logoalt Hacker News

lbrandyyesterday at 6:23 AM1 replyview on HN

> Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted.

The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _you_ are conscious given what we know about how you work. You can't ignore the second half of this problem when making statements like this... because many of the obvious ways to argue that clearly LLMs aren't conscious would also apply to you.


Replies

bloppeyesterday at 4:31 PM

I wouldn't say that we actually know how our brains work. Based mainly on my neuroscience minor from 10 years ago I'd say that understanding feels hopelessly far away.