Comment by kalkin

6 months ago

Conflating consciousness and intelligence is going to hopelessly confuse any attempt to understand if or when a machine might achieve either.

(I think there's no reasonable definition of intelligence under which LLMs don't possess some, setting aside arguments about quantity. Whether they have or in principle could have any form of consciousness is much more mysterious -- how would we tell?)

Defining machine consciousness is indeed mysterious, at the end of the day it ultimately depends on how much faith one puts in science fiction rather than an objective measure.

  • Seems like a philosophy question, with maybe some input from neuroscience and ML interpretability. I'm not sure what faith in science fiction has to do with it.