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hackinthebochstoday at 12:59 AM1 replyview on HN

> 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.


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trescenzitoday at 1:17 AM

> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake.

> There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.

We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or cannot be conscious a priori can’t be done.

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