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TacticalCodertoday at 3:37 PM4 repliesview on HN

Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way.

A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".

Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".

I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.

Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.


Replies

fc417fc802today at 8:13 PM

> I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.

That seems exceptionally arbitrary. What basis do you have on which to classify them? Are you not conflating the perception of free will with ... what was the definition for it again anyway? Are you able to construct a satisfactory one that meshes with physics? I certainly haven't been able to.

qarltoday at 3:38 PM

> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".

You'll need to explain why.

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antxtoday at 3:40 PM

Out of curiosity, which models are fully deterministic? I was under the impression that all LLMs were fundamentally probabilistic.

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joe_the_usertoday at 4:05 PM

The idea that determinism and consciousness are incompatible is deeply intuitive to many people. And many other embrace it - you can trace this back to the debates for and against Calvinism.

A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness makes people unhappy. But just as much, if the opposite of determinism is hard statistical randomness, how do say that "is the essence of personhood". This is why physicist go out in the world trying to find consciousness as a fifth physical force.

I mean, think consciousness is a term that ever have a non-contradictory meaning since it's primarily used to bound ethical human worlds and the verifiable formulations of biological and physical systems. But it's going to be with us for a while and I'm not sure what can be done about it.

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