Worth noting that in the limit the distribution P(human did/said A | context B) is a complete definition of human behavior. If you could model this perfectly, that would be a perfect model of a human ie identical.
And the real problem is the way humans decide sentience in the first place - by how much the machinery acts as if it were sentient. There is no other information - just our perception. If we imagine two agents, A and B, one sentient and one insentient, but both acting identically, we theoretically couldn't decide which one is which.
So whether or not there is sentience in a machine then becomes a question as unanswerable as whether there is something that exists outside the universe we can perceive. We cannot know what we cannot possibly perceive.
We do on the other hand know for a fact it's possible to run an instance of consciousness in a volume of about a liter that consumes like 20 watts (aka your average human brain), so there's something probably wrong with our general approach to the matter. GPT-3 already uses about twice as many parameters as our organic counterparts do, with much worse results. And it even doesn't have to process a ridiculously large stream of sensor data and run an entire body of muscle actuators at the same time.
This isn't accurate. GPT-3 has 175B parameters. The human brain has ~175B cells (neurons, glia, etc.) The analog to GPT-3's parameter count would be synapses, not neurons, where even conservative estimates put the human brain at several orders of magnitude larger. It's likely that >90% of the 175B could be pruned with little change in performance. That changes the synapse ratios since we know the brain is quite a bit sparser. In addition, the training dataset is likely broader than the majority of Internet users. Basically, its not an apples-to-apples comparison.
That said, I agree that simply scaling model and data is the naive approach.
If you can get GPT-like performance out of a 17B model, you should publish that.
Retrieval models (again, lots of published examples: RETRO, etc.) that externalize their data will bring the sizes down by about that order as well.
But extremely serious scientists, very smart people, are still drawing epicycles on blackboards studying “consciousness”.
Studying, even measuring the capabilities of an animal is science.
Justifying a soul is the purview of spirituality, not science. (Nothing against spirituality, I have a spiritual life, I just don’t confuse it with science).
Yeah, it's hard to quantify and isolate and experiment on, but that just speaks to either current limitations of human science, or possibly to limitations that cannot be surpassed. Given how much mileage certain philosophical movements have gotten out the common intuition that emerged during the Elightenment that everything is scientifically tractable, I understand the resistance to accepting these limitations and opening the door to all of the philosophical consequences of that intuition failing. But sorry, reality doesn't care about your philosophical attachments.
You really think that we’re a special case, that a difference in degree has become a difference in kind?
I personally experience a feeling that I’m conscious subjectively, but I have no evidence that I’m any more or less motivated by pleasure or pain or community than a dolphin is.
Where do we draw the line? What’s the acid test for “yup now we’re dealing with consciousness”?
Descartes was a genius, but he was no Alan Turing, and Alan-fucking-Turing got it wrong on the most famous thing named after him (among the lay population at least). The Turing Test was a great idea, but it’s now trivially useless.
Humans are special to (mostly) themselves and (substantially) other humans.
They are not special to the universe. We’ve had this argument, it was called the “Inquisition” at least once, and we eventually cleared up once and for all what celestial body rotates around the bigger one.