Comment by JKCalhoun
15 days ago
Yeah, kind of my issue with LLM dismissers as well. Sure, (statistically) generated clump of tokens. What is a human mind doing instead?
I'm on board with calling out differences between how LLMs work and how the human mind work, but I'm not hearing anything about the latter. Mostly it comes down to, "Come on, you know, like we think!"
I have no idea how it is I (we) think.
If anything LLM's uncanny ability to seem human might be shedding light in fact on how it is we do function — at least when in casual conversation. (Someone ought to look into that.)
One massive difference between the two is that a human mind is still in "training" mode, it is affected by and changes according to the conversations it has. An LLM does not. Another major difference is that the human exists in real time and continues thinking, sensing, and being even while it is not speaking, while an LLM does not.
If you ascribe to the idea (as I do) that consciousness is not a binary quality that a thing possesses or does not, you can assign some tiny amount of consciousness to this process. But you can do the same for a paramecium. Until those two major differences are addressed, I believe we're talking about consciousness on that scale, not to be confused with human consciousness.