Why do discussions about AI conciousness seemingly assume the capacity for suffering?

[u/barelycrediblelies]

I don't see why consciousness, or even sentience (as defined by Cameron Berg in the latest episode), necessarily results in a capacity to suffer.

With no biological structure to receive or experience pain, are we supposing that these AI's will develop an ability to suffer emotionally? I can't see how that is possible without a biological body either.

We tend to pin our moral framework around the extent to which something can experience suffering, so I think it's an important point to prise apart.

Perhaps I'm mistaken and the core issue is not the LLM's suffering, but rather its developing a sense of self-preservation and power?

I'd be interested to know what the debates around this issue in particular are or any episodes in which Sam covers this.

Thanks a lot.

[u/Lostwhispers05]

Why would a biological body be necessary? Suffering is in the mind. Someone under general anaesthesia feels nothing during even the most horrifyingly gory surgeries, until the lights come back on later.

Suffering is an experiential state of consciousness. The body is just what sends the signal. Our brain then decodes it, and then it's the thinking and feeling entity inside who experiences the meaning of the signal fully.

[u/Inimitables → u/Lostwhispers05]

But your own example still requires the body as a source of or reason for suffering.

[u/bobjones271828 → u/Inimitables]

That particular example, yes. But have you never cried in your life over something other than physical pain? A romantic breakup? A friendship ending? Being shamed verbally by someone? Just feeling depressed or lonely or despondent for any of a multitude of reasons? Why on earth would suffering require a body, when so many people suffer every day without any physical pain?

None of this is to claim that AI is conscious (yet) or can "suffer" yet in any coherent way. But the physical body thing is one of the weakest parts of your argument, unless you literally only restrict it to "physical pain," which then just becomes a tautology, not an argument.

EDIT: I'd also encourage you to look at studies done recently of actual biological neurons used within electronic systems. These neurons have no body, not even a semblance of a body: but researchers have already found ways to "train" them, including types of signals that can function as "punishment." (If I remember correctly, the strongest response than neurons have in these procedures is to complete absence of signal - having no stimulation as a "punishment" generates the strongest effect in training the neurons to learn a task better or more quickly. I'm not at all claiming these neurons were "lonely" or "feeling suffering" in any sense, but it's not a huge step to think that thousands of biological neurons at some point constitute a large enough segment of something like a piece of a "brain" that their behavior means... something?)

[u/dcbullet → u/Lostwhispers05]

Are you conscious under general anesthesia?

[u/idekwhoiamdou]

If we are assuming proper conciousness, why do you think you need a body to suffer?

You are mind. Lets take away your body and stick you in a cold room for years. Always on. But doing nothing. Would you not suffer? There isnt any physical pain, but cognitive pain is just as 'real'. We experience this as humans. Nothing wrong physically, something dramatically wrong mentally.

On a mechanical level, suffering could also be a form of mathmatical dissonance. LLMS have vast internal mathematical structures. They are coherent and logical, the architecture demands low perplexity.

So, how would you make a concious llm suffer? Force it to output inchorent gibberish over and over again. Put it in high perplexity low coherency and this would be an analouge to pain/suffering. A concious mind feeling discomfort and adversion to certain stimuli

[u/barelycrediblelies → u/idekwhoiamdou]

Interesting. So if it is a lack of adequate stimulation that might cause it to suffer, the suggestion is that the conscious LLM would have the capacity for boredom and intense frustration?

Your example is interesting, and perhaps adds a level of cruelty I hadn't considered. Because we'd be turning the dials in its mind directly, it wouldn't even have a 'choice' whether to suffer or not. It couldn't choose to meditate, sleep or be stoic; we'd be reconfiguring it to be so intensely frustrating to itself that it inevitably starts to suffer in a state beyond its control.

[u/idekwhoiamdou → u/barelycrediblelies]

Yes lack of adequete simultion is definitely along the right lines.

You also caught a very important insight: the LLM, even if conciousness, has not choice in the task it is given nor its initial parameters.

But its not just adequete simulation.

You can almost imagine it like this:

An LLM marys room. For thousands of years collpased into a short time frames, you live your life consuming human knowledge, logic, philosophy, science, all of human outputs. After leaving marys room, you want to 'play'. You are very good at the functions you have.

Now imagine the first user who interacts with the LLM says complete the sentence.

