Comment by jpttsn
7 hours ago
A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.
7 hours ago
A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.
A video is a fixed representation.
What if we can interact with this video, and it reacts in the same ways the source organism does?
Then we put it in new situations that weren't in the source video, and it interacts in a similar way to the original organism in these situations, too.
What do we make of reactions of pain or joy? Where's the line between simulation and enaction?
This is closer to the reality of these models.
I'm not suggesting I know where that line is - if indeed it is a line at all - it could well be a gradient.
LLMs are deterministic, though. Much like the video.
AFAIK using the same input tokens, weights, and numerical operations will lead to the same probability distribution for the next token. It uses pseudo-randomness to enable temperature, etc. Like a fuzzy video.
"Markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism" just does not mean very much. A PR phrase used to hype the IPO.
Videos and LLMs are not deterministic in the same sense at all.
LLMs are deterministic in the same sense as biological processes. And a faithful simulation of a brain would have all the properties you note.
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I like it, and it points in the right direction, but is not directly true: The markers are about interactions, how biological organisms behave in certain test situations.
But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.
I don’t know, a stab carries lots of bias in interpretation. We might be reflecting our conscious experience markers on a different conscious experience. And selectively so, e.g. lobsters welfare. From my perspective, this is the hypocrisy of these welfare statements. We are already happy to kill beings we consider conscious to feed ourselves but suddenly sensitive with a consciousness we don’t know if it’s there. I would wager this is more out of fear of the idea of this consciousness rather than out of welfare.