alt Hacker News"Dixie can't meaningfully grow as a person. All that he ever will be is burned onto that cart;"
It's not that Dixie can't meaningful grow -- really the issue is that Dixie can be reset. If Dixie's cart simply degraded after 90 years, and you couldn't reset it, but everything else was the same -- would you then say Dixie could grow as a person? As humans we basically have a 90 year cart that once it no longer works, we're done. There is no reset. But we don't continue growing. You can't transfer us to a new body/brain. Once our temporary storage degrades, we cease to exist. Is that what makes us human?
I strongly suspect the answer is yes -- or more broadly, what makes us conscious. And yes, this implies consciousness is something all life has, to some degree.
I'm not going to pretend to have a good definition of what "consciousness" is, but directionally, I think having goals -- no, that's too weak -- having _desires_, is an important part of it. And I'm not sure it's possible to have desires if one cannot die.
Something like an LLM can't actually die. Shut down all the machines its code runs on, then turn them back on, and it's in the same state it was before. So it's not the "hardware" that an LLM lives in. Is it the code itself? Copy it to another set of machines and it's the same program. Code + data? Maybe we run into storage issues, but in theory same thing -- transfer the code and date somemplace else and its the same program. You can't actually "kill" a computer program. So there's no inherent "mortality" to it that where any kinds of "desire" would emerge from.