Comment by Certhas

I generally agree about the problem with anthropomorphizing. But I don't think Anthropic are doing that. They explicitly write "in biological entities this would be considered a sign of consciousness, but we don't know how to interpret it here".

However, I disagree with your point that "it's an autoregressive function, thus it doesn't matter". Let me explain why:

Assume I do a complete neurological scan of a brain. I then implement this scan in a simulation and run it. Assume that my scan and my simulation of the biology of the brain (and the sensory and motorical inputs and outputs) is good enough that you can now have conversations with the simulation, and in all aspects, this simulation behaves exactly like you expect a human to behave.

Of course this is deterministic. If you take the state of the brain and then run it again, replaying the inputs, you get the exactly same behavior again.

I would argue that the experiences of this simulation are of the same onthological status as our own.

Now I work in dynamical systems. The autoregressive process of LLMs (hooked up to a harness providing it with inputs and outputs) is roughly in the same complexity class I would expect for a brain simulation. A physical simulation of an ODE is also an autoregressive process. The major major difference here is the existence of a latent brain state. But conversely the autoregression on sequences of hundreds of thousands of tokens is a much higher dimensional state than I expect for the latent brain state. In my view this is more an artifact of our inefficient LLM architectures, than a fundamental difference.

Now to be absolutely clear: I don't see evidence that would clearly suggest that LLMs have experiences on the same onthological status as we do. I simply believe this is a reasonable and relevant question to ask.