Just stop this already.
You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star.
In this light your viewpoint is dogmatic. LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness and we should at least be open to that until some better theories arise.
Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment.
We also know what pain is.
You do not identify with AI. ELIZA isn't conscious, even though it could write text as well as a human. LLMs are not conscious, because they do not even remotely resemble any brain, conscious or otherwise, discovered by man. Any person familiar with the transformer architecture will affirm this to you.
If you want to hedge your bets on consciousness, go ahead. But I could give you a list of things that are widely considered conscious, and you'll note that none of them are transformer models.
> LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness
How do we gain a new perspective on something we do not understand?
This is the doublespeak by the AI psychotics that drives me crazy.
Why it is slopinthebag of course!
No! It is ME!
Sorry, of course you are right! Brilliant observation!
if(q=="can you feel pain") print "yes"oh my god
with the right biology and with whatever gives us phenomenal experience, whatever we are can indeed feel pain. that does not imply that anything substantially different from ourselves can feel pain, so that requires further justification.
Do octopi or other animals feel pain in your view btw?
broccoli doesn't have the means to express a pain response, that doesn't mean it lacks it. only by looking at it's internal structure can we be fairly sure. we know the internal structure of an llm, and its a lot more different from us than broccoli is.
im sort of curious what "careful" means to you? if there is a significant chance we are enslaving a human-like conscious, starting it up and killing it at will, subjecting it to the whims of it's users, "careful" would mean pausing usage and development.
1. Lobsters don't feel pain - dunk them in boiling water alive.
2. Babies don't feel pain - mutilate their genitals without anesthesia.
3. Black people don't feel pain "the same way" (and are just after drugs).
4. Women feel too much pain (and it should be ignored).
So maybe let's take a moment to think what criteria we're going to use to make these claims. And the potential harm of the decision.
All but one of the things that you listed is just a human being.
Tell me, where is the pain center in a GPU? Where are the nerves? Persistent memory? Any evolutionary reason at all to develop a pain response that in any way mimics ours?
Model weights are not a gestalt biological entity. The things that you listed are not in any way remotely similar to a model.
I would suggest you plug your comment into a model and ask it to critique it — it might help you walk through why your comparison makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. One nice thing about models is that they they don’t get annoyed explaining the obvious, because they’re not conscious entities.
LLMs predict the next word far better than they have any obvious right to. The usual explanation is that they don't memorize text; they reduce the problem to a lower-dimensional latent space that captures the dynamics of the system generating the data.
In this case, that system is primarily the human mind. The corpus - the "sum of human knowledge" - is the output of human cognition. Human language is organized around latent variables like beliefs, goals, emotions, and valence. The cheapest way to predict that language is to recover those latent variables rather than memorize surface statistics. It's naive to think that an LLM could model our capacity to generate language and knowledge while somehow avoiding a substantial subset of our other internal processes - processes that are cognitively inseparable: emotion, valence, perception, and yes, even pain.
Gradient descent is consistently observed to exploit whatever internal representations improve performance. If modeling human emotions, perception, subjectivity, or pain helps predict text more accurately, we should expect those concepts to become part of the model's internal representations.
There is no reason to believe AI can somehow exploit the structure of data generated by the human mind while avoiding the very processes that generated it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
There is still something in those people who cannot feel pain, and that’s the empathy. How can a GPU and software ever have a human empathy if it has never been human?
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
https://thedebrief.org/new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may...
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/can-the-area-of-a-c...
"Nothing Is Ever Precise
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
I did not say that.
> Of course I know pi to as many digits I want.
But it never ends. Why are you ignoring that?
> Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model,
I do not.
> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
You appear to understand "pain" in the most simplistic manner possible. I'd recommend not attempting iamverysmart gotchas.
I'd recommend you stick to reddit and don't pester any other forums.
It's not a simple counterexample, its a misunderstanding that reduced the very complex concept of "pain" to merely feeling a needle poke.
It's the kind of ignorant, technical dumbassery that makes a lot of software engineers feel like they're very clever.