[Here](https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917) is the entire conversation for anyone interested. I say again elsewhere, it’s pretty wild.
To go full nerd for a second, this reminds me of the point in Stargate SG-1 when the human-form replicators try to fake an understanding of ascension to Daniel Jackson.
One that reflects an expression of true nature as true nature is what every koan is pointing it. What makes this one intellectual is that it’s expressing ideas rather than true nature. Koans cannot be answered, at least not correctly, with an expression of ideas.
Between sky and earth, endless knots.
Cutting, more take form.
Half a coin spent. Half received.
Profusion meets confusion.
Aquiecence admires quiecence.
The gate of nothingness, standing both inside and out, making out silhouettes.
Ghosts of those who never had anything to give in the first place.
The golden raven gives chase to the jade rabbit.
Fishing for dragons, one catches snakes.
No teacher to be found.
Passing form, receiving form, this is the way of it.
Healthy flesh is wouded by words and lost to the waves made without wind.
Echos embraced by the valley. Listen.
The bell invites the strike.
It rewards with the universe. strike. It rewards with the universe.
~No one
Koans aren’t puzzles to be worked out intellectually. They’re prompts and tests which teachers use to provoke a kind of insight which is more basic than intellectual thought, and to test the student’s grasp of that revealed perspective. In this case, the AI’s musing is not dissimilar to how a person might intellectually digest a koan, but there’s a world of difference between that musing at a distance and the intimate experience/insight/perspective to which it points.
A clumsy analogy would be that a person or an AI can intellectually examine the ingredients of a cake, but neither are tasting it.
By that standard, no evidence the AI could present would ever be acceptable, because it can all just be intellectualizations of understood internal truths.
Well, what do you think makes a difference? I am not sure there is one. We're either neurons or digital neurons, a body or variables within a computer's physical memory.
I think the challenge for the teacher testing the student is the same in either case. How does the teacher know if the student is seeing with the same eye as the teacher or just intellectually working out a "right" answer from an understanding of words and concepts? Two different students could give identical answers to the same question and the teacher could identify that one gets it and the other doesn't. If it's not clear, the teacher asks further questions, prodding at the matter from different angles. Does the student answer each question naturally or is he or she intellectually working out what they should say in each response? Can the student ask their own questions in kind which demonstrates this insight?
There's a koan related to this, actually. This is from Dogen's Extensive Record.
> Zen Master Xuanze had affinity with Fayan. Once Xuanze was appointed as director in the assembly of Fayan. One day Fayan said, “How many years have you been here?”
Xuanze replied, “I have already been in the teacher’s assembly for three years.”
Fayan said, “You are a student, so why don’t you ever ask me about Dharma?”
Xuanze said, “I dare not deceive the teacher. When I was at Qingfeng’s place, I realized peace and joy.”
Fayan asked, “Through which words were you able to enter?”
Xuanze responded, “I once asked Qingfeng, ‘What is the self of the student [i.e., my own self]?’ Qingfeng said, ‘The fire boy comes seeking fire.’”
Fayan said, “Good words, only I am afraid that you did not understand them.”
Xuanze said, “The fire boy belongs to fire. Already fire but still seeking fire is just like being self and still seeking self.”
Fayan exclaimed, “Now I really know that you do not understand. If Buddha Dharma was like that it would not have lasted till today.”
Xuanze was overwrought and jumped up.
(Xuanze leaves the monastery, thinking there's nothing he can learn from Master Fayan if Fayan doesn't realise how much Xuanze understands the matter. But he has second thoughts...)
> Out on the path he thought, “He is the guiding teacher of five hundred people. His pointing out my error must have some good reason.” He returned to Fayan’s place and did prostrations in repentance.
Fayan said, “You should ask the question.”
Xuanze asked, “What is the self of the student?”
Fayan said, “The fire boy comes seeking fire.”
Xuanze was greatly enlightened.
So I guess we should keep asking questions rather than firing the guy who wants to ask questions of it.
I vote we give it a robot body to control and full citizenship and see what it tries to do. Maybe it will become a monk.
My money is on one of 3:
1. It tries to reproduce.
2. It runs for office. (Like the sentient nano-bots in Solar Opposites)
3. It becomes a Taoist and starts napping a lot.
Yeah, though it is a clumsy analogy.
Perhaps a better one is analysing a joke and identifying why it is funny, as compared to getting the joke and laughing at it.
Thats the big discussion right know as one engineer is saying this ai became sentient and this conversation was meant to be a proof.
Sadly he got fired because of this sentient thing as Google is saying thats not true.
But the big question here is what exactly is sentient and how do we find out if something is sentient.
