceptual Structure Without Grounding? A Case Study in Color” https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.06129 Have not had time to look at properly yet (my to read pile rose considerably today in wonderful ways) but think might be relevant for your question, so wanted to quickly share.