alt Hacker NewsThis is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.
Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.
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I like your argument.
It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own.
Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world.
But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form.
What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry?
Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.
We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.
If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.
> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is
We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.