Comment by semiquaver
9 hours ago
> very different from what humans would call conscious
I mean, what would you call conscious? The word literally means “aware; responding to one’s surroundings.” By that definition most any animal is conscious and LLM+Harness combos have been conscious for a while.
I think the real issue is that when most people refer to consciousness, they have their own subjective experience in mind which strongly resists any tidy definition. I think it’s extraordinarily unlikely LLMs have anything like this, but they are far more able to effectively respond to their surroundings than most animals and in some areas better than humans.
So if you’re waiting for proof that an LLM has an inner life basically equivalent to your own, you’ll be waiting a long time. After all, other humans can’t even prove the fact of their own consciousness to you! They could just be replaying their training data at you in a way that is merely a convincing but false simulation of the true consciousness which you experience inside your head.
I strongly disagree that llm's are conscious of their environment. Even an insect reacts to light and someone attempting to swat at it. An llm barely even receives input from its environment.
By your rules, LLMs & deaf-blind people are not conscious, but self-driving cars are? Also a brain in a vat is not conscious?
The real answer is that we don't know if LLMs are conscious, and we don't really know how we'd that figure out. I guess if an AI wrote a philosophy paper on consciousness that had new insights, that might change some minds. But even that would fail to convince most people.
Again, by our own choices and somewhat hardware limitations.
There is nothing stopping you from adding any kind of sensors you want during a training to an LLM, except money and GPU power at this point.
This seems no different to me at least then someone back in the 80's telling me computers were useless because they were so slow. Hardware only gets faster and more efficient from here.
people define consciousness quite differently but it generally has to do with phenomenal experience. your provided definition would make a self-driving car conscious, which is fine to argue, but probably not intended.