Comment by Planktonne

18 hours ago

You could absolutely write a compelling story about a sentient toaster; it's been done before [1].

That is entirely separate to whether or not it would be a meaningful way to understand the world; a convincing story is not the same thing as one that is true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brave_Little_Toaster

14 comments

Planktonne

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maxbond  18 hours ago

I never said you couldn't write any arbitrary compelling story about a toaster, I said that this specific hypothetical story, where you rewrite "They're made of meat!" to be about a toaster, would not be compelling.

I am doing my best to communicate with you but to be honest you are not hearing me (across both responses), and I am out of words.

  • iainmerrick  15 hours ago

    Just wanted to say, I appreciate your patience and good sense in this thread.

    It's difficult to tell who's trolling -- probably best to go with the charitable assumption that everyone is honestly trying to convey their opinion, but mostly talking past each other. Unfortunately these discussions about the nature of consciousness never go anywhere useful.

    I think I'm probably in the same boat as you, roughly: a) LLMs are doing something really interesting that resembles in many ways both intelligence and consciousness; b) I suspect they're not actually conscious but I don't know how you'd know for sure; c) it all just drives home that we still don't really know what consciousness actually is. But like (a), it's definitely something really interesting...

  • econ  6 hours ago

    I read some stuff once where the author argued that almost everything takes in values, performs operation on them and gives output. Some things also store things. Then, if everything is doing logic operations there is no telling where intelligent "life" might be hiding. It also is really one giant system.

    The toaster has hard coded or configurable weights. It makes a product from heat and time.

    You could make toast by heating a brick on a campfire. It would be a clear sign of intelligence.

    If we lift one weight out of your brain we wouldn't look at the number and say it is intelligence. It must exist in a chain or matrix multiplication to qualify.

    The fun thing is that the timer and feedback mechanism do exist in a chain of events.

    It's part of the system and it takes all steps to complete the task.

    Our chain of thought that leads to making toast would be abandoned if it wasn't in working order.

  • Planktonne  15 hours ago

    It would be equally compelling, because the compelling nature of the story comes from the language, the presentation, rather than the [specific thing being ascribed consciousness].

    • iainmerrick  15 hours ago

      No, the original "they're made out of meat" works because we're confident that we are in fact intelligent and conscious, despite how ridiculous and unlikely the author manages to make it sound.

      "They're made out of weights" works precisely because LLMs really do have this mysterious property that they seem somehow intelligent even though nobody can explain exactly why, and there's active debate over whether they could be considered conscious.

      The thing being discussed isn't simply an arbitrary MacGuffin; in both cases the nature of the thing is central to the impact of the story.

      3 replies →

darkwater  17 hours ago

But that toaster would just be a device to talk about consciousness in general. In this case it does that and also it talks specifically of the LLM case, which can spark the discussion. Unless you believe to have the only valid and true opinion on the matter, and affirm that a normal toaster is just the same as an LLM in this topic.