Comment by threethirtytwo

Except we don’t know how those words are strung together. Right? Why don’t you analyze it a little further and stop shutting down your own brain before coming to this superficial conclusion.

You ask the LLM a complex question and it gives you a correct answer. Yes it has to string words together to answer your question but how did it know the order and which words to use in order to make the answer correct? You don’t actually know. No one does and it is in that unknown space that we suspect consciousness may lie. Something is there and humanity as a whole cannot understand it and this lack of understanding is exactly the same fundamental lack of understanding we have for how a monkey brain or dog brain or even human brain works. We do not know whether humans dogs or monkeys are conscious… you only assume other living beings are conscious because you yourself experience it and just assume it exists for others. We can’t even define what it is because consciousness is a loaded word like spirituality.

This is not anthropomorphism. You attribute the bias wrongly. Instead it is a stranger phenomenon among people like you who can mysteriously only characterize the LLM as a next token predictor and nothing else beyond that even though the token prediction clearly indicates greater intelligence at work.

The tldr is that we don’t actually know and that consciousness is a highly viable possibility given what we don’t know and given the assumptions of consciousness we have on other living beings with equivalent understanding of complex topics.