Comment by breuleux
14 hours ago
I think a better angle is that LLMs are "just" token predictors in the same way that we are "just" made out of atoms. A lot of people do not believe consciousness can be material; they don't believe that you could build conscious beings just out of normal matter, without an immaterial "soul". Whereas if you think that physical matter is a lot, actually, and you can build a nearly infinite variety of things out of these building blocks... well, why not consciousness?
Predicting the next token is an immensely powerful thing. You can encode basically anything into a sequence of tokens, any configuration of matter. If you have a perfect next token predictor, you can predict basically anything. You can simulate an entire universe. It's Turing-complete. It sounds diminutive, but it's a general paradigm. Given everything this paradigm appears to be capable of, well, why not consciousness, really?
Yours is exactly the right intuition imo.
If you presuppose certain key aspects of materialism, non-dualism, functionalism, objectivism, perhaps absolute determinism... and then layer on a good general grasp of neurobiology, chemistry, cosmology, physics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and psychology... I think the conclusions you have stated are inevitable.
Humans are "just" atoms. Humans are "just" the sum of trillions of living cells going about automatic/reactionary processes, culminating in a buzzing cacophony of activity that gives rise to what we perceive as consciousness and free will.