alt Hacker NewsI think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism.
So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably tons of data pattern that LLM can learn from to be able to reproduce a sentence continuation that is convincing without having to learn the specific mechanism that is "conscious".
For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing. If indeed the only way to produce sentence continuation convincingly would be by "simulating a brain", then it would not explain the first LLM from several years ago (before the extra layers of RLHF, ...). They were able to have quite convincing conversation on a lot of non-trivial aspect, and yet failed on some aspects that should have been basic for a system that would have been trained to work like a human brain. It shows that it is possible to "cleverly disguise examples of sentence continuation" without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being.
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> I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing.
There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. Evolution learns various solutions to optimization problems, and so if consciousness evolved then it was either useful instrumentally, or it is a byproduct of some organization that is useful instrumentally. The point is that as a solution to certain kinds of optimization problems, consciousness can conceivably be the solution to the optimization problem of predicting the next token of text written by humans who themselves have complex phenomenology. There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.
>For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing
World models don't have to be rich and detailed to count as a world model. Lower life forms might be conscious but they only model the part of the world useful for their existence in their ecological niche.
> a flaw in the logic [...] mechanism
Similar to: "Birds fly, my spinning helical device flies, therefore we've started to replicate how birds fly."
> without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being
One of the elements I expect in a conscious being is that you can't rewrite it by changing the introductory paragraph.
When it comes to LLMs, almost every "mind" we humans perceive is a fictional character in an LLM-generated story-document, one we are either reading or which is being "acted" at us by regular code. Our own instinct for pareidolia and simulating/inferring other minds is very strong, which means we should require really good evidence/logic to counter our instincts.
Even if one believes the LLM has a single "real mind" as an author of every document... what evidence do we have that it is conscious or "self-inserting" itself as one of the characters in the document?
I think, for me, the thing is that when you tutor undergrads in abstract math, you discover that students will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mathematical principle.
sometimes humans making claims about AI intelligence or consciousness also identify spurious patterns that do not correspond to the problems of intelligence or hard consciousness.
I didn't make the claim that a model can learn consciousness.
Understanding is not consciousness.
Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness.
Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be structurally designed to not have consciousness.
This is a case where acting is very credible. Understanding of other's consciousness, in a functional and third party sense, isn't a substrate for personal experience.
In stark contrast, humans develop consciousness gradually over continuous time with persistent aggregation of experience. By the time we can recognize our own consciousness in the abstract, and reason about it, we have had it for some time.