alt Hacker NewsIs it really so wacky to suggest we might want to be careful with bootstrapping complex computation from human neurons? It's quite different from an LLM and the fact that it's not made out of neurons seems to be one of the core arguments for opponents of the possibility of LLM consciousness...
>that just pops out if you have a large enough system.
certainly not a claim I would make.
>No proof is required
Isn't it legitimate to reason on a more abstract level and try to make inferences that way?
>psuedoscientific tests
no clue what you're referring to here or in the rest of your comments about saints and authorities and sins. Another parallel to religion could be drawn w.r.t. the idea that only human souls could ever feel suffering but I don't think it's such a productive level to have this conversation on.
I may have overreacted, but jumping from "we should probably ban this research preemptively because it might pose difficult questions later" to comparisons to Unit 731 when someone disagreed, reminded me of the way Anthropic pushes their belief that Claude is conscious onto everyone with "evidence" of questionable value and even when there are many questions they haven't bothered to answer about such a claim. Plus, they do this despite various features we generally associate with conscious experience that current gen LLMs lack.
Given the complexity of behavior observed in nature that doesn't require conscious experience, yet is more advanced than what we can achieve in circuitry, I think it would be too early to close off this area of research.