Comment by jimbokun
10 hours ago
It’s the opposite.
Descartes made clear that subjective experience is the ONLY thing we know. Everything else is theories to explain the phenomena we subjectively experience.
We theorize that there is a physical world and other beings like us having similar subjective experiences, because that seems the best explanation for our subjective experiences. But we might be living in the Matrix, with all the people we think we are interacting with and just sophisticated simulations.
And this has some bearing on the debate about whether these systems do or could in the future exhibit something similar?
If we go along with the though that our own subjective experience is the only thing we truly know, and that we cannot really know if any other humans are having the same experience (and any belief of that sorts is purely extrapolation), then there isn't a fundamental difference between LLMs and "other humans" in terms of whether or not they're "conscious". Sure, it appears more likely that "other humans" are real conscious beings, but there's no fundamental difference.
>whether these systems do or could in the future exhibit something similar?
I think the whole discussion is based on the idea that consciousness isn't something you can "exhibit". (Tell me, how can you "exhibit consciousness"?)