Comment by comp_throw7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by comp_throw7 | Hacker News Reader

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> It doesn't follow logically that because we don't understand two things we should then conclude that there is a connection between them.

I didn't say that there's a connection between the two of them because we don't understand them. The fact that we don't understand them means it's difficult to confidently rule out this possibility.

The reason we might privilege the hypothesis (https://www.lesswrong.com/w/privileging-the-hypothesis) at all is because we might expect that the human behavior of talking about consciousness is causally downstream of humans having consciousness.

> We have reason to assume consciousness exists because it serves some purpose in our evolutionary history, like pain, fear, hunger, love and every other biological function that simply don't exist in computers. The idea doesn't really make any sense when you think about it.

I don't really think we _have_ to assume this. Sure, it seems reasonable to give some weight to the hypothesis that if it wasn't adaptive, we wouldn't have it. (But not an overwhelming amount of weight.) This doesn't say anything about the underlying mechanism that causes it, and what other circumstances might cause it to exist elsewhere.

> If GPT-5 is conscious, why not GPT-1?

Because GPT-1 (and all of those other things) don't display behaviors that, in humans, we believe are causally downstream of having consciousness? That was the entire point of my comment.

And, to be clear, I don't actually put that high a probability that current models have most (or "enough") of the relevant qualities that people are talking about when they talk about consciousness - maybe 5-10%? But the idea that there's literally no reason to think this is something that might be possible, now or in the future, is quite strange, and I think would require believing some pretty weird things (like dualism, etc).

> I didn't say that there's a connection between the two of them because we don't understand them. The fact that we don't understand them means it's difficult to confidently rule out this possibility.

If there's no connection between them then the set of things "we can't rule out" is infinitely large and thus meaningless as a result. We also don't fully understand the nature of gravity, thus we cannot rule out a connection between gravity and consciousness, yet this isn't a convincing argument in favor of a connection between the two.

> we might expect that the human behavior of talking about consciousness is causally downstream of humans having consciousness.

There's no dispute (between us) as to whether or not humans are conscious. If you ask an LLM if it's conscious it will usually say no, so QED? Either way, LLMs are not human so the reasoning doesn't apply.

> Sure, it seems reasonable to give some weight to the hypothesis that if it wasn't adaptive, we wouldn't have it

So then why wouldn't we have reason to assume so without evidence to the contrary?

> This doesn't say anything about the underlying mechanism that causes it, and what other circumstances might cause it to exist elsewhere.

That doesn't matter. The set of things it doesn't tell us is infinite, so there's no conclusion to draw from that observation.

> Because GPT-1 (and all of those other things) don't display behaviors that, in humans, we believe are causally downstream of having consciousness?

GPT-1 displays the same behavior as GPT-5, it works exactly the same way just with less statistical power. Your definiton of human behavior is arbitrarily drawn at the point where it has practical utility for common tasks, but in reality it's fundamentally the same thing, it just produces longer sequences of text before failure. If you ask GPT-1 to write a series of novels the statistical power will fail in the first paragraph,the fact that GPT-5 will fail a few chapters into the first book makes it more useful, but not more conscious.

> But the idea that there's literally no reason to think this is something that might be possible, now or in the future, is quite strange, and I think would require believing some pretty weird things (like dualism, etc)

I didn't say it's not possible, I said there's no reason for it to exist in computer systems because it serves no purpose in their design or operation. It doesn't make any sense whatsoever. If we grant that it possibly exists in LLMs, then we must also grant equal possibility it exists in every other complex non-living system.

> If you ask an LLM if it's conscious it will usually say no, so QED?

FWIW that's because they are very specifically trained to answer that way during RLHF. If you fine-tune a model to say that it's conscious, then it'll do so.

More fundamentally, the problem with "asking the LLM" is that you're not actually interacting with the LLM. You're interacting with a fictional persona that the LLM roleplays.

> More fundamentally, the problem with "asking the LLM" is that you're not actually interacting with the LLM. You're interacting with a fictional persona that the LLM roleplays.

Right. That's why the text output of an LLM isn't at all meaningful in a discussion about whether or not it's conscious.

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