From the folks who think this is obviously ridiculous, I'd like to hear where Schwitzgebel is missing something obvious.
> At a broad, functional level, AI architectures are beginning to resemble the architectures many consciousness scientists associate with conscious systems.
If you can find even a single published scientist who associates "next-token prediction", which is the full extent of what LLM architecture is programmed to do, with "consciousness", be my guest. Bonus points if they aren't already well-known as a quack or sponsored by an LLM lab.
The reality is that we can confidently assert there is no consciousness because we know exactly how LLMs are programmed, and nothing in that programming is more sophisticated than token prediction. That is literally the beginning and the end of it. There is some extremely impressive math and engineering going on to do a very good job of it, but there is absolutely zero reason to believe that consciousness is merely token prediction. I wouldn't rule out the possibility of machine consciousness categorically, but LLMs are not it and are architecturally not even in the correct direction towards achieving it.
You seem to be confusing the training task with the architecture. Next-token prediction is a task, which many architectures can do, including human brains (although we're worse at it than LLMs).
Note that some of the theories Schwitzgebel cites would, in his reading, require sensors and/or recurrence for consciousness, which a plain transformer doesn't have. But neither is hard to add in principle, and Anthropic like its competitors doesn't make public what architectural changes it might have made in the last few years.
There is a section on the Chinese Room argument in the book.
(I personally am skeptical that LLMs have any conscious experience. I just don't think it's a ridiculous question.)
What is? That you can run us on paper? That seems demonstrably false
And unless you believe in a metaphysical reality to the body, then your point about substrate independence cuts for the brain as well.
The hypothetical AI you and he are talking about would need to be an order of magnitude more complex before we can even begin asking that question. Treating today's AIs like people is delusional; whether self-delusion, or outright grift, YMMV.
What point do you think he's trying to make?
(TBH, before confidently accusing people of "delusion" or "grift" I would like to have a better argument than a sequence of 4-6 word sentences which each restate my conclusion with slightly variant phrasing. But clarifying our understanding of what Schwitzgebel is arguing might be a more productive direction.)
No we don't? We understand practically nothing of how modern frontier systems actually function (in the sense that we would not be able to recreate even the tiniest fraction of their capabilities by conventional means). Knowing how they're trained has nothing to do with understanding their internal processes.