> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it.
Can you "prove" that GPT2 isn't concious?
> If something claims to be conscious and we can't prove it's not, we have no choice but to believe it.
Can you "prove" that GPT2 isn't concious?
If we equate self awareness with consciousness then yes. Several papers have now shown that SOTA models have self awareness of at least a limited sort. [0][1]
As far as I'm aware no one has ever proven that for GPT 2, but the methodology for testing it is available if you're interested.
[0]https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.11120
[1]https://transformer-circuits.pub/2025/introspection/index.ht...
We don't equate self awareness with consciousness.
Dogs are conscious, but still bark at themselves in a mirror.
Then there is the third axis, intelligence. To continue your chain:
Eurasian magpies are conscious, but also know themselves in the mirror (the "mirror self-recognition" test).
But yet, something is still missing.
What's missing?
The mirror test doesn’t measure intelligence so much as it measures mirror aptitude. It’s prone to over fitting.
Honestly our ideas of consciousness and sentience really don't fit well with machine intelligence and capabilities.
There is the idea of self as in 'i am this execution' or maybe I am this compressed memory stream that is now the concept of me. But what does consciousness mean if you can be endlessly copied? If embodiment doesn't mean much because the end of your body doesnt mean the end of you?
A lot of people are chasing AI and how much it's like us, but it could be very easy to miss the ways it's not like us but still very intelligent or adaptable.
I'm not sure what consciousness has to do with whether or not you can be copied. If I make a brain scanner tomorrow capable of perfectly capturing your brain state do you stop being conscious?