Comment by MostlyStable
15 days ago
And I'm saying that the question of whether language production and consciousness imply one another is orthogonal to the argument. My argument, in it's simplest form, is that in order to confidently claim a non-human is not conscious, we would indeed need to solve the hard problem. We have not solved that problem, and therefore we should make no strong claims about the consciousness or lack thereof of any non-human.
I may have been imprecise in my original comment, if it led you to believe that I thought that language production was the only evidence or important thing. If so, I apologize for my imprecision. I don't think that it's really that relevant.
Oh, I see. That's too broad a claim in my view, but I would agree we can't be certain without a general solution of the 'hard problem' - no more about LLMs than about humans; in the general case, we can't prove ourselves conscious either, which is the sort of thing that tends to drive consciousness researchers gradually but definitely up a wall over time. (But we've discussed Hoel already. To his credit, he's always been very open about his reasons for having departed academia.)
It sounds to me as though you might seek to get at a concern less mechanistic than moral or ethical, and my advice in such case would be to address that concern directly. If you try to tell me that because LLMs produce speech they must be presumptively treated as if able to suffer, I'm going to tell you that's nonsense, as indeed I have just finished doing. If you tell me instead that they must be so treated because we have no way to be sure they don't suffer, I'll see no cause to argue. But I appreciate that making a compassionate argument for its own sake isn't a very good way to convince anyone around here.