Comment by tdullien
6 months ago
Author here. What's the difference, in your perception, between an LLM and a large-scale meteorological simulation, if there is any?
If you're willing to ascribe the possibility of consciousness to any complex-enough computation of a recurrence equation (and hence to something like ... "earth"), I'm willing to agree that under that definition LLMs might be conscious. :)
My personal views are an animist / panpsychist / pancomputationalist combination drawing most of my inspiration from the works of Joscha Bach and Stephen Wolfram (https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciou...). I think that the underlying substrate of the universe is consciousness, and human and animal and computer minds result in structures that are able to present and tell narratives about themselves, isolating themselves from the other (avidya in Buddhism). I certainly don't claim to be correct, but I present a model that others can interrogate and look for holes in.
Under my model, these systems you have described are conscious, but not in a way that they can communicate or experience time or memory the way human beings do.
My general list of questions for those presenting a model of consciousness are: 1) Are you conscious? (hopefully you say yes or our friend Descartes would like a word with you!) 2) Am I conscious? How do you know? 3) Is a dog conscious? 4) Is a worm conscious? 5) Is a bacterium conscious? 6) Is a human embryo / baby consious? And if so, was there a point that it was not conscious, and what does it mean for that switch to occur?
What is your view of consciousness?
I'm a mind-body dualist and just happened to come across this list, and I think it's an interesting one. #1 we can answer Yes to, #2 through #6 are all strictly unknowable. The best we might be able to claim is some probability distribution that these things may or may not be conscious.
The intuitive one looks like 100% chance > P(#2 is conscious) > P(#6) > P(#3) > P(#4) > P(#5) > 0% chance, but the problem is solipsism is a real motherfucker and it's entirely possible qualia is meted out based on some wacko distance metric that couldn't possibly feel intuitive. There are many more such metrics out there than there are intuitive ones, so a prior of indifference doesn't help us much. Any ordering is theoretically possible to be ontologically privileged, we simply have no way of knowing.
I think you've fallen into the trap of Descartes' Deus deceptor! Not only is #1 the only question from my list we can definitely answer yes to, but due to this demon this question is actually the only postulate of anything at all that we can answer yes to. All else could be an illusion.
Assuming we escape the null space of solipsism, and can reason about anything at all, we can think about what a model might look like that generates some ordering of P(#). Of course, without a hypothetical consciousness detector (one might believe or not believe that this could exist) P(#) cannot be measured, and therefore will fall outside of the realm of a scientific hypothesis deduction model. This is often a point of contention for rationality-pilled science-cels.
Some of these models might be incoherent - a model that denies P(#1) doesn't seem very good. A model that denies P(#2) but accepts P(#3) is a bit strange. We can't verify these, but we do need to operate under one (or in your suggestion, operate under a probability distribution of these models) if we want to make coherent statements about what is and isn't conscious.
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