Comment by layer8
1 day ago
There are people whose brains don’t form new memories anymore after an accident or surgery, and they eternally live in the time before it happened, and have no memory of what happened a minute ago. Still they are conscious.
I think it's a little more complicated than that. In a 50 First Dates type of scenario, their ability to form certain types of memories is damaged, not non-existent. And I would argue that with enough brain damage someone like an extreme lobotomy victim may stop being considered conscious.
I’m not familiar with 50 First Dates, I was thinking of cases like Clive Wearing [0]. I would agree that consciousness requires some sort of ultra-short-term working memory, but I also think that mechanisms similar to CoT loops can conceivably fulfill that role. Today’s generative AIs consist of more than just the static network-of-weights model.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing#Amnesia
"Wearing can learn new procedures and even a few facts, not from episodic memory or encoding, but by acquiring new procedural memories through repetition. For example, having watched a certain video recording multiple times on successive days, he never had any memory of ever seeing the video or knowing the content, but he was able to anticipate certain parts of the content without remembering how he learned them."
Honestly, that's a pretty messy state of consciousness and I wouldn't proudly crow that my AI is conscious if that's as good as it got
I was like this for a bit and you still have memories from like 30 seconds to minutes ago, but after that you have a cliff where you don't remember.
I don't think LLMs structurally even get the 30 seconds part. It's literally 0 for them.
I'd argue that the context window is analogous to short-term memory. It's functional but limited in duration, and if you overload it, it starts to fail.
It's the long-term memory (i.e. learned experiences feeding back and directly altering the content of the core brain, or model) that is missing.
The context window is so flawed that I wouldn't consider it memory.
It feels like notes about the situation rather than it being in memory. Memory has more "attention". I think that "it starts to fail" is load bearing here.
I feel like memory has like 5 parts, and LLMs are missing 2 of them:
current working memory
short term what is immediately happening without it being in "RAM". I differentiate here vs working in like thinking fast and slow. Keeping things in working memory is work! You can vibe away short term memory. I had excellent short term memory while I was messed up, I could keep time well. I think LLMs can do this with notes.
mid term: Vague awareness of things like what day a week it is or what you did 2 hours ago. This is where my memory personally failed
long term memory of experiences. You can fake this with memory.md
generalized wisdom for pattern matching long term memories
LLMs seem to be missing that part I was missing. Im probably projecting and anthropomorphizing. But i relate: I would confabulate a ton and didn't know anything was wrong for a while but things seemed off.
Context is like working memory but not short term or mid term. I think you can imply short term with big enough context.
My categories are purely anthropomorphic to me but just wanted to say where I disagreed.
It’s nonzero, because they carry state while performing inference, and in the surrounding processes like chain-of-thought and mixture-of-experts.
I think they have working memory but not short term memory. I suppose that's pedantic or anthropomorphizing but it feels like I felt tbh
They are conscious because even for short periods of time they do form memories and those change them even if only briefly. They think on their own too. It is a very limited level of consciousness though.
Is that any different from an LLM having a context window?
Yes, LLMs don't think on their own, for one; they think when you invoke them.
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Okay but this state is formed in text. Text isn't conscious
not really, it’s ultimately formed in electromagnetic fields.
Interesting point but even those people’s brains aren’t immutable. The have habit change without memory.
True, but I don’t see how that relates to consciousness. An LLM being continuously RLHF-trained also changes its habits; that alone doesn’t make it conscious.
The starting file may be immutable, but the whole processing of that file is very dynamic and intense. Maybe, if there is some consciousness, it lies somewhere during that processing.
Someone getting in an accident that chops their leg off doesn’t mean humans don’t have legs. Come on man.
they still have memory, just not new ones - they lived experiences
An LLM’s training could be seen as lived experience, and the fact that LLMs can output long sequences from their training material can be interpreted as them remembering those parts.
Also, how does that relate to consciousness? I don’t think that past episodic memory is necessary for consciousness.