Comment by bayindirh
20 hours ago
> Who have you ever heard make a sincere, good faith argument that a toaster is conscious?
More than one, for many classes of devices, incl. toasters. Some were drunk, some were insane, and some were delusional.
LLMs are no different. They are automata, yet delusional people bring out pitchforks and torches when someone points out that they are just statistical models, and they don't even work when there's no input to them.
Which is very different than consciousness.
Their being statistical models and their being conscious are not contradictory unless proven otherwise. That's not knowledge, it is assumption.
It would appear to me you have no interest in a real, good faith discussion on this topic because you think anyone who disagrees with you is necessarily delusional. Which is a shame, and that's the kind of dogma you are criticizing.
This was exactly the point of the story, it's too uncomfortable to admit that we don't know what consciousness is and what is and isn't conscious, so we just brush it under the rug.
Sorry, I'll be blunt: Are you sure you are not projecting?
My perspective comes from a set of pillars. First, I work at an HPC center, where we support running and development of AI systems, incl. international projects. IOW, I have knowledge about how these systems built, work and needs to continue working.
Moreover, I'm an HPC programmer myself, so I'm not completely uninformed about the math this involving this thing, and I'm lucky enough to have friends who are much more dedicated than me, and we discuss how this thing works and feels like this way.
I'm not an AI hater per se, being programmed AI systems in the past, incl. emergent intelligence systems with multi-agents which can span continents if need be (this was my master's thesis, time flies).
However, knowing what these things are capable of and how they are built. I don't believe them they're conscious/sentient beings. I also had much more time to ponder on these things even before LLMs being a thing. Some hard sci-fi books have asked these questions seriously in their captive adventures way earlier. If one reads these books seriously, there are a lot of philosophical angles to consider and draw upon.
I can discuss in good faith. For hours, days or months even, but throwing "you're a narrow-minded dogmatic luddite neanderthal!" card to anyone disagreeing with you is not it.
Positive, yes. I never called you a luddite or a neanderthal or anything of the kind.
It's perfectly fine to believe they are not conscious, I am not convinced they are, but asserting anyone who disagrees with you is delusional is unfortunate.
4 replies →
> they don't even work when there's no input to them.
Why is that needed for consciousness? They're artificial. If we put someone in a coma, they don't talk, they're not really conscious. Just because the AI model has a more obvious off switch shouldn't make a difference. It's easy to imagine gluing a cron job to the model so it works randomly. If that doesn't count because it's external, if we take a brain out of a human's head and slap it on the table, it's not going to do anything. If I take the AI's model file and stick it on a USB flash drive, it doesn't do anything. Without a computer to run it on, it doesn't do anything, just like a human brain doesn't do anything without the rest of the human body as the harness.
The underlying question is, since we created LLMs, we can see into the actual matrix math, the linear algebra that comprises them. So it's easy to dismiss them as a next word guesser. How could consciousness arise from guessing the next word? But we don't know where consciousness comes from in the first place!
So since we don't know, the fact that, yes, the anthropomorphically named LLM "neurons" are merely matrixes of numbers and we do linear algebra on them; yes, that gives us much more insight as to what it's doing internally compared to a human or any other lifeform with consciousness's brain. And yes, human neurons are much more complicated than a mere 2d matrix of numbers, so far as we know. But we don't know!
The indightment of LLMs is that they can't say they don't know, and would prefer, instead, to hallucinate and bullshit an answer instead. They can't help it, they learned from the best. As a human though, I don't know if they're conscious, and what I'm going to say about that.