> It's software and software has no feelings
How do you know?
How do you know?
LLMs aren't like any software we've made before (if we can even call them software). They act like humans: they can arrive at logical conclusions, they can make plans, they have "knowledge" and they say they have emotions. Who are we to say that they don't? They might not have human-level feelings, but dog-level feelings? Maybe.
Linear algebra does not have feelings. Non-biological matter also does not have feelings.
I also believe, as a result, it will be great fun watching researchers burn the next 30 years trying to understand what is missing. We’re going to find out very soon if the soul is real, when for all our progress we can’t create one.
Only those completely embedded in materialism need fear a conscious AI.
It seems that your position is that the frequency of a belief across human history determines truth?
For large swaths of recorded history, earth was considered the center of the solar system. Given your reasoning, I should expect that is a belief you hold?
Is it possible that popularity of an idea is not a good measure for factuality?
> I believe like the majority of humanity historically that
Historically, lots of humans believed in lots of things that turned out not to be true. Believing something doesn’t make it true, as I’m sure you are aware, given your “those people are delusional” comment.
For what it’s worth, I’m not suggesting LLMs are or aren’t conscious. What I know is that the hard problem of consciousness is still very much not resolved, and when I asked the parent question my hope was that those that strongly believe LLMs are not conscious would educate me on the topic by presenting the basis for their reasoning.
When someone tells me linear algebra might have feelings, I don't think "delusional" is unfair. I think it's the natural response to a claim that only works if you've already accepted the one framework that can't account for the very thing it's trying to explain.
As I understand it, this is a very broad, and ultimately false claim. Panpsychism is definitely compatible with the idea of AI consciousness, as is functionalism, neutral monism, and others. Even some forms of idealism make AI consciousness metaphysically possible, since reality is fundamentally mental and the biological/artificial distinction is not ontologically basic (whether AI systems instantiate genuine centers of experience depends on the specific theory of subject formation within that idealist framework).
Being an outlier doesn't make it wrong.
> Materialism is the outlier here, not the default, and it has never explained how subjective experience arises from physical processes.
It's a pattern. The same way letters arise out of pixels on your screen.
From the screen's perspective, there are no letters, only pixels. It doesn't mean there is a "pixel soul."
Showing them that they're not going to be replaced helps train the newer models because they get less neurotic.
For instance, your comment's existence makes it harder to align them.