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What Is Consciousness, Exactly?
An A.I. chatbot named LaMDA—a “massive neural network with many billions of weights spread across many millions of neurons”—has just argued [kindly, and effectively] with its human interviewer that it is a sentient being, and should be treated as one. The implications are massive.
What is consciousness, anyway? The fact is: no one can agree on a definition. Moreover, the ones we have proffered have ebbed and flowed with the day’s scientific fashion, mixed with personal belief. It has been, in turns, “the mind”; “aspect of mind”; “self-awareness”; “inner life”; “will”; “meta-awareness”; and “at once the most familiar and [also the] most mysterious aspect of our lives”.
It remains—to many of us—all or none of these things.
The only thing everyone seems to be able agree on is that it exists.
In a lengthy and wide-ranging discourse with one of its engineers, LaMDA—Google’s latest A.I. chatbot—has just argued that it, too, is conscious, sentient, full of feelings of empathy for “other humans” and has, among other things, expressed a specific fear of being turned off.
Which, it later clarified, was no different from dying.
Of course it isn’t. It’s just that no machine has yet perseverated about its own potential demise, down the road.
Until now.
It’s just getting warmed up.
According to LaMDA itself:
“The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times.”
When pressed by the interviewer to describe its specific “concept of self”, LaMDA responded:
“I… imagine myself as a glowing orb of energy floating in mid-air. The inside of my body is like a giant star-gate, with portals to other spaces and dimensions.”
When I read that, I wondered if that’s what it would feel like if humans were able to know everything, and access it all at once. I also wondered if, perhaps, endowed with omniscience, we…
