Comment by eureka7
15 hours ago
How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
15 hours ago
How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. You can not sit down with pen and paper, and reproduce by hand exactly what is going on inside someone’s brain.
But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?
My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
Because it is common sense.
This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.
How is this "common sense"? The question of what consciousness is, what it emerges from, etc. literally have no proved answer at the moment.
Take this statement: "consciousness emerges from sufficient complexity in any system". Neither you or I can prove it right or wrong, but we can both make an assumption that if it was right, then there would be a way for an LLM to be conscious.
I'm not arguing that they are, I'm saying being this confident that they are not is the exact same as being confident that they are.
Yes, I see your point. You could argue that humans, too, are trained to produce expected outputs (family, societal and peer pressure, etc.).
2 replies →
for the same reason I don't think a pinball machine or ATM is conscious
You could just as much argue that a stone has consciousness. Some people believe that. Insane describes it quite well.
Why is it insane? We have no idea how or where consciousness arises, or even if it's a coherent concept.
We don't know a lot of things. That does not make it sensible to just make up unfounded claims about them.
I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
9 replies →
All you’re doing is shutting down any inquiry because you’ve decided it’s not worth discussing
So why keep discussing?
You're disparaging a lot of people in your last sentence.