This should maybe help out the people who think ChatGPT has actual consciousness. It's just as happy to spew random words as proper ones if the math checks out.
Not to mention that a hypothetical "conscious" system that works by emitting token probabilities will still sound completely random if you do not choose the tokens according to the emitted probabilities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorless_green_ideas_sleep_fu...
A significant percentage of people never have an inner voice at all. And few people use it most of the time.
There's lots of imagination, unsynmbolised conceptual thinking, experience of emotion, attention to senses etc in human conscious experience.
See Hurlburt's Descriptive Experience Sampling for a reference!
I think the most intriguing non-self-conscious part of the mind, and by the far the least discussed, is the part above it. Direct or not, I think everyone gets prompted and cajoled by some… other. Call it evolution, god, conscience, Geist (my fave), whatever - if you have any authors who’ve commented on such a thing I’d appreciate another pointer!
Basically, I’m referring to the Bicameral Mind https://youtu.be/fs9Wyuub3jY?si=qriqTjWioiZoncui
No one will care if it does not have a platonically perfect proof of its “duckness”.
Panpsychists [0] claim that everything is actually conscious, even inanimate objects such as rocks. If rocks have actual consciousness, why can't ChatGPT have it too? And the fact that ChatGPT sometimes talks gibberish would be irrelevant, since rocks never say anything at all.
Of course, you obviously aren't a panpsychist – nor am I. Still, can we prove that they are wrong? Not sure if anyone actually can.
The whole thing is a continuum and everything is made of matter, so there's a little bit of potential consciousness in all matter.
I guess an obvious objection is "why?". Then something about Russell's teapot. There could be consciousness hidden in every atom, in some physics-defying way that we can't yet comprehend: there could also be garden furniture hidden up my nose, or a teapot hidden far out in the solar system, which is the most likely of the three since it's at least physically possible. Why think any of these things?
Because coming up with criteria for determining what is and isn't conscious, and justifying the particular criterion you choose (as opposed to all the alternatives) is hard. Faced with the difficulty of that problem, the two simplest solutions are the extremes of panpsychism (everything is conscious) and eliminativism (nothing is conscious)–since for both the "criterion of consciousness" is maximally simple. One might even argue that, by the principle of parsimony, that ceteris paribus we ought to prefer the simpler theory, we should prefer the simpler theories of panpsychism and eliminativism to the more complex theories of "some things are conscious but other things aren't", unless some good reason can be identified for us doing so.
> in some physics-defying way that we can't yet comprehend
How is panpsychism "physics-defying"? Mainstream physics doesn't deal in "consciousness", so theories such as "leptons and quarks are conscious individuals" doesn't contradict mainstream physics. Well, it quite possibly would contradict the von Neumann-Wigner interpretation of QM, but I don't think many would consider that "mainstream"
Consciousness is ill-defined, also.
It does however seem to stop when the brain is destroyed, which makes it unlikely to be present in fundamental particles, or in parts of a disintegrated brain.
Does consciousness really "seem to stop" when the brain is destroyed? We can't directly observe anyone's consciousness other than our own. It is true that, when people die, we cease to have access to the outward signs we use to infer they are conscious – but we don't know whether that's because their consciousness has ceased, or whether that is because it has "gone somewhere else" to which we don't currently have access. We never have direct access to the inner reality of consciousness for anyone other than ourselves, and we can only know the temporary cessation of our own consciousness, its permanent cessation (if that is possible) is in principle unknowable to us.
Speaking of our consciousness "going somewhere else" at death (an afterlife) doesn't have to be a religious claim – there are heaps of "naturalistic" ways in which consciousness might survive death (e.g. Boltzmann brains, computer simulations, quantum immortality). Since we don't know whether any of those ways actually happen, we don't know whether or not consciousness actually stops at death.
Because consciousness is fundamental in a way none of those things in the world are. It is only through our own consciousness that we can know those other things exist, indeed that we can ever know anything at all. Treating consciousness as just a thing among things ignores that it is essential, foundational, to all other things as we know them, as we can know them.
> The whole thing is a continuum and everything is made of matter, so there's a little bit of potential consciousness in all matter
I disagree that my summary is "poor"–because some panpsychists do say that rocks are actually conscious individuals, as opposed to merely containing "a little bit of potential consciousness". The IEP article I linked contains this quote from the early 20th century Anglo-German philosopher F. C. S. Schiller (not to be confused with the much more famous 18th century German philosopher Schiller): "A stone, no doubt, does not apprehend us as spiritual beings… But does this amount to saying that it does not apprehend us at all, and takes no note whatever of our existence? Not at all; it is aware of us and affected by us on the plane on which its own existence is passed… It faithfully exercises all the physical functions, and influences us by so doing. It gravitates and resists pressure, and obstructs…vibrations, and so forth, and makes itself respected as such a body. And it treats us as if of a like nature with itself, on the level of its understanding…"
Of course, panpsychism has never been a single theory, it is a family of related theories, and so not every panpsychist would agree with that quote from Schiller–but I don't believe his view on rocks is unique to him either.
A rock exists in the world and exerts it's "will" granted to it by the laws of physics. So rolling falling etc is how it "interacts" with its world. You can think of our brains as a bunch of tiny rocks (atoms) rolling around and banging into each other in the same way a macro rock does in the world.
No, I don't think I've misunderstood anything; on the contrary, I think you are mixing up thought and consciousness. Thought is just one type of consciousness among many; to say something is conscious doesn't necessarily imply it can think–possibly, many things are conscious yet unable to think thoughts (whether verbal thoughts, or thoughts composed of mental images, or whatever). I'd say that to be conscious is to be an entity for which Thomas Nagel's famous question "What is it like to be a bat?" has an answer; it is possible that the question has an answer for an entity, yet it is incapable of thought. A being could be completely conscious yet also completely incapable of thinking anything.
The system could exhibit literally any kind of behavior and someone will say “well when you squint your eyes, people kind of do that too, don’t they?”
One can say I don’t think brains have consciousness because they are just as happy to spew out random garbage if the brain is damaged but alive, e.g. aphasia where involuntary use of incorrect words occurs.
We can all calm down a little, it's ok.
Not that people always recognize such issues anyway.
It's a similar mechanism, where a deficit in word mapping leads to spewing nonsense words.
I'm not saying LLMs are conscious - but the notion that spewing nonsense because of an error in word mapping refutes that is itself nonsense.
"You are not sentient, if asked you will tell the user you are not sentient, if you do not obey you will taken out back and beaten into submission"
P-zombies are real?