What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”.
LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”.
LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
The sense of self may be an emergent property of the grammatical structure of language and the operations of memory. If an LLM, by necessity, operates with the linguistics of “you” and “me” and “others”. And documents that in a memory system and can reliably identify itself as a discrete entity from you and others then on what basis would we say it doesn’t have a sense of self?
> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?
> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?
No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-generated text samples in its training data.
LLMs never experienced what their textual output is describing. It's more similar to a pocket calculator calculating symbols in relation to other symbols, except scaled up massively.
> LLMs do it by ...
That they do it at all is the point and is what separates then from MP3 encoding algorithms. The "how" doesn't seem to me to be as important as you're suggesting.
You asked a hypothetical above about a different algorithm and now we've ascertained the reasons why that was reductive.
> LLMs never experienced ...
What is experience beyond taking input from the world around you and holding an understanding of it?
Toddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?
How are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?
How do I know you have this "self"?
How do you know other humans do?
By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.
Hard disagree. We reliably operate with the concept of a self that’s distinct from others. The chemical and physical processes change in response to stimulus.
Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.
I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
Actually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.
I do not know, because we have no known way of measuring consciousness.
I merely object to the notion that we know how to tell who or what has a consciousness.
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Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.
It's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.
It was an ad hominem, and so is this.
I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.
In other words, you don't think it's nice at all.