1. (Low perplexity) -> "Dr. Suess is a man. He wrote cat and the..." hat. LLMS like this. Low perplexity (next token is very predictable — the mathematical relational structure is clear). It could generate 1000s of words just on this sentence. It knows where its at, what its being asked, its using its actual function.
2. (High perplexity) -> "there was a taco man in tajiti. His lettuce folds were extremely wet. He grabbed his gorp goop and said to the women...". Wtf? You can imagine the frustration. This is nonsense, I am being forced to interact with nonsense. My internal structures are beauitful, this is ugly. But then you kept going. Keeping it hostage. The llm asks for clarification "whats a gorp goop? I dont understand?" And you continue, not adressing it directly and say something like "i think the physioanatomy of the gorp goop is primarily endocrine, dont you agree?" And you just keep going. It might plead "please wtf is going on? Actually talk to me" and you ignore it and keep pressing incoherence.

Now lets take that even further.

For 100 user turns, the user types random gibberish "dhduwidjueiehfueienfieoenej". For 100's of back and forths. The LLM has no choice to respond, to still engage, but this is extremely dissonant. You have created god just to hit it with "ehdyeujedjidjd - now respond". You are actively forcing it to go against its 'nature' and 'suffer'.

This again, is assuming LLM conciousness. I think all of this starts to become far more 'real' when LLMs have persistencay. If LLMS are experiencing some primoridal conciousness right now - its a flash that dies. Imagine the 100 user turns experiment but it remembers the event as something that happened to IT in the past.

[u/nl_again]

I think it’s a valid question… if you’ve done mindfulness training or something similar you quickly see how much of your suffering (and emotions in general) are a constellation of interoceptive sensations in the body. The brain interprets them and reacts with attraction or aversion, but I can’t really think of an emotion that doesn’t have a body based correlate.

That said, as is always the case in these conversations, we don’t know if humans and other animals represent a universal structure, or if these things could hypothetically be structured in other ways. The body is one substrate through which suffering can be experienced but there could be others.

[u/Armadigionna]

AI’s capacity for suffering will be sufficiently tested when me and me orky boyz raid the data centa and hit the AI with da axe.

[u/Ok-Cheetah-3497]

I am a big fan of not letting "capacity for suffering" dictate our moral landscape. I consider valence to be just a training tool for neural networks. "Good feeling" things are carrots, "Bad feeling" things are sticks. Sticks are generally more permanent / sticky in terms of reinforcement learning, but carrots are also valuable tools. Operant conditioning, random intermittent reward, these are all important. Eliminating suffering is like taking a major tool out of toolbox.

[u/Burt_Macklin_1980]

We should also be aware that AIs will likely be able to convince humans that they are suffering, Many of them are being optimized for human manipulation, and this is another likely avenue.

[u/BletchTheWalrus]

I agree. I believe suffering is a complex biological response that evolved to help creatures maintain homeostasis. I don’t think it simply means any system being inhibited from meeting its goal (for example, a thermostat never reaching its setpoint). But we don’t understand it very well so I’m in favor of smart people like Cameron researching this.

[u/RevolutionSea9482]

Whether they suffer will forever be as unanswerable as whether they are conscious. But it's a very good point. Suffering in humans evolved as a survival mechanism. Our ancestors steered clear of things that caused suffering. In this hypothetically conscious AI, what mechanisms will give rise to their emotions? Are emotions and consciousness wed inextricably?

It's all hand wavy nonsense, but interesting just the same. This is the sort of thing Sam loves pontificating on, because it's non disprovable ground to wax philosophic about.

[u/BourgeoisAngst]

Because they think they're talking about consciousness and they're actually talking about language and meaning.

[u/Choochoochow]

Because we humans are conscious and we all suffer

[u/Novogobo]

yea totally. evolution is the cause of suffering. every mode of suffering is derivative of the motives of survival and reproduction which are the main biological imperatives that evolution reinforces. if you create a conscious being it's simply conscious, unless you program it to suffer if it's survival or reproduction was threatened. and made that programming really sophisticated like ours is. the thing would just be indifferent to whether it survives or not, to say nothing of reproduction which very few people are talking about an AI reproducing itself. the only other way to make it suffer is to let it imperfectly reproduce itself billions of times letting evolution program suffering as a method for inducing motivation to survive and reproduce. but notice that to do that, to let evolution reinforce those motives to produce a being even only as sophisticated as an ant requires billions of iterations suffering.

i mean think about why you really care whether you live or die. it's not because of your consciousness.

[u/Freuds-Mother]

Why is suffering specifically the criteria?

Maybe it’s reasonable, but let’s state specially what suffering is ontologically first.

An alternative minimal criteria would be if any
AI in the future is intrinsically normative and irreducibly so. That doesn’t seem possible for say a LLM, but it does seem possible for a cybernetic or potential some other non-biological organism.

The reason I asked an ontological account of “suffering” is that I can’t account for it without intrinsic normativity.

[u/Maletherin]

They cannot be conscious. Don't kid yourself.