How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?
My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought.
The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?
https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-e...
People have thought they were nearly complete at least for 500 years, probably longer.
When you choose a specific model to represent the brain you are asserting you’ve accounted for everything that generates consciousness (=the lights are on, experiences qualia). This means you’ve solved the hard problem. The hard problem is debated constantly though.
In my view there is absolutely no reason to think a description of reality can be equal to reality. There are probably (in my view that is) aspects of reality, like first person internal experience, that fundamentally can not be described with third party linguistic / symbolic / representational devices.
This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.
Take this statement: "consciousness emerges from sufficient complexity in any system". Neither you or I can prove it right or wrong, but we can both make an assumption that if it was right, then there would be a way for an LLM to be conscious.
I'm not arguing that they are, I'm saying being this confident that they are not is the exact same as being confident that they are.
Mathematics is an invention of humans.
Which shouldnt be a surprise - most CS folks are disconnected ironically from reality.
I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.
The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?
I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?
It is powered while it is powered.
Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.
It'a even in their name, they model language, language is the thing that humans use to communicate, therefore they model communcating humans.
Humans are the precedent.
As it is, it would be insane for me to confidently claim you are conscious or even that you're human, as an LLM could have written the same message.
The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.
If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.
So why keep discussing?