I'm in the same boat with you.

It's entirely too much to put in a Hacker News comment, but if I had to phrase my beliefs as precisely as possible, it would be something like:

  > "Phenomenal consciousness arises when a self-organizing system with survival-contingent valence runs recurrent predictive models over its own sensory and interoceptive states, and those models are grounded in a first-person causal self-tag that distinguishes self-generated state changes from externally caused ones."

I think that our physical senses and mental processes are tools for reacting to valence stimuli. Before an organism can represent "red"/"loud" it must process states as approach/avoid, good/bad, viable/nonviable. There's a formalization of this known as "Psychophysical Principle of Causality."

Valence isn't attached to representations -- representations are constructed from valence. IE you don't first see red and then decide it's threatening. The threat-relevance is the prior, and "red" is a learned compression of a particular pattern of valence signals across sensory channels.

Humans are constantly generating predictions about sensory input, comparing those predictions to actual input, and updating internal models based on prediction errors. Our moment-to-moment conscious experience is our brain's best guess about what's causing its sensory input, while constrained by that input.

This might sound ridiculous, but consider what happens when consuming psychedelics:

As you increase dose, predictive processing falters and bottom-up errors increase, so the raw sensory input goes through increasing less model-fitting filters. At the extreme, the "self" vanishes and raw valence is all that is left.

It's not common to find just one, short post that completely changes my the worldview in a nin-trivial area. This is one of them. Thank you, that combination of mechanical interpretation + reminder that consciousness might be alien/animal but still count as consciousness was that one piece of puzzle that was missing for me. Obvious in hindsight but priceless nonetheless.

How can consciousness be possible without internal state? LLM inference is equivalent to repeatedly reading a giant look-up table (a pure function mapping a list of tokens to a set of token probabilities). Is the look-up table conscious merely by existing or does the act of reading it make it conscious? Does the format it's stored in make a difference?

Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4?

I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?

There are fields that focus on these areas and numerous ideas around what the criteria would be. One of the common understandings is that recurrent processing is likely a foundational layer for consciousness, and agents do not have this currently.

I'd say that in terms of evidence I'd want to establish specific functional criteria that seem related to consciousness and then try to establish those criteria existing in agents. If we can do so, then they're conscious. My layman understanding is that they don't really come close to some of the fairly fundamental assumptions.

Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of frameworks for this that have already been applied to LLMs.

I'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.

A LLM is not intrinsically affected by time. The model rests completely inert until a query comes in, regardless of whether that happens once per second, per minute, or per day. The model is not even aware of these gaps unless that information is provided externally.

It is like a crystal that shows beautiful colours when you shine a light through it. You can play with different kinds of lights and patterns, or you can put it in a drawer and forget about it: the crystal doesn’t care anyway.

Pseudocode for LLM inference:

    while (sampled_token != END_OF_TEXT) {
    probability_set = LLM(context_list)
    sampled_token = sampler(probability_set)
    context_list.append(sampled_token)
    }

LLM() is a pure function. The only "memory" is context_list. You can change it any way you like and LLM() will never know. It doesn't have time as an input.

A living brain exists physically, changes over time, and never stops working.

A brain cut from its body and frozen its a dead brain.

> You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious.

Sure I would. The human part is not being inferenced, the data is. LLM output in this circumstance is no more conscious than a book that you read by flipping to random pages.

> You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.

I don't assume anything about everyone or everything's intelligence. I have a healthy distrust of all claims.