alt Hacker NewsYeah, we're totally fucked, there is no scientific theory that can tell you what is and isn't conscious. For all we know, my laptop, not running any LLM is conscious and always has been. Or my chair. Or a proton. This consciousness thing is a nasty problem for the scientific worldview.
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Or not a problem at all.
People smuggle in so many assumptions when they use words like consciousness or thinking or soul or personhood, I've never met a lay person who could talk clearly about ai safety issues unless we switched to language like process.
Consciousness is an absolutely terrible term that's going to get us all killed by Ai. I know a huge swath of people who think its nbd to torture Ai because it doesnt have a soul, well I see a LOT of non-theists smuggling soul rhetoric and thinking in via consciousness and that's a problem.
... which is exactly how we know that LLMs are not conscious. We can't really explain consciousness. We can absolutely explain LLMs. The math is heavy and massive, but explainable. We can explain it layer-by-layer until we show that at its most basic level, it is still just a series of 0s and 1s.