How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. You can not sit down with pen and paper, and reproduce by hand exactly what is going on inside someone’s brain.
But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?
My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
Because it is common sense.
This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.
How is this "common sense"? The question of what consciousness is, what it emerges from, etc. literally have no proved answer at the moment.
Take this statement: "consciousness emerges from sufficient complexity in any system". Neither you or I can prove it right or wrong, but we can both make an assumption that if it was right, then there would be a way for an LLM to be conscious.
I'm not arguing that they are, I'm saying being this confident that they are not is the exact same as being confident that they are.
Yes, I see your point. You could argue that humans, too, are trained to produce expected outputs (family, societal and peer pressure, etc.).
By social norms, not running matrix multiplication in their head ad nauseam
I don't think that argument holds water, because the scope of what can be reasonably approximated by matrix multiplication is extremely broad (especially when the matrix multiplication is also paired with a source of randomness).
for the same reason I don't think a pinball machine or ATM is conscious
You could just as much argue that a stone has consciousness. Some people believe that. Insane describes it quite well.
Why is it insane? We have no idea how or where consciousness arises, or even if it's a coherent concept.
We don't know a lot of things. That does not make it sensible to just make up unfounded claims about them.
I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about?
I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.
The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
What's the difference between a computer and a stone?
A lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about.
Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
If the computer is functional, powered, and connected to some some kind of interface allowing you to use it (e.g. network, touchscreen, desktop setup, etc.), then sure you can use it to perform general computation. But if its unpowered, is there any real difference between a stone and a computer in a debate about consciousness?
So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive? The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it.
Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?
> So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?
I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?
One is a computer and the other, a stone.
Well those that claim humans are conscious need to come up with a test to demonstrate it empirically. Then we can have LLMs take the same test.
As it is, it would be insane for me to confidently claim you are conscious or even that you're human, as an LLM could have written the same message.
The burden if proof is on you in this case.
The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.
If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.
All you’re doing is shutting down any inquiry because you’ve decided it’s not worth discussing
So why keep discussing?
You're disparaging a lot of people in your last sentence.