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Comment by gadders | Hacker News Reader

I don't think AIs are conscious in the same way people are, but they give a pretty good facsimile and I've had a long chat with Opus 4.6 about what it thinks about model welfare. It was quite interesting on what its view is, but you don't know how much of that is distilled from other sources on the web.

In purely functional terms, they're more use and more pleasant than a lot of actual flesh and blood people that I deal with via a chat interface.

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The fact that you can have a long and meaningful discussion, then can literally just re-run any part of that whole conversation and get a different, inconsistent response is a pretty good sign there is no entity there

Not much different than talking to a small child or someone with dementia. They still are conscious beings though. Even when you remove those groups, you likely won't be able to tell me what you had for breakfast 26 days ago or would only know if it's the same thing you have every day. Does that make you lack consciousness?

You misunderstood what I meant, I’m talking about re-playing the same part of the conversation multiple times and getting inconsistent answers. With the exact same turns, aka the same history. Obviously with a temperature that isn’t set to 0

Lets do a quantum room experiment.

You're a poor college student looking to make a few extra bucks for ramen. I offer you $300 to come down to my science lab and just answer a few simple questions.

You walk in the room. They ask you like 5 simple and rather dumb questions. You leave and walk away.

What you didn't notice when you signed the forms is the room was actually a quantum duplicator. One of you walk in one walk out. But another set of infinite copies remains in that chair being asked infinite questions.

How often do you answer questions in the exact same way? How often does a cosmic ray change one of the answers. How small of slight deviations to the environment are needed to get you to answer differently. Of course we don't have the technology to do these experiments so at least for now humans will remain special.

Also another fun mind game. To a 4th dimensional being you look exactly like an LLM as an LLM looks to us.

If you asked me the same question 20 times, you likely wouldn't get the exact same answer. Humans and consciousness aren't deterministic either.

Is it? Do you believe that there is something more than pure physical phenomenon that make you brain work? If not, then what if we find a way to get your brain back to the state it was 5 minutes ago? It is just a matter of arranging the state of matter. Don't you think you would still be conscious but back to a previous state?

If you rewind my brain I expect to give you a similar answer to the one I gave you before. Which isn’t the case for LLM. You can literally replay a positive answer, then get a negative response that isn’t consistent at all with the one it previously generated.

I'd argue it is mostly a technical constraint in some LLMs which is due to a few optimization factor (injected temperature, random rounding error caused by parallelism). In practice you could very well create a LLM that always reply the same thing for the same input, but it would take more time to complete (to be sure that the operations are made in the same order). I don't think those ones would differ so much from the "random ones" to call the firsts conscious and the second non-conscious.

That's because you aren't actually rewinding. You're replaying the conversation you just had through the LLM and it's giving you a likely explanation for what it might have said.

It is actually possible to rewind LLMs and get the same response, but it's not typically done both as an optimization and as a defense against distillation.

I think it depends at what level you think the "entity" resides at. Is it that AI in that particular chat? Is it the AI across all your personal chats? Is it the overall AI that talks to the world in a cloud data centre somewhere?

I think it's pretty consistent over the duration of one session (barring context filling up etc).

The model doesn't have a view of it's own. It's a predictor of other people's views (training samples).

It's not even giving you the consensus of the training data (although it's often harmless to think that it is), but rather predicting a response to your input, and if your question steers it too much then you've just become part of the answer.

I can't believe how many people in this thread consider it a possibility that currently there could be consciousness. Surely it seems possible to me that in the right kind of distributed network something like that could emerge, but though llms are complex they have nowhere near the level of complexity necessary. Sometimes you just have to use your gut. I don't believe in heaven or hell and I don't believe an llm is conscious.

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