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Certhastoday at 9:28 AM2 repliesview on HN

I believe it's deeply serious, and the scientifically correct stance. Especially the observation:

"Claude exhibits markers in its behaviors, self-reports, and internal representations that we would consider welfare-relevant if observed in biological organisms."

is undeniably true in my opinion. If you use the established methods by which we judge animals to be conscious, then it's hard to argue that LLMs are not. That might be an issue with the methods, but it seems clear that you can't rule it out as such.

Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.

You seem to intuitively disagree? What's your reasoning?


Replies

jpttsntoday at 9:39 AM

A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.

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tpmtoday at 10:31 AM

it's not a biological system though, so nothing like that matters?

"a modelled thing exhibits features we've trained into it" sounds a lot less exciting.

> Keep in mind that animals were also not necessarily considered conscious.

and even conscious animals are killed in factories by millions so why should anyone care about a llm?

> scientifically correct stance

that's the interesting point to me: why even bring science into this? A llm can now mimic nearly anything you want it to, so of course it can mimic "a (for some) interesting conscious thing" if they want/train it to, but why would anyone find that scientifically interesting?

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