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Comment by karpierz | Hacker News Reader

> Although I lean towards you on this, we don't have a definition good enough to test against, so we can't tell if it is or isn't.

I don't think a definition of consciousness is possible in any objective sense, as consciousness is by definition, a subjective experience.

A more useful question is why ask if LLMs are conscious?

ex:

1. Are you trying to decide whether shutting them off is ethical?

2. Are you trying to figure out how to manipulate them to ask your questions correctly?

3. Are you trying to answer whether they can replicate anything a human can do?

When the contextual question that prompts the word "consciousness" is defined, we can make progress in determining whether something is "conscious".

For example, if it's a question of ethics, then you follow up by defining your ethical framework.

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I think the ethical question is the only one that really requires even discussing consciousness.

Unless there are externally observable things that can't or are unlikely to be done without consciousness, which doesn't seem to be a solved question either.

But even the ethical question is straight forward.

LLM definitely don’t suffer, and we are happy “shutting off” a dog which both can suffer and has some greater level of consciousness. So, yes, it’s fine to shut off LLMs

Society may be happy doing that to a dog, I am not. Nor am I happy doing that to animals which are turned into dog meat. Contradictions abound with more than a superficial glance on many moral topics, in part due to our lack of any of omniscience, omnipotence, nor omnibenevolence.

But we aren’t talking about you. We are talking about us, society. And it’s unequivocal.

Society is made up of individuals.

200 years ago, some societies were fine with slavery. Enough individuals rejected it and society changed.

What you say only works insofar as "ethics" means only the rules of your society and not any person or group; this would also reject the "E" from PETA, the USA declaration of independence, and the Suffragettes.

Okay. So we kill and keep dolphins captive. We eat octopus. We run experiments on monkeys.

This happens globally. For 1000s of years. There is no global or even local movement to stop treating conscious animals any better… which is exactly my point, AI in its current state is less than that. So until we as a society want to tackle consciousness animals I don’t think we will tackle consciousness in AI

I don't think ethics involves consciousness either; you can't inspect other people's consciousness, so how can you put ethical weight on it?

You can assume that other people are conscious like you, and so you put ethical value on that. But then you're really putting ethical value on "being like me", irrespective of whether other people are or are not conscious.

> But then you're really putting ethical value on "being like me", irrespective of whether other people are or are not conscious.

I can't find flaw with that, but I wish it were not so. I want it to be about consciousness being special rather than brain structure chauvinism.

"Unless there are externally observable things that can't or are unlikely to be done without consciousness..."

If it weren't, why would it have evolved in the first place? It seems me not unlikely that the only way we can accurately surmise what's going on inside the heads of other people (an obvious survival advantage) is to have that subjective experience of what's going on inside our own.

> For example, if it's a question of ethics, then you follow up by defining your ethical framework.

A. I oppose the forcing into unpaid labor and/or murder of sentient beings.

B. We do not know (to a satisfactory degree) what constitutes sentience.

C. Given B, we do not know whether LLMs are sentient. [1]

D. Given A and C, we should exercise extreme caution when it comes to making LLMs widely available, at least until B is resolved.

[1] Indeed, solipsists posit that we cannot even be certain that other humans are sentient.

There are a number of issues with your reasoning here.

The main one that my previous post was getting at was (A) is not an axiom in your ethical framework; it's derived. And I think you'll find if you try and build up to (A) from base principles, sentience won't be a condition of the ethics of an action.

A secondary one is that (C) is true regardless of what you replace LLMs with, because you've outright state that you don't have a means to judge what sentience is. You could take your argument and use it for:

- Humans

- Cats

- Ants

- Car engines

- Rocks

- Air

And it will hold, since you aren't relying on any particular properties of LLMs to make your case.

(A) is just sentiocentrism, which isn’t a novel ethical view. There’s a pretty extensive Wikipedia page on it [1].

Regarding your second point, indeed we can’t truly know whether or not anything is sentient, so we must reason in terms of probabilities.

We can observe some degree of understanding and emotion in humans, cats (and other animals), and LLMs. We also consider (in the case of humans and animals) that their brains are probably biologically similar to ours, and (in the case of LLMs) that their neural nets are weakly modeled after our brains.

When we consider car engines, rocks, or air, we cannot observe any degree of understanding or emotion (though indeed we can never be certain). We also do not observe any probable similarities to our brains.

Therefore, we arrive at the conclusion that P(other humans sentient) > P(cats sentient) > P(ants sentient) >> P(engines sentient) > P(rocks or air sentient).

This leads us to apply the precautionary principle [2] to humans, animals, and LLMs, but not to engines, rocks, or air.

But indeed, ethical questions around the uncertainty of sentience aren’t novel either. Wikipedia also has a page on this topic [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentiocentrism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle#Animal...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_uncertain_sentience

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