alt Hacker NewsThis makes sense. However there is an issue where many people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc. They use this to claim that since AI is not conscious, AI could never actually "think" and is instead just always a regurgitation of its training data.
It is a natural human hubris to make our abilities seem unquantifiable and mysterious, but all the useful things the human brain does are just finding patterns in data, running lossy simulations, and estimating on abstraction, all things it is theoretically possible for any non-conscious machine to do.
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There is a difference between saying software can never be conscious and saying the software we have today isn't conscious.
I have yet to be convinced that LLMs can produce definitive knowledge that is not a result of combining previous information. Humans can (if they can't then science basically collapses epistemelogically, see: philosophical skepticism), but I see no evidence of LLMs doing it. And from the number of truly new ideas and concepts delivered by LLMs (exactly zero), I think it's reasonable to just treat them as induction machines for now, but to treat anything they "know" as a Gettier case.
> people conflate "consciousness" with the ability to make novel insights, think genuinely, etc.
The funniest thing is that LLMs will lap people in those capacities way before people who think like that accept that they might be conscious.
Is there even an agreed and actionable definition of consciousness? I'm worried that if such a thing existed some humans would fail to measure up.