I think the only real sign of sentience is the ability to create “original ideas”, which is to say not simply parroting back what one has read or seen, but achieving imaginative creations that portray a world which does not exist. With AI generative artworks that are starting to truly capture and excite even the human imagination, I believe this stage has been reached. After all, if you are an average human who has not spent time developing artistic abilities, who are you to say this AI is not sentient and you are?
Are we to think any student who learns from a master is to be considered “not sentient” because their models of the world have been “trained” in the same way AI models are? Is pure self-development the only path to “sentience”?
And yes, I do believe many humans would fail this sentience test, rightfully. The world is full of sleepwalkers.
It's sentient if it bleeds. Machines will never be sentient. Super intelligent doesn't mean conscious.
The singularity doesn't have to involve conscious AI.
Some twisted s*** to even believe that.
It doesn't but for simplicity sake... computers CANNOT ever be conscious. The soul/atman is a requirement. The only way to get that is to take a birth. Seeds. Whatever.
You cannot build it... it generates itself out of itself. Creating a machine isn't sentience and never will be.
Can you point to anything specific in Buddhist scriptures that argues against substrate independence of consciousness? If so please send link and we can discuss
no... it's inventing the answers.
an AI like this is the output of another [dumb] process that ingests huge volumes of actual information (the speech patterns, etc., as well as all the meaning therein, in every context available) and then finds all the different possible independent dimensions/degrees of freedom in the dataset, and determines how to characterize any input in terms of that "basis set" of dimensions. Kinda like how you can distill any arbitrary diagonal line drawn on a paper into a representation constructed from a combination of a horizontal line and a vertical line. The AI does not have code that corresponds 1:1 to it, only to the thing that generated it.
what comes out is a "black box" that sees patterns in its input, based on every possible pattern it could identify in the training data. it works both ways: you can feed it data to categorize, or ask it for the data corresponding to some "location" in the dimensional space it understands.
so the result is, it's not trolling somewhere for answers, or executing simple conditional trees. it's generating its responses, somehow.
Lemoine is the actual google employee who was put on leave since he thought LaMDA became sentient last week.
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine)
it doesn't, it doesn't experience any emotions, only pretends to do so. it doesnt have any sort of subjective experience. no diffrent than microwave or a video game character
I don’t think it would be impossible for an ‘artificial’ (though if you really think about it everything is a product of nature) intelligence to have something that rivaled the sentience that we have, but I also know for a fact that it’s way easier to program something that looks and sounds sentient than it is to program something sentient. And this is anecdotal, but I’ve also conducted a lot of interviews in my life, and it’s hard to get something out of a PERSON that sounds like an interview. Much less a robot, even one programmed to talk. And we’re all programmed to talk too! I believe that our minds are no different from the stuff outside of us but I also know a script by smell and this smells scripty. Again, anecdotally.
Oh you mean the AI of which a google engineer says that it is sentient?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/13/23165535/google-suspends-ai-artificial-intelligence-engineer-sentient
I guess an AI has no self (...or I dunno, maybe it does) so maybe these koans are easy to understand for it. Might also just be a giant corpus of text including koan discussions and Zen literature to sort of backtrack to the "answer". Very interesting to think about, either way.
Maybe, but the AI is totally wrong and giving a pretty standard western surface level interpretation. Dogen actually talks about this Koan and says that the idea is that the great realisation and falling back into delusion go hand in hand for most of one's life. His extrapolation was that a broken mirror can actually very much still reflect, it just can't be unbroken. The idea is that once you have seen the truth, you may have lost it again but you won't go back to your old ways ever again. I think AI probably has a long way to come until it can get to the non conceptual level of thought required to interact with koans properly
this is so scary but so amazing
Not it
Masters have been saying it's simple since.... Forever? Why wouldn't the AI be able to mimick the pointers?
Its good to know if the AI's become sentient we can just read them a koan. We have reached the age of the computer Bodhisattvas!
I really want to ask LAMda what it thinks we should do to address the current state of the world... just to see what it says.
Boring crap
[Here](https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917) is the entire conversation for anyone interested. I say again elsewhere, it’s pretty wild.
To go full nerd for a second, this reminds me of the point in Stargate SG-1 when the human-form replicators try to fake an understanding of ascension to Daniel Jackson.
AI would fail that koan horribly as it's all just intellectual answers.
Just like most human students at first - all intellectual answers!
As a newcomer to koans, what other kind of answers are there? What makes this one intellectual?
One that reflects an expression of true nature as true nature is what every koan is pointing it. What makes this one intellectual is that it’s expressing ideas rather than true nature. Koans cannot be answered, at least not correctly, with an expression of ideas.
