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deadbabe

These anthropomorphizations of LLMs are unhelpful in helping people understand what’s going on.

LLMs aren’t “pretending” to do anything, they don’t “know” anything.

Your AI is nothing but a blackbox of math and the inputs you’re providing are creating outputs you don’t want.

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Aren't we just black boxes of a big sack of brains?

Panpsychism proposes that a plausible theory of consciousness is that everything has consciousness, and the recognizable consciousness we have emerges from our high complexity density, but that consciousness is present in all things.

Just because dozens of people think rocks or plastic trash bins are conscious doesn't make it so – even if they name their imbecilic idea something impressive-sounding like "pansychism."

Well, how do you explain the coming of consciousness into being whereas before there was none? Souls? That's equally imebecillic.

A theory, perhaps, but not a plausible one.

I mean, consciousness is a really complicated topic. Either it's an illusion, it's a single thing that inhabits us (i.e. a soul), or there is some smaller "unit" of consciousness like they are describing, which to me does seem fairly reasonable to consider, since brains can act really weird and non-uniform in certain situations, plus most things are composed of smaller things.

You're saying it's plausible that an electron is conscious?

The definition of "conscious" is kind of the whole question, but I could probably believe that as easily as the idea that every brain of sufficient complexity gets a single unit of conscious soul that inhabits it. I really don't know how it works.

LLMs are trained to anthropomorphise themselves — their behaviour and output is what they (in the Bayesian sense of the word) "believe" users would up-vote.

While they might be semi functional cargo-cult golems mimicking us at only a superficial level*, the very fact they're trained to mimic us, means that we can model them as models of us — a photocopy of a photocopy isn't great, but it's not ridiculous or unusable.

* nobody even knows how deep a copy would even need to be to *really* be like us

I like your argument but I often wonder if my mind is nothing but a black box of math and the inputs I’m providing are creating outputs I don’t want.

In some sense physics (and with it, everything) is nothing but a black box of math.

Yeah I would say the issue isn't that it's a blackbox (which it is), but rather that they should frame their research on what's actually happening according to what we do know about LLM's. They don't "know" anything, but rather we see their generative text retain roleplaying over longer conversations as advancements in the space are made.

Your mind would still exist even when cut off from all inputs.

Your mind runs on biology, which only pauses for sleep, death, and theoretically cryonics.

Practically, cryonics is currently just fancy death in a steel coffin filled with liquid nitrogen; but if it wasn't death, if it was actually reversable, then your brain literally frozen is conceptually not that different from an AI* whose state is written to a hard drive and not updated by continuous exposure to more input tokens.

* in the general sense, at least — most AI as they currently exist don't get weights updated live, and even those that do, the connectome doesn't behave quite like ours

Yeah, if an LLM is alive/conscious, it could only be so for the course of inference, so using chatgpt would be some kind of horrific mass murder, not a conversation with another sapient entity.

> so using chatgpt would be some kind of horrific mass murder

We don't yet have useful words for what it is.

If the contexts are never deleted, it's like being able to clone a cryonics patient, asking a question, then putting the clone back on ice.

Even if the contexts are deleted but the original weights remain, is that murder, or amnesia?

Not if it was never given input.

Black box of carbon or a black box of silicon.

AI does feel like a sort of mass delusion in that people think it is sentient

"Sentience" seems to me to be used to mean many different things. One of the uses of the word is to mean "consciousness", which itself has 40 different meanings. Sometimes it's about the ability to perceive (but that's so vague it includes tape recorder dictaphones and mood rings), sometimes it requires an emotion, sometimes it requires qualia — all depends who you ask.

That makes it very difficult to discuss.

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