alt Hacker NewsShouldn't that imply that agnosticism is the proper view, rather than asserting that something is impossible on a next-token-predictor architecture?
(Note: I don't actually think the consciousness question is the most important one in the near term. Where I think this line of reasoning gets really dangerous is when people use it to assert that LLMs can't or won't engage in certain behaviors no matter much they advance; this doesn't have anything to do with consciousness.)
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I think you can reliably assert that X != Y without having a complete definition of Y, as long as you can identify at least one property or condition that Y possesses which X violates.
So for consciousness and LLMs it could be Qualia, lack of semantic understanding, lack of continuity in time, lack of a high degree of integrated causal feedback, etc.
Or perhaps those are just features of human consciousness but not integral to consciousness as a whole. To me this then implies panpsychism to some degree, which I'm alright with too.
If you believe that matrix multiplication with random sampling is conscious, then you probably believe everything is conscious, like rocks.
Most people would expect that matrix multiplication is not conscious, and autocomplete is not conscious either.
We can't prove matrix multiplication isn't conscious, but it doesn't seem likely unless everything is conscious.