> I know it doesn't experience joy or surprise or empathy.
You don't know. You strongly feel that you know. There's no standard procedure to assess the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
You don't know. You strongly feel that you know. There's no standard procedure to assess the existence of phenomenal consciousness.
But with what I know of people and what I know of matrix multiplication, I have a strong suspicion.
A matmul (or a fixed finite sequence of matmuls) is not Turing-complete. An LLM that produces answer in the number of steps that is proportional to the length of the answer is not Turing-complete. An LLM with CoT that produces answer after a number of steps, which is determined by the LLM itself, is Turing-complete.
So, we do have a qualitative step between a matmul and modern LLMs. Of course, it doesn't guaranty having feelings, but it doesn't allow to simply dismiss the notion due to sheer computational inadequacy.
A machine is not turing complete, but by running it recursively on its own output, turing completeness emerges.
Who knows at what stage of intricacy consciousness emerges?
Arguably, either it does at some point, or it never does and we requiere the supernatural soul.
So, if it does, we can't disregard the possibility that we've reached it already.
Please.
You know it doesn’t experience joy, surprise or empathy too. You absolutely, undoubtedly know that.
First things first. You are wrong. I don't have a gut feeling that LLMs have no phenomenal states. Not anymore. I was skeptical that LLMs can form complex internal representations. Mechanistic interpretability has shown that they can. I'm still skeptical in regard to introspective mechanisms. One token being fed back into the network and KV cache update do seem lacking in comparison to the ubiquitous recurrent connections in the brain.
What I do know is that philosophy hasn't produced an operationalized definition of qualia. So, we need to approach the problem of LLMs' phenomenal states from other angles.
For example, we can argue that LLMs lack something, which seems to be relevant to the problem: a biological substrate, generality (non-CoT LLMs aren't Turing-complete), "something something feedback"[1], and things like that.
"Admit that you know that" is boring.
[1] I'm referring to https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa...
Reality is under no obligation to be fun. It might be boring but it is the truth.
The fact that you needed such effort to try and give this position any shred of sense only serves as proof of how nonsensical it is to do so.
The inability of people to reflect on their own beliefs amazes me to no end. How can you know that LLMs have no phenomenal states?
For example, I believe that rocks (ordinary rocks, not silicon chips) have no phenomenal states because for all we know they don't do any kind of information processing (relevant to self-reflection, at least) and I don't believe in panpsychism or dualism.