alt Hacker NewsNot just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious?
And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when running large batches is non-deterministic, as I understand it. But, in a controlled lab, you can make a model repeat itself identically. Unless the random number generator is "conscious", I don't see a place to fit consciousness into our understanding of LLMs.
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> Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be.
Assuming your brain and the GPUs are both real physical things, where’s the magic part in your brain that makes you conscious?
(Roger Penrose knows, but no one believes him.)
> And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic
Why is indeterminism the key to consciousness?
Hm, it sounds like to you consciousness implies non-determinism, and so determinism implies a lack of consciousness - is that right? If so, why do you think so? And if not, what am I missing?
Human brains are also deterministic, though somewhat more difficult to reset to a starting state. So this seems to prove that humans aren't conscious either.
People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about whether it clears the bar for that kind of emergence. Architectural simplicity and total system complexity aren’t the same thing.
Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too.
When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities.
Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails.