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Comment by andrei_says_ | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of arguments on this website where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs.

From my perspective, the disconnect you describe is one of the main reasons this term cannot be applied.

Another reason is that the argument for calling LLMs conscious arises from the perspective of thinking and reasoning grounded in language.

But in my personal experience, thinking in language is just a small emerging quality of human consciousness. It is just that the intellectuals making these arguments happen to be fully identified with the “I think therefore I am” aspect of it and not the vastness of the rest.

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> where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs

They have all drunk too much AI cool-aid. I doubt these people have any meaningul education in fields such as biology, neuroscience and related life sciences.

Quite simply, we don't yet understand how consciousness arises. There are a lot of theories, but they are just that—theories.

Related reading: Antonio Damasio wrote a book in 1994 with the spicy title, Descartes' Error[1] to rebut his famous quote that you cite.

Also look up "Somatic Marker Hypothesis" by Damasio.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes%27_Error

You've read Wittgenstein haven't you?

I have and to quote Wittgenstein all this is like saying the machine has a toothache.

It is just complete nonsense.

No one believes a pocket calculator is thinking just because it produces the correct output.

To believe the LLM is thinking you have to find the demarcation between the pocket calculator and the LLM. Good luck with that.

Actually there are people who believe that a calculator is "thinking" just a tiny bit, and that LLMs are thinking a bit more.

To believe that a human is thinking, you have to find the demarcation between a brain and a neuron. Then between a neuron and a cell. Then between a cell and a protein. Then between a protein and a molecule.

Good luck with that.

Proof is nevertheless in the pudding

Alas, I cannot even prove there is any conscious being in the universe at all besides myself. Obviously proof is the goal, but our existing "self-evidently true" understanding of this problem space also has effectively zero proven foundation.

Proof isn't the goal here. Centuries of thought and experimentation have made it clear that we currently have no ability to decisively determine whether something is conscious.

However, as humans we intuitively build projections of what we believe is the internal world of other beings. We also clearly believe there is a continuum of complexity of thought among all the beings that we have observed.

The question then becomes, what behaviors of computer programs match up with what we consider conscious behaviors of other beings we have observed? This is a necessary question because we don't have access into the internal states of others, so we have to interrogate the full complexity of what we believe represents consciousness, and whether these beings match those behaviors.

Not really. Meditation + other experiences.

Yeah. Understandable.

I don’t know about others, but this is definitely not why I question whether LLMs are conscious or not.

I don’t think you should presume to know the reason people raise this idea.

I come to an identical conclusion over and over again, and couldn't have put it better myself.

You’re right of course, I can only presume, deduct, or, project others’ experiences.

Do you hypothesize LLMs to be conscious? Could you expand?

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