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viftoditoday at 8:32 AM0 repliesview on HN

It makes me very sad to see this pseudo-intellectualism posted here and so many people replying here about consciousness and so on, not realizing what it would entail if this were true.

For LLMs to have consciousness we would approach fictional levels of how the universe works, and magical levels of how any interpretation of information as an equivalent of some qualia would magically apply. (E.G. the word hurt in output by an LLM, would be associated with pain)

You can't deduce consciousness or qualia from the output of an LLM.

Sure on a purely philosophical level, since qualia isn't measurable, you can claim that it can exist in anything, even inanimate objects, but this argument is as moot as anything that approaches the limits of philosophy.

But overall, there is no reason to believe LLMs have qualia or consciousness, it would be absolutely absurd.

This would imply that information in itself would magically entail qualia based on it's valance or something like that.

An LLM "saying" I am in pain, won't magically make the pain appear, based on what criteria? Even algorithmically there is no basis to even simulate something like this, it is impossible for it to emerge architecturally.

Humans don't feel pain because on a purely information level this is negative for the organism, obviously the nervous system does something deliberate to signal pain, and it evolved this way.

And also don't forget the dynamic aspects of the brain, and the binding problem, consciousness and qualia can't exist statically, you can't have a gpu (or piece of paper) represent a computation or w/e and qualia to exist.

The binding problem itself entails that the brain is doing something in particular to solve it, I personally speculate that it's the electro magnetic field in the brain, it's the only way to be able to globally represent information.

If it were otherwise, then it would go into magical territory, it would mean the information itself would raise to qualia, and it would also entail that you wouldn't even need physical connections between neurons, just for them to behave this way and represent information. E.G. replace each neuron with a microscopic led or w/e, and each synapse with radio waves or w/e, if qualia didn't have a physical aspect, and was purely informational and computational then this would imply that you can ultimately derive it from something as abstract as numbers on a piece of paper, and when you get to that point, you not only can't solve the binding problem, and it becomes magical, but you also can't solve the valance/direction problem, it would imply that something like pain, or any negative or positive sensation arises purely from the interpretation aspect of the information, but we know this isn't the case, organism evolved to represent in particular such signals, for survival for example