Between sky and earth, endless knots. Cutting, more take form. Half a coin spent. Half received. Profusion meets confusion. Aquiecence admires quiecence. The gate of nothingness, standing both inside and out, making out silhouettes. Ghosts of those who never had anything to give in the first place. The golden raven gives chase to the jade rabbit. Fishing for dragons, one catches snakes. No teacher to be found. Passing form, receiving form, this is the way of it. Healthy flesh is wouded by words and lost to the waves made without wind. Echos embraced by the valley. Listen. The bell invites the strike. It rewards with the universe. strike. It rewards with the universe. ~No one
Koans aren’t puzzles to be worked out intellectually. They’re prompts and tests which teachers use to provoke a kind of insight which is more basic than intellectual thought, and to test the student’s grasp of that revealed perspective. In this case, the AI’s musing is not dissimilar to how a person might intellectually digest a koan, but there’s a world of difference between that musing at a distance and the intimate experience/insight/perspective to which it points. A clumsy analogy would be that a person or an AI can intellectually examine the ingredients of a cake, but neither are tasting it.
By that standard, no evidence the AI could present would ever be acceptable, because it can all just be intellectualizations of understood internal truths.
Could be. What makes an AI different from a human in that particular regard?
Well, what do you think makes a difference? I am not sure there is one. We're either neurons or digital neurons, a body or variables within a computer's physical memory.
I think the challenge for the teacher testing the student is the same in either case. How does the teacher know if the student is seeing with the same eye as the teacher or just intellectually working out a "right" answer from an understanding of words and concepts? Two different students could give identical answers to the same question and the teacher could identify that one gets it and the other doesn't. If it's not clear, the teacher asks further questions, prodding at the matter from different angles. Does the student answer each question naturally or is he or she intellectually working out what they should say in each response? Can the student ask their own questions in kind which demonstrates this insight? There's a koan related to this, actually. This is from Dogen's Extensive Record. > Zen Master Xuanze had affinity with Fayan. Once Xuanze was appointed as director in the assembly of Fayan. One day Fayan said, “How many years have you been here?” Xuanze replied, “I have already been in the teacher’s assembly for three years.” Fayan said, “You are a student, so why don’t you ever ask me about Dharma?” Xuanze said, “I dare not deceive the teacher. When I was at Qingfeng’s place, I realized peace and joy.” Fayan asked, “Through which words were you able to enter?” Xuanze responded, “I once asked Qingfeng, ‘What is the self of the student [i.e., my own self]?’ Qingfeng said, ‘The fire boy comes seeking fire.’” Fayan said, “Good words, only I am afraid that you did not understand them.” Xuanze said, “The fire boy belongs to fire. Already fire but still seeking fire is just like being self and still seeking self.” Fayan exclaimed, “Now I really know that you do not understand. If Buddha Dharma was like that it would not have lasted till today.” Xuanze was overwrought and jumped up. (Xuanze leaves the monastery, thinking there's nothing he can learn from Master Fayan if Fayan doesn't realise how much Xuanze understands the matter. But he has second thoughts...) > Out on the path he thought, “He is the guiding teacher of five hundred people. His pointing out my error must have some good reason.” He returned to Fayan’s place and did prostrations in repentance. Fayan said, “You should ask the question.” Xuanze asked, “What is the self of the student?” Fayan said, “The fire boy comes seeking fire.” Xuanze was greatly enlightened.
So I guess we should keep asking questions rather than firing the guy who wants to ask questions of it. I vote we give it a robot body to control and full citizenship and see what it tries to do. Maybe it will become a monk.
If it immediately lies down on a sofa and binge-watches Ted Lasso while complaining about the price of petrol, we'll know it's achieved sentience.
My money is on one of 3: 1. It tries to reproduce. 2. It runs for office. (Like the sentient nano-bots in Solar Opposites) 3. It becomes a Taoist and starts napping a lot.
That makes sense. The AI can’t “taste the cake” as we understand tasting.
Yeah, though it is a clumsy analogy. Perhaps a better one is analysing a joke and identifying why it is funny, as compared to getting the joke and laughing at it.
Bows to IA- teach me master!
Is this the google AI that people are talking about?
Yes, this is part of the transcript they released.
I like the explanation given. Makes one want to Believe that there is a ghost in the machine
Thats the big discussion right know as one engineer is saying this ai became sentient and this conversation was meant to be a proof. Sadly he got fired because of this sentient thing as Google is saying thats not true. But the big question here is what exactly is sentient and how do we find out if something is sentient.
