Comment by peddling-brink
9 hours ago
Rebooting a machine running an LLM isn’t noticed by the LLM.
Would you feel comfortable digitally torturing it? Giving it a persona and telling it terrible things? Acts of violence against its persona?
I’m not confident it’s not “feeling” in a way.
Yes its circuitry is ones and zeros, we understand the mechanics. But at some point, there’s mechanics and meat circuitry behind our thoughts and feelings too.
It is hubris to confidently state that this is not a form of consciousness.
I'm not entirely opposed to the kind of animism that assigns a certain amount of soul, consciousness, or being to everything in a spectrum between a rock and a philosopher... but even so.
Multiplying large matrices over and over is very much towards the "rock" end of that scale.
If we accept the Church-Turing thesis, a philosopher can be simulated by a simple Universal Turing machine.
If one day we are able to create a philosopher from such a rudimentary machine (and a lot of tape), would you consider that very much towards the "rock" end as well?
Can a Turing machine of any sort truly indistinguishably simulate a nondeterministic system?
If a Turing machine can truly simulate a full nondeterministic system as complex as a philosopher but it would take dedicating every gram of matter in the visible universe for a trillion years to simulate one second, is this meaningfully different than saying it cannot?
I suggest the answer to both questions are no, but the second one makes the answer at worst "practically, no".
My feeling is that consciousness is a phenomenon deeply connected to quantum mechanics and thus evades simulation or recreation on Turing machines.
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