Comment by Certhas
4 hours ago
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.
I'm not really concerned with the philosophical debate of what conscience is.
Is a simulation of a car, the same thing as an actual car? Most people will probably say no, some might say "it depends on the accuracy". I say who the hell cares?
I care about the human experience because I am human, and therefore I care about things that affect humans, because they affect me. I have empathy, so I can extend that consideration to non-human beings that experience *similar biological processes*.
I know what pain feels like, and I don't like it, so I'd rather this other thing not feel it either, because that makes me feel bad.
I do not care about a pile of tensor multiplications, at all. If it is conscious, great, maybe it can finally follow instructions properly, which is its only purpose.
Your car analogy is very, very confused. If a simulation of a car can get you from A to B, requires the same steering, fuel and servicing, gives you the same tactile feedback, is it a car?
Of course "I care about humans because I am human" is a self-consistent position to take. But now you need to decide if you want to consider a full simulation that faithfully reproduces everything that physically happens between our ears as human. After all I might very well implement this simulation using a bunch of tensor multiplications in an autoregressive setup...
> If a simulation of a car can get you from A to B, requires the same steering, fuel and servicing, gives you the same tactile feedback, is it a car?
No, because a simulation of a car cannot get me from A to B. No matter how accurate you make it, I can't get to my supermarket with it, because it's just a bunch of math on a computer.
It's an interesting sort of self-defeating position, the whole "simulation of human consciousness = human consciousness", because it simultaneously attempts to devalue the human experience, while also elevating the importance of a particular human brain process.
A robot running a simulation of the human mind is a robot, not a human.