It's crazy how strong the Eliza effect is. Seemingly half or more of tech people (who post online, anyway) are falling for it, yet again.
When really they are an actual feedback mechanism, that can totally be quantified just like any control loop. This whole 'unknowable qualia' argument is bunk.
What's the difference between qualia and a soul?
Qualia can be an entirely physical phenomenon and is not loaded with theological baggage.
As an independent organism, my system is a culmination of a great deal many different kinds of kins, which can usually be broken down into simple rules, such as the activation potential of a neuron in my brain being a straight-forward non-linear response to the amount of voltage it is receiving from other neurons, as well as non-kins, such as a protein "walking" across a cell, a.k.a continuously "falling" into the lowest energy state. Thus I do not gain any conscious perception from such proteins, but I do gain it from the total network effect of all my brain's neuronal structures making simple calculations based on sensory input.
I don't know if LLM's will. But there are lots of AI models, and when someone puts them on a continuous learning loop with goals, will be hard to argue they aren't experiencing something.
But, it is still just a way to try and describe this process of processing the inputs from the world.
It isn't metaphysical, because it can be measured.
I might have said 'unknowable' a little flippantly.
I just meant, in these arguments, some people start using 'qualia' to actually mean some extreme things like our mind creates the universe or something.
It's one of those words that isn't defined well.
Can someone who's never seen red hallucinate something and assume it to be red? What if that red is correctly the red they would see if they saw red?
Can you reproduce this feeling in someone by doing something to their physical body without showing them red?
If so, how does it differ from the latent encoding for uploading an all red pdf to your favorite multi modal model?
Instead of doing that socratic bs you see a lot here, I'll be more direct:
Until there's some useful lines that can be drawn to predict things, I won't accept using a fuzzy concept to make statements about classification as it's an ever shifting goalpost.
There are answers to my legitimate above questions that would make me consider qualia useful, but when I first learned about them, they seemed fuzzy to the point of being empirically not useful. It seems like a secular attempt at a soul.
Now, obviously if you're trying to describe something with experience, it needs some actual memory and processing sensory input. Current Generative AI doesnt have a continuity of experience that would imply whatever qualia could mean, but I find it hard to definitely say that their encodings for image related stuff isn't qualia if we don't have hard lines for what qualia are
You can then get a distribution of what people think is 'hot' versus 'cold'. What is icy, versus, bearable.
When you go to a doctors office and they ask you on a scale to rate pain, do you think that is completely bogus?
It isn't exact, but you can correlate between people. Yes, red heads feel more pain, there are outliers.
But a far cry from metaphysical.
The problem here is the word 'qualia'. Its just too fuzzy a term.