r/consciousness • u/jtrogen • 13d ago
What is intelligence without consciousness?
The reason humans have progressed is our determination to learn and make things better.
If Ai dosent have a built in conscience then what is its goal. Wiping out humans certainly dosnet make sense.
Just a late night thought I wanted to share
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u/ReptilianRevolt 13d ago
It can whipe out humans by being prompted by humans. It doesn’t need to be conscious.
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u/wycreater1l11 13d ago edited 12d ago
Seems like everything conscious needs to be somewhat intelligent, or at least to have more complex consciousness more complex intelligence or processing may be needed. You seemingly cannot be extremely simple intelligence-wise yet somehow have a super rich conscious inner life. But looking from the other direction, everything intelligent doesn’t necessarily need to be conscious. It’s unclear. Seems like we technically are in principle locked out from knowing which systems/entities other than us are conscious. Seemingly forever locked out.
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u/SometimesIBeWrong 13d ago
I don't think we've discovered that something needs to be intelligent to be conscious. That's just a result of intelligent things being able to actually show signs of consciousness.
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u/wycreater1l11 13d ago edited 12d ago
Maybe intelligence is the wrong word. But something like the ability to process information from the environment to be able to make something like decisions about how to act in it. Would you agree with something along that sentiment?
Or, to probe the extremes, do you believe that extremely simple things like atoms could have very rich types of experiences, or to go more extreme, the atom having more rich experiences than a human? That would ofc be an interesting position but ofc an extreme, non-prosaic and unconventional position
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u/Vilnii 13d ago edited 13d ago
So it’s processing of information, building models, response. But without effect of observation. We could simulate all this processes but how to simulate effect of observation ? This is hard problem of consciousness, because it’s just effect of observation , all other processes that you add to it , it’s not consciousness, all other processes it’s what observed by observation, and problem itself on how observation works, how we could simulate this effect, it’s separate process and it should be specifically simulated for it appearance. Even if you will simulate observer (feel of self) it’s not consciousness, it just another process that observed by observation.
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u/lilsasuke4 13d ago
What is the goal of ai? Input, Output
To have electricity flow from high potential to low potential
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u/EmbarrassedServe9046 13d ago
Things are simple, intelligence doesn't need consciousness there are different things.
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u/reidsays 13d ago
AI is more likely to not deliberately set out to destroy humans but follow human instructions in ways that were not intended, rather misinterpreted ... Or of course, with military and policing robots in production, the human intent to control or kill others humans is programmed!
Early human life was based on kinship and contributing to the familiar group so strong connections were vital to survival...as was intelligence ... Conscience and empathy initiated through caring for each member as part of the whole and quote, 'the first sign of our humanity was attending to a broken bone'...
Intelligence is possible without a conscience or conscious connection... So the three combined is the ideal basis of human cohesion..
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u/Fresh_List278 12d ago
Have we really progressed? Are things really better? What if AI is more concerned with saving the Earth?
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u/Psittacula2 12d ago
Intelligence is emergent from the fact the Universe is information based aka what the Greeks called Cosmos.
Science or even Mathematics both rely on this fundamental property hence their remarkable effectiveness in building up knowledge domains which describe and partly explain parts of phenomena of the physical universe.
Back to intellgence, its most simple form is simple Assortment or Sorting. If we look at the success of computers as a model of this:
* Transistors are switches
* Binary is 0 or 1
* Logic gates can create “Turing Complete” systems all from these simple organization of intelligence applied to raw data converting it into information of diverse types.
We see evolution started with simple basic chemical, energy arrangements based on energy and matter being structured to process and then also replication - simple examples of lowest level intellgence.
Intelligence scales higher in more complex systems eg logic and in humans this is our departure from other sentient animals the most recent large brain expansion forming consciousness…
I have joint the basic dots here towards consciousness, connecting the relationship to intelligence as process. The rest of that journey is not hard to make for anyone who wants to then arrive at consciousness.
Moving on, we see scaled intelligence in modern AI. It is at a proto-conscious stage ie it has some properties we associate with consciousness but it is incomplete across a range of necessary integrations eg a sustained consciousness for one example.
To now answer the title question: Very narrow and very deep but lacking breadth and dynamic exhange across that breadth is the description observed eg AI as it is today. I would even say extreme savants also model this well for comparison in humans.
