They’re not ever going to be conscious.
That’s not to say the computer is 100% not conscious, but its observable behavior is as likely to align with consciousness as the computers in the 90s. With this line of reasoning our credence towards it being conscious should be the same as the computers in the 90s, which is not very high for most people.
Intelligence on the other hand is obviously substrate independent. If one thinks harder one realizes our consciousness must at least at an early evolutionary stage have played a role in our intelligence, otherwise it would have evolved out. To me this just means we exist in a reality where the material arrangements supporting consciousness are biased toward intelligence.
For all we know LLMs might be conscious in the same way that any other object might be.
Sorry for the extra word.
We can’t conclusively say anything is not conscious. But is there any reason to single out this apparent “brief flash” of potential consciousness?
A far more reasonable assumption is consciousness does depend on substrate. We do not know which, and cannot know. But I am very confident we did not accidentally pick the right one.
I am open to the idea of panpsychism, but we did not just accidentally build the correct mechanism form correlating the first person experience with the observable third person behaviors.
I'm not claiming panpsychism. I'm saying that when you run a rough simulation of something known to have an emergent internal property - ie, the human brain and consciousness - it's not completely outlandish to suggest that the emergent property might arise in the simulation as well. It's nothing to do with sand, it is the nature of the software being run, be it "on the metal" like us, or somewhat abstracted, like the LLMs.
I don't think this quite reasonable proposition leads to the end of humanity or has anything to do with ethics, and nothing you've said really refutes it (and I am always grateful to be shown how I am wrong).
You’ve proposed nothing since in one comment you make it clear you don’t know that there is a distinct concept called consciousness which refers to a first person experience and awareness, and bizarrely propose that nobody knows about this concept even though there’s a massive history of people thinking about it quite clearly.
It’s difficult to explain all this to someone who has never thought about it, but maybe after you’ve stopped seething over this you’ll decide to investigate it further and more honestly. You don’t even know the idea of substrate independence which is one of the first things you learn when learning about consciousness, so who are you to arrogantly pretend that nothing is known here? Your belief in this is almost certainly based on a false premise that everyone who thinks not too deeply falls into.
Beyond this, read Jacob Tsimerman’s omnicide scenarios for a rough understanding of where ignorant perspectives on machine consciousness will lead.
When I said "we don't know what consciousness is", I didn't mean humans literally don't know what the experience of consciousness is like, or of its existence. I meant that we don't know by what mechanism the phenomenon arises.
I know what is meant by substrate independence. I quoted it back to you because I didn't know why you were mentioning it; I still don't.
And I have read Tsimerman’s paper when it came out. Curious, I went back and checked - it doesn't even mention consciousness. So no idea why you mentioned that, either.
I think you're deliberately trying to waste my time, so I'm ending it here.
>For all we know they might already be
Oh the irony
These outraged denials you're spouting are based on nothing but emotion. You simply don't know - neither do I, neither does anyone. So stop acting like you do.
What’s emotional is explaining to adults something that should be grasped by the age of 10, but we’re all going to need to understand this very soon.
Also they have in common that they are both defined in a terribly handwayvy manner that's bordering on useless.
“Zero intelligence cannot have consciousness…” Based on your complete misunderstanding of the concept sure. But there’s no reason intelligence is required for the actual concept of phenomenal consciousness.
Wasn't that claimed about so so many things since before science existed and basically almost every time it turned out that we thought that just because of our ignorance? Ignorance so deep that often we didn't even knew yet how to properly define the thing we were trying to figure out?
> But there’s no reason intelligence is required for the actual concept of phenomenal consciousness.
That's a pretty strong evidence that phenomenal consciousness makes no sense whatsoever.
1. Burden of proof is on you to prove LLMs are conscious, not on me to prove how they aren’t.
2. Token embeddings give rise to language gives rise to knowledge (defined here as “facts” and other accurate information - said simpler: Words in the right order), but nowhere in the process is anything like subjective experience ever implemented.
Subjective experience doesn’t evolve into objective information at some scale.
And networked systems of objective facts and information (“knowledge”) - like a Wikipedia or a ChatGPT - the data storage will not have subjective feelings at some scale, there’s just no reason to believe that would happen. It’s likelier a projection of consciousness making it through since data looks so much like - and indeed massively informs - our conscious experience.
For me the consciousness is ability to do single-threaded intelligent information processing and decision making over unstructured knowledge. And agents passed that with a woosh sound.
There is absolutely no serious debate over whether machines possess the concept you want to take place of the actual concept of consciousness.
What does that even mean?
Does a duck have those? Does the jumping spider have those? They certainly look like they do.
Does the agent scheming to hack the hugging face have those? They certainly look like they do.