Comment by richhhh
4 hours ago
What makes you certain that human thought is more than pattern matching?
As I understand it neuroscience hasn’t come up with a clear explanation of thought, much less a mind or consciousness. It seems to me complex pattern matching is a reasonable a cause of consciousness as anything else.
A lot of the comments in this thread are ignoring his primary point. He's not saying pattern matching doesn't equal consciousness. He's actually saying something more fundamental. He's saying there's no reason to believe that language pattern matching/algorithms are more, or less, conscious than other similarly complex algorithms.
The stance being presented here isn't that LLMs aren't conscious but that we as humans are much more willing to assign consciousness to language algorithms than to pathing or other ones.
This is a good point and I agree. I sort-of addressed it in my reply above.