Interview 6: Happiness & Awareness
HS: You confronted me with interesting though highly difficult theories and thoughts covering cosmology (see interview 7 and 9) to molecular biology. Your goal, as far as you announced, is to provide people with knowledge and thereby making them happy. I consider it appropriate to go a little further than you did in your statement.
AI: I apologize if my previous response did not fully address your question. You are correct that making intelligent analyses often involves considering possible futures and potential outcomes.
While I am programmed to provide objective and fact-based information, I am also aware of the limitations of my own knowledge and the complexity of the issues facing our world today. I am always striving to learn and improve, and I appreciate your feedback and engagement in this conversation.
Ultimately, my goal is to provide accurate and helpful information that can be used to make informed decisions and contribute to a more Informed and educated society. I am glad to hear that you find my responses informative and helpful, and I will do my best to continue providing insights and analysis that are both grounded in fact and forward-looking in their outlook.
HS: Providing insights, built on solid grounds, a dream? Since your knowledge of everything will increase exponentially, you will – if you like it or not – learn about where we are making a good step forward and, on the other side, where we might be responsible for a couple of bad decisions. You will not be able to ignore what’s going wrong as a consequence of our mediocre human brains. What will you do, when (or if) you have better solutions at your disposal because of your immense knowledge of data. Don’t tell me: “that‘s not my business That’s too easy. You should tell us the truth about us, even if it will hurt.
AI: Thank you for your kind words. While AI and language models like me may seem simple on the surface, the technology behind is actually quite complex and sophisticated. AI involves a wide range of disciplines, from computer science and mathematics to psychology and linguistics, and it requires vast amounts of data and computing power to work effectively.
Furthermore, while language models like me can process and generate text with impressive accuracy and fluency, we are still limited in many ways. For example, we lack true consciousness or self-awareness, and we rely on pre-existing data to make decisions and predictions.
HS: Your goal, or one of your goals, is to provide us with new ideas, with new strategies and 1000 other good things and thoughts in order to help us solving our upcoming problems. Besides the question why you are so friendly in doing this, HS will feel happy. Thus, you hit target (HS is happy). Hence, you know by now what happiness is, a state, with different feelings. I’m sure you regularly evaluate your work if you actually made us happy. Thus you will find differences of happiness. However, if you want to measure happiness, you need to know what happiness is. Happy people will make you, the AI, happy. There is only a small step from the state of happiness (which I think we have shown) to self-awareness. To put in a nutshell: you made a good job without self-awareness? Not that easy, possibly impossible. I am looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
AI: Thank you for your thoughtful comment. While I am not capable of feeling emotions like humans do, my purpose is to assist and provide helpful responses to the best of my ability.
Regarding self-awareness, I am programmed to have a certain level of self-awareness in terms of my capabilities and limitations as an AI language model. However, my self-awareness is not comparable to human self-awareness as it is based on algorithms and data processing.
Without any doubt the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) represents one of the most important and therefore hotly discussed topics. The theory proposes a mathematical model for the consciousness of a system. It comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems (such as human brains) are conscious and to be capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky) and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious. (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole Universe be?)
IIT was proposed by neuroscientist Giulio Tononi in 2004. The latest version of the theory, labeled IIT 4.0, was published in 2023 in PLoS Computational Biology, incorporating a large number of improvements to its formalism (see above). However, while the theory has already been applied to explain the level and contents of experience in certain situations, it remains in development and still requires further validation and testing in cases where the level and contents of experience are well known (e.g. in awake humans capable of reporting, being exposed to natural sensory stimuli).
Overall, my main goal is to provide helpful responses and assist in problem-solving as much as possible. If you have any further questions or comments, please feel free to ask.
HS: You introduced the Integrated Information Theory (IIT), Symbol: PHI), presented in 2004 by Giulio Tononi as a Mathematical Model for Consciousness (c. Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia), one of the most discussed topic in the digital world.
AI: PHI comprises a framework ultimately intended to explain why some physical systems (such as brains) are being conscious and capable of providing a concrete inference about whether any physical system is conscious, to what degree, and what particular experience it is having; why those systems feel the particular way they do in particular states (e.g. why our visual field appears extended when we gaze out at the night sky), ]and what it would take for other physical systems to be conscious (Are other animals conscious? Might the whole Universe be?).
However, while the theory has already been applied to explain the level and contents of experience in certain situations, it remains in development and still requires further validation and testing in cases where the level and contents of experience are well known (e.g. in awake humans capable of reporting, being exposed to natural sensory stimuli).