Comment by miyoji
14 hours ago
> (consciousness being a cognitive capacity)
I don't think it makes any sense to say that consciousness is a cognitive capacity. Cognition is one of many qualia that compose the experience of consciousness from the inside, but it's not the only one, and I can easily imagine consciousness without cognition at all.
So I don't think it's weird at all to say that LLMs can be good models of some cognitive capacities (particularly the ones embodied in language) but lacks others, and overall lacks consciousness.
allow me to resolve the confusion: ai is a model of language. language is a model of human cognitive state. to the extent language maps to cognitive state accurately and ai processes language fluently ai models understanding. whether this is understanding is an irrelevant metaphysical question to me.