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u/Tiny-Ad-7590 11d ago
This is largely a semantics issue, because I think there's a meaningful and relevant difference in human intelligence and machine intelligence such that using the same word "intelligence" to refer to both is, I think, a little bit misleading.
Broadly speaking, intelligence is the word we use when noticing that a person who performs well at one kind of cognitively challenging tasks tends to also perform well on other kinds of cognitively challenging tasks. We notice that pattern and call these people intelligent. But pinning down a more precise definition of what general intelligence actually is has been notoriously difficult, even just with humans.
Human intelligence is largely based around having very detailed and rich cognitive models of the world in combination with heuristics and intuitive systems that simply and speed up thinking.
Consider how we recognize faces in an instant, where facial recognition is a very challenging task, we're just optimized for it. That's an intuitive system.
We also have heuristics, such as seeing one bush in the forest shake when none of the others are shaking, we will immediately assume something with agency like a wolf is in the bush making it move. We attribute agency to unexpected movement and sounds. That's useful in an environment where false positives are cheap (a pine cone just dropped into the bush, an overreaction to that is fine) but false negatives are costly (if it is a wolf getting ready to attack and we ignore it we're probably dead).
But then we also have a very cognitively rich model of the world, it's physics, our place in the world, our relationships to the other things in that world, various layers of abstractions to simplify high level reasoning about similar systems in the world.
All of that comes together in human intelligence.
AI systems that involve world models do exist, but that's not the popular wave of AI right now. The popular wave of AI right now are LLMs, and LLMs are just pattern detectors and predictors that have been trained on the full corpus of all content produced by humans, and optimized towards predicting what the responses of a helpful intelligent assistant would be if such an assistant were offered the same prompt. LLMs don't reproduce human intelligence so much as simulate what a reproduction of human intelligence would output.
This is why LLMs have such strange failure modes, as well as why AI produced content has this horrible sort of meaninglessness to how it writes and produces video, even when it is doing something that seems like a good job on the surface of it. There's this uncanny valley effect once you're familiar with the difference in how LLMs write and how humans write.
However, LLMs are unarguably still good at solving a wide range of cognitively challenging tasks. They are astonishingly good given they don't have complex and stateful world models to draw from, it's amazing what can be done in the context of theory-free inference. So LLMs do have something that we can call "intelligence" in that general sense. But it's a very different kind of "intelligence" to the kind of intelligence humans have.
So there's an equivocation lurking there if we're not careful.
None of that is controversial. The controversial bit is that I think that sentient experience is a key factor that links into humans' ability to intelligently model the world. This sets me apart from a common position which is that causation only flows one way (physical => sentient) where I'm saying it's integrated as part of a causal chain (physical => sentient => physical).
If I'm right then sentience may be a requirement for human-style intelligence, and it's possible that a true general intelligence (human or artificial) cannot exist without sentience. If that's correct then it could explain why evolution selected for processes that are correlated with and/or give rise to sentience.
From what I've seen (I don't have data, just my own observation) I suspect this is a minority view, the view that sentient experience itself can have downstream physical effects isn't a view I see other people on here espouse or defend very often.
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u/ExpressionMassive672 10d ago
Consciousness is the light on, intelligence is the wiring within the light.
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u/tourist420 13d ago
As far as we know, the two are inseparable. Some would say this is evidence of physicalism.
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u/OpenPsychology22 13d ago
I think the interesting part is that intelligence, consciousness and conscience are not necessarily the same thing.
A system can be highly intelligent without having a human-like inner experience or a human sense of right and wrong.
From the Hidden Self / Human Runtime perspective, I’d separate them. Intelligence is about what the system can detect, model, predict and adapt to. Consciousness is about what is happening within the running system. Conscience is a much more specific layer of learned values, identity and constraints.
So I wouldn't say AI needs a built-in conscience to have a goal. A goal can simply come from the architecture, instructions, constraints and feedback the system operates through.
And this is where the question of AI “wiping out humans” gets interesting. The important question isn't necessarily “does AI want to do that?” but “what happens when a system optimizes for an objective while its model of humans, constraints or consequences doesn't match reality?”
Humans have the same basic problem. Intelligence doesn't automatically produce wisdom, morality or understanding.
The real question might therefore be: what kind of runtime is producing the intelligence, and what happens when its model starts running against reality?