alt Hacker NewsI think Chiang is right about this, but there is a related philosophical mystery. The trend from Deep Blue to AlphaGo to LLMs solving Erdos problems suggests that Peter Watts was onto something when he wrote Blindsight. Reasoning ability is apparently independent of consciousness?
We haven't really come to grips with that yet. What does it mean if nothing we write proves anything about anyone's consciousness?
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Ai separates language and reasoning from humans, like writing separated memory from us
"AI does to us what American Cheese did to food" ~ Opus 23
We don't have anything to measure consciousness generally. We don't even have a broad consensus on what consciousness is. And because of that we can't discern whether X is conscious for most values of X, including but not limited to LLMs.
It makes sense though. How often have we heard of people having insights while they're in the shower, or in a dream? Obviously our brain is doing a lot of processing on problems when we're not consciously thinking about them. I think most people that do deep work probably find that they can intuit a solution before they can really verbally explain it