alt Hacker NewsThe key point here, I think, and why it's necessary to have read the original story, is that being able to express an idea is not the same as that idea being correct.
You could go through and change all the points in the original story to be about a toaster instead. It would require you to edit text, but there is no barrier to doing that.
What I think a lot of people are getting stuck on is that editing the text to say 'toaster' would not mean that toasters were conscious, and that editing the text to say 'weights' doesn't mean that weights are conscious either. Stories aren't factual just because they are written.
The original story was written by the thing claiming to be conscious; the LLM and toaster ones would not be, which undermines the claim to consciousness a lot.
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>You could go through and change all the points in the original story to be about a toaster instead. It would require you to edit text, but there is no barrier to doing that.
Yes, there very much is a huge barrier. The copy and the original both keep the same subject matter: intelligence/human-like behavior.
The toaster doesn't. We could do edits, and the story (original or copy) would lose all its potency.
The surprise is "but how is the richness of intelligent behavior produced from something as basic as meat/weights". Why is kind of surprising reductionism is both cases.
Whereas nobody is surprised that "a metal strip with electricity flowing through it from a power source" heats pieces of bread to a specific temperature. Even if a toaster was "metal strips" all the way down, it's nowhere near as impressive jump from substrate to behavior, nor is the behavior as important to us and touches the core of our existance.
I don't think you understood the point of the story. It's not that LLMs or agents are conscious, it's that our dismissal of the possibility is reflexive and uninformed. Personally I think anyone who has made their mind up about whether or not LLMs/agents are or can be conscious has done so before the evidence is in.
The story does not assert that search and replacing "meat" with "weight" makes them conscious through some magical mechanism. It's a thought experiment.