alt Hacker News1. Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion, a phenomena/name of something that occurs when you bunch thinking together. Think of this objectively and base it on what we know of the brain. It literally is working off of what hardware we have, there's no magic.
2. That's just a well adapted neural network (I suspect more brain is left than you let on). Multimodal model making the most of its limited compute and whatever gpio it has.
3. Humans navigate a pre-existing map that is already built. We can't understand things in other dimensions and need to abstract this. We're mediocre at computation.
I know there's people that like to think humans should always be special.
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> Consciousness itself is probably just an illusion
This is a major cop-out. The very concept of "illusion" implies a consciousness (a thing that can be illuded).
I think you've maybe heard that sense of self is an illusion and you're mistakenly applying that to consciousness, which is quite literally the only thing in the universe we can be certain is not an illusion. The existence of one's own consciousness is the only thing they cannot possibly be illuded about (note: the contents of said consciousness are fully up for grabs)
Consciousness is an emergent behavior of a model that needs to incorporate its own existence into its predictions (and perhaps to some extent the complex behavior of same-species actors). So whether or not that is an 'illusion' really depends on what you mean by that.
1. 'Probably just an illusion' is doing heavy lifting here. Either provide evidence or admit this is speculation. You can't use an unproven claim about consciousness to dismiss concerns about conflating it with text generation.
2. Yes, there are documented cases of people with massive cranial cavities living normal lives. https://x.com/i/status/1728796851456156136. The point isn't that they have 'just enough' brain. it's that massive structural variation doesn't preclude function, which undermines simplistic 'right atomic arrangement = consciousness' claims.
3. You're equivocating. Humans navigate maps built by other humans through language. We also directly interact with physical reality and create new maps from that interaction. LLMs only have access to the maps - they can't taste coffee, stub their toe, or run an experiment. That's the difference.