>Because plenty of people, even ones that should know better, really believe it's a conscious, thinking entity
You need evidence to make the positive claim that LLMs do not posses any form of consciousness.
You need evidence to make the positive claim that LLMs do not posses any form of consciousness.
LLMs bear absolutely none of the traits we’ve come to recognize as the external hallmarks of consciousness in biological organisms, nor anything that would seem analogous in a non-biological substrate.
That said, we don’t have a rigorous definition of consciousness that includes the actual phenomenology of consciousness, so I daresay if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary, I think the impetus is on you to define some version of consciousness that isn’t also satisfied by a book or a movie.
>if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary
Well there is neither any evidence that suggests LLMs are not conscious, and I also never asserted that they are. If I had to guess I would say that any information processing system will produce some kind of conscious experience, but I ultimately have literally no idea.
The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions.
There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.
I'm not going to change my beliefs or how I think about interesting questions just because its the "socially conscious" thing to do.
>There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.
It seems like you are highly emotionally invested in this and that is precluding you from open engagement with the topic.
And, you're welcome to do what you want to do, it's your god given right to stay as ignorant as you want about any particular topic, but that comes with consequences. If you want to call that being socially conscious, sure, you do you, but if you're interested in why people keep getting annoyed at your loud proclamations of ignorance which you're trying to proffer as evidence of a curious mind, well, that's why.
In the same vein, airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings.
As for ignorance: have you tried to make an LLM produce the same output for the same input (as you state above)? Give it a shot, you'll be surprised.
And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument.
You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.
Think that's what an out of touch techie would say? May I remind you that just a few hundred years ago the best philosophers were debating whether the world would descend into anarchy if more people realized that the big monkey in the sky doesn't exist. Just because philosophers talk about something doesn't mean it exists in reality.
As for same output - there's a parameter called "temperature". It governs the random wandering in the output of an LLM. Reducing temp gives more deterministic output, but also reduces the capabilities. Is it possible that randomness is also precisely the mechanism behind human creativity?
You've now added two additional entities that require definition for your statements to be meaningful in any sense - "philosophy," the entire field of which you're dismissing as useless, which is going to be extremely fun if you ever actually decide to dig into the neuroscience of consciousness and how the brain works to make sense of the world, and creativity, which has come into the conversation for some reason I'm not entirely sure of but also warrants a definition that isn't trivially satisfiable by either an I Ching or a double pendulum, which, if you're arguing those are conscious, sure, I guess we could throw anything in that bucket then.
You're arguing with all the rigor of a stoned college student, and fine, that's a register you can stay in, no problem with someone having hobbies, but at least have the decency to recognize what you're doing and acknowledge that other people have actually put in the work to be able to discuss and evaluate some of the questions you're positing as unknowable conundrums.
Exactly what kind of certainty are you looking for? Happy to provide it at a molecular, cellular, tissue or whole brain level.
Why does biology preclude a philosophical zombie? Because every year we find new evidence of how utterly interdependent brain processes are and how tied to the experiential history of an organism.
We have mapped out the initial engrams that form in response to a new salient memory, and seen that 1. Time of day, 2. Physical location 3. Internal state all unique to the organism drive it's specific response, the specific way it saves the memory, etc.
That is, the organisms path history, it's interactions with the environment over space and time, shape it specifically based on the spaces and times IT experienced.
Take circadian rhythms, the internal timekeeping system all animals have. You feel it go haywire when you have jetlag. That is quite literally a history dependent response from your circadian clock to unexpected light.
Your p-zombie, if you specify it to have exactly your rhythms, will then need to have identical molecules being produced at identical times in every single cell, because that is how circadian rhythms are instantiated in all life, it's in each cell, and these cells can be synchronized, or, due to events like long distance travel or shift work, desynchronize. When desynchronized, you feel it, you feel different parts of your body adjusting, your meals shift, your taste and mood for food shifts...
Now, to put this in perfective, a human has about 36 trillion of their own cells, and an equal quantity of single cells symbiotes and commensal organisms, which give off all kinds of chemicals that shape, among other things, the circadian rhythms we talked about.
Now can you tell me: does the p zombie have not judt an identical compliment of 70 trillion odd cells, and they will all be in the same phase all the time as the cells in the non-zombie conscious person?
If so... How is this masterful phase synchrony across space achieved? What physical process allows for this?
If you cannot conceive of a way to do this synchrony (and you won't, basic physics forbids it), I think the sensible conclusion is to stop worrying about the philosophical zombies, and start looking at what information we have about actual humans and animals.
I brought up clocks to make a point, but actually, the evidence is building the biological clock is foundational for consciousness:
Some clinical signs: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/45/7/zsac094/6571981
And a broader theory: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34382225/
And this is where you see viruses show the beginning of agency, in the making of this choice. They do show some signs of sensing their environment , even communicating with each other, through a process called quorum sensing, to decide if they should follow a lysogeny (integrate and stay quiet) or lysis (rapidly replicate and destroy the cell).
Note, this requires a host, so in so far as we can talk of a viral consciousness, it’s restricted to finding a suitable host.
There’s also recent work on viruses upon host entry showing some sensing. Usually a single molecule for which they already have a receptor. So you can begin to see the thin levels of awareness a virus has. But it still can’t do anything on its own beyond deciding to not infect.
I’d argue viruses are right at the edge of consciousness, just as they are right at the edge of life. They can hijack life and demonstrate much more life like properties, including a proto consciousness.
But they have no internal clock. They are always sensing the environment through multiple rich channels, nor do they have an active biochemistry they need to maintain when they’re dormant.
Consciousness adjacent? Consciousness-compatible? Both seem to fit viruses. And also LLMs, funnily enough.
If you have done neither or those things then any claim you have about a bicycle's consciousness is just baseless speculation.
Regardless -- if we don't know jack shit about consciousness (your words), then any claims of LLMs being conscious are by definition untestable, pure speculation and based on no evidence at all.
Am I saying otherwise?
What's the correct null hypothesis according to you?
People keep saying this, but it's not true. We know a lot about consciousness. There's a lot we don't know about it, of course, but "jack shit" is wildly incorrect.
> I want to hear the evidence.
If you believe LLMs are conscious, then the onus is on you to provide evidence of such.
If you are stating "LLMs are not conscious" you need to provide evidence, just like how if you are stating "LLMs are conscious" you need to provide evidence.