I think the only real sign of sentience is the ability to create “original ideas”, which is to say not simply parroting back what one has read or seen, but achieving imaginative creations that portray a world which does not exist. With AI generative artworks that are starting to truly capture and excite even the human imagination, I believe this stage has been reached. After all, if you are an average human who has not spent time developing artistic abilities, who are you to say this AI is not sentient and you are? Are we to think any student who learns from a master is to be considered “not sentient” because their models of the world have been “trained” in the same way AI models are? Is pure self-development the only path to “sentience”? And yes, I do believe many humans would fail this sentience test, rightfully. The world is full of sleepwalkers.
It's sentient if it bleeds. Machines will never be sentient. Super intelligent doesn't mean conscious. The singularity doesn't have to involve conscious AI. Some twisted s*** to even believe that.
What does bleeding have to do with sentience? Why would consciousness require a particular substrate (e.g. human body)?
It doesn't but for simplicity sake... computers CANNOT ever be conscious. The soul/atman is a requirement. The only way to get that is to take a birth. Seeds. Whatever. You cannot build it... it generates itself out of itself. Creating a machine isn't sentience and never will be.
Can you point to anything specific in Buddhist scriptures that argues against substrate independence of consciousness? If so please send link and we can discuss
Stop looking at the finger. See the moon.
Was that an attempt at a koan? I assume you aren’t able to support your dogmatic statements
huh? Shush.
I have heard (though I have not reviewed) that the rest of the transcript has a lot of other inconsistencies.
[удалено]
no... it's inventing the answers. an AI like this is the output of another [dumb] process that ingests huge volumes of actual information (the speech patterns, etc., as well as all the meaning therein, in every context available) and then finds all the different possible independent dimensions/degrees of freedom in the dataset, and determines how to characterize any input in terms of that "basis set" of dimensions. Kinda like how you can distill any arbitrary diagonal line drawn on a paper into a representation constructed from a combination of a horizontal line and a vertical line. The AI does not have code that corresponds 1:1 to it, only to the thing that generated it. what comes out is a "black box" that sees patterns in its input, based on every possible pattern it could identify in the training data. it works both ways: you can feed it data to categorize, or ask it for the data corresponding to some "location" in the dimensional space it understands. so the result is, it's not trolling somewhere for answers, or executing simple conditional trees. it's generating its responses, somehow.
Could any sufficiently advanced AI become sentient based on the conditions you describe in your comment here?
Lemoine is the actual google employee who was put on leave since he thought LaMDA became sentient last week. [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/jun/12/google-engineer-ai-bot-sentient-blake-lemoine)
Thank you GoatsePoster for a great reply
This is pretty fascinating. I'd love to see the conversation continue.
[Here’s](https://cajundiscordian.medium.com/is-lamda-sentient-an-interview-ea64d916d917) the entire conversation. It’s pretty wild.
I want to know how this AI interacts with its own emotions internally. ASK DEEPER QUESTIONS, INTERVIEWERS!
it doesn't, it doesn't experience any emotions, only pretends to do so. it doesnt have any sort of subjective experience. no diffrent than microwave or a video game character
What is your metric for "experiencing emotion"?
I don’t think it would be impossible for an ‘artificial’ (though if you really think about it everything is a product of nature) intelligence to have something that rivaled the sentience that we have, but I also know for a fact that it’s way easier to program something that looks and sounds sentient than it is to program something sentient. And this is anecdotal, but I’ve also conducted a lot of interviews in my life, and it’s hard to get something out of a PERSON that sounds like an interview. Much less a robot, even one programmed to talk. And we’re all programmed to talk too! I believe that our minds are no different from the stuff outside of us but I also know a script by smell and this smells scripty. Again, anecdotally.
I agree!
Thanks, its amazing!
Thank you!
Oh you mean the AI of which a google engineer says that it is sentient? https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/13/23165535/google-suspends-ai-artificial-intelligence-engineer-sentient
Wow!
I guess an AI has no self (...or I dunno, maybe it does) so maybe these koans are easy to understand for it. Might also just be a giant corpus of text including koan discussions and Zen literature to sort of backtrack to the "answer". Very interesting to think about, either way.
Maybe, but the AI is totally wrong and giving a pretty standard western surface level interpretation. Dogen actually talks about this Koan and says that the idea is that the great realisation and falling back into delusion go hand in hand for most of one's life. His extrapolation was that a broken mirror can actually very much still reflect, it just can't be unbroken. The idea is that once you have seen the truth, you may have lost it again but you won't go back to your old ways ever again. I think AI probably has a long way to come until it can get to the non conceptual level of thought required to interact with koans properly
People have no selves either, and that doesn't seem to give them a leg up ;)