Comment by TeMPOraL

> Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness?

Difference in size and complexity and nature of calculations being run?

I'd ask the other way - why do you (general you, people who do not have this inkling) have no problem debating consciousness of meat based brains, but it somehow becomes a category error when talking about silicon? Assuming you don't believe in divine magic, and that divine magic is core to consciousness, there's no reason to assume it's impossible a complex enough machine running complex enough software could be intelligent, or conscious - thinking is computation, and computation is made of math - it's independent of substrate that does the computing in the real world.

LLMs are definitely a different beast than regular software - both in their structure and in their generality. They may not be conscious or intelligent, maybe this specific design could never truly be (though I think it could) - but bucketing them with spreadsheets and terminal emulators is a real category error. If you stop fixating on the underlying substrate, then LLMs are already much more similar to biological minds than to any "regular" computer programs.

But that's still somewhat abstract. In immediate practical terms, it's also why I keep saying that anthropomorphising them gives a better high-order intuition: they are, by design, emulating human thinking in full generality, which makes their overall behavior, including their well-known problems like hallucinations or prompt injections (i.e. manipulation/gullibility), match what you'd expect of a people-like component of a system. It's a real, dangerous mistake, to treat LLMs like regular software components when designing systems.