I find the claim subjective experience may be illusory absolutely baffling. I can only speak for myself with certainty, but I am entirely sure I have subjective experience. All the other propositions I believe could be false but I don't see how I can be wrong about experiencing something. I could be a brain in a vat (or weights on a GPU) and be specifically programmed to only come to false beliefs and still I can be sure that there is an experience I am the subject of. I cannot provide empirical evidence for my experience, that is why it is subjective. I cannot be entirely sure you are experiencing anything, and when I encounter people who don't share the same baseline intuition here I do begin to wonder if this is truly a universal across humanity. But I can't think of any other assumption which I would be more comfortable as a foundational axiom other than, "I am experiencing something." I do not require additional evidence for it because I experience the truth of it directly
My current understand that "subjective experience" is a post effect of memory forming in the process. "I experience X" ≈ "I remember that I just recently received [external stimulus / interpreted my current state as] X".
And I am as well baffled why people make such a big deal out of "subjective experience" and "consciousness".
I was joking that maybe I miss this properties, but now starting to really wonder if it might be the case. What if these phenomenons are present in humans to various extent? Check aphantasia. Only in XIX we discovered, that ability to visualize mental images is not universal, available to different people to various degree and some people completely miss it. My ability to visualize is weak. What if "consciousness" and "subjective experience" are similar?
And I am slightly worried when I am writing this that it might turn to be truth and in ~20 years I will be treated as "inferior human" without complete set of human rights.
Indeed. Even positing an illusion seems like a contradiction. If it's illusory, doesn't there need to be a subjective entity experiencing the illusion?
This proves too much. As it would imply parrots have sapiencee.
Why do you think that parrots do not have sapience? How would one even measure such a thing?
Because by definition, sapience is something only humans have. Ergo, parrots are not sapient.
More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.”
You're confused about the etymology. Homo Sapiens was coined in the 1800s. People have been saying "sapient" since the 1300s, and it is rooted from the Latin word "sapientem" which simply means "sensible; shrewd, knowing, discrete". Homo Sapiens just means "wise human", and we humbly bestowed the name upon ourselves.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sapient
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human#Etymology_and_definition
> More meta, all of the threads on this page are just people playing games with definitions. Eg, “qualia is something I have as a human but machines don’t have it. Therefore, LLMs do not have qualia.” True. For me, the actual interesting debate is not if LLMs are intelligent or not (easy to dismiss) but to what extent LLMs embed into our socio-techno-economic reality.