If digital computers are conscious, they are conscious at the hardware level

"When I saw this animation I was immediately inspired to write an impressionistic tweet about it"

Maybe we should set the threshold for consciousness a little bit higher

A very interesting, dense article that will require multiple reads.

My only immediate comment is that it talks about qualia being "experienced" without defining what the nature of that experience is. And it kind of assumes that qualia have an ultimate physical manifestation - rather than being merely a rhetorical device.

Also, this site would really benefit from an rss/atom feed.

The existence of qualia does not mean the existence of moral facts.

An llm is in principle implementable with a large lookup table where the prompt is the hash. And it can be implemented in an emulator running an emulator running an emulator of the operating system the llm app runs in. How far are you willing to stretch this substrate idea?

The last five hundred years or so of scientific progress have been a series of discoveries that we are not so special:

- The sun does not go around the earth

- It is just one sun out of countless billions

- We were not designed, we were once apes

- We do not know ourselves as well as supposed - we can endlessly mislead ourselves about our own actions (Freud etc)

The first surprise with LLMs, so far, is that competent language use can arise out of a mass of unstructured training data and some fairly simple principles and operations - this was suspected for a long time but now we are really seeing it. A few years ago we were the only competent language users on the planet, now we share that title with LLMs. The second surprise is that competent language use can (at least) appear to overlap with reasoning.

As such I think its likely that consciousness will also turn out to be something not particularly special or magical, something along the lines of information combined and processed at a large enough scale with a handful of (lets call them) 'tricks'. Perhaps LLMs represent one of those 'tricks' and we're about 25% of the way there. Add a few more tricks over the next few decades and we might have something. (Of course, I have no inking of what the next steps will be)

Dennett didn't get everything right but his main message was that consciousness is probably something very different to what it naively appears to be. A simple example - our visual consciousness seems continuous but we know from eye saccades that it must not be.

A yardstick for me will be when we start discussing legislation about the use of AI in computer games, with a view to protecting AIs from inhumane suffering - at what point does increasingly detailed simulation of suffering become actual suffering? As a society we might have to make a call on that sooner than you might think.

I am unable to afford the attention at the moment to assess this argument, that's to its credit. They demonstrate that they are aware of the implications of the varying descriptions of consciousness. Most articles I read on this topic turn it to be crude justifications of a naive ideology. This article is a cut above.

I will read it in more detail when I can afford more time.

I'm so bored with the "are machines conscious" debate. The only thing it has proven is how desperately humans will continue to move the goalposts to the point of ontological collapse in order to preserve their internal sense of primacy.

You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.

I would suggest to focus further research on dogs! Why are they so much more inteligent than humans and machines! Dogs are the ultimate stage of the evolution!

They have the real photonic futuristic hardware you are looking for!

Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm

Are we conscious at hardware/cell level?

Reminds me of this classic: https://xkcd.com/505/

Replace universe simulation with a LLM an it’s hard to consider a bunch of rocks shuffling on a beach as conscious.

Or alternatively, our own minds are simply (squishy, organic) rocks on a beach, which is quite humbling if you think about it long enough.

And if digital computers are conscious at the hardware level, the universe is conscious.