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How do you know the sensation of a red photon hitting a cone cell, transduced to the optic nerve through ion junctions and processed by pyramidal neurons, is any more or less real than the excitation of electrons in a doped silicon junction activating the latent space of the "red" thought vector? Cause we are made of meat?

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You’re arguing against the opposite of my position. I am arguing that LLMs have a reasonable basis to be seen as conscious because there is nothing special about biological neural networks.

by vidarh12 hours ago|

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Sensory input is nothing but data.

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That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".

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Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.

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They don't have senses because they don't have a body. It's just a program. Do weights on a hard drive have consciousness? Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness? It doesn't make any sense.

by AlecSchueler7 hours ago|

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> They don't have senses because they don't have a body

Surely "having senses" is predicated more on "being able to sense the world around you" than "having a body."

> Does my installation of starcraft have consciousness?

Can your installation of StarCraft take in information about the world and then reason about its own place in that world?

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The weights on your hard drive might have consciousness if they can respond to stimuli in ways other conscious brains do. That’s the whole point of the Turing test, it’s a criteria for when the threshold of reasonable interpretation is crossed.

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Bodies aren’t necessary for senses. I can send a picture to Claude. I can send a series of pictures. That’s usually called a sense of vision. I could connect it to a pressure sensor and that would be touch.

by arcfour8 hours ago|

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There are robots with AI controlling them, so it doesn't hold that they don't all have bodies. They can see, they can move.

(I'm still not sure that that makes them conscious, or if we can even determine that at all, but I don't think that's a fair argument.)

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How do you measure this consciousness?

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How do you imagine a brain can distinguish data from a real sense and data from another source?

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Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.

by brookst11 hours ago|

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No, it will respond to tokens telling it about a temperature change. It has no sense of warmth. It cannot be burned.

Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.

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The human Brain is a neural network. Your sense of “knowing what warmth is” reduces down to the weights of connections between neurons in an analog of LLMs. What is different about the human brain that warrants saying that the same emergent characteristics for one network are inaccessible to another?

by tonyarkles8 hours ago|

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I’m not sure I fully understand the distinction you’re making, or if I do I’m not sure I agree. Concretely, I agree that these are very different mechanisms. Abstractly… I agree that an LLM cannot be burned. I’m not sure I agree, though, that there is a significant conceptual difference between thermoreceptors in the skin causing action potentials to make their way up the spinal cord to the brain is all that different than reading a temperature sensor over I2C and turning it into input tokens.

Edit: what they don’t have, obviously, is a hard-coded twitch response, where the brain itself is largely bypassed and muscles react to massive temperature differentials independently of conscious thought. But I don’t think that defines consciousness either. Ants instinctively run away from flames too.

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LLMs have no self, sensory experience, or experience of any kind. The idea doesn't even really make sense. Even if it did, the closest analogy to biological "experience" for an LLM would be the training process, since training at least vaguely resembles an environment where the model is receiving stimuli and reacting to it (i.e. human lived experience) - inference is just using the freeze-dried weights as a lookup table for token statistics. It's absurd to think that such a thing is conscious.

by digitaltrees5 hours ago|

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What is different about the human neural network? People have given LLMs sensors and they respond to stimuli. The sense of self can be expressed as a linguistic artifact that results in an emergent pattern recognition of distinct entities. For example, merely my saying I am sitting under the tree with a friend I have encountered the self as a pointer to me as the speaker. There is evidence from early childhood development that language acquisition correlates to awareness of the self as distinct from other. And there is evidence from anthropology indicating that language structures shape exactly what the self is perceived to be.

Your best argument is that the weights are set because that means it’s not a system that can self reflect and alter the experience. But I don’t see why that is necessary to have an experience. It seems that I can sense a light and feel its warmth regardless of whether my neurons change. One experience being identical to another doesn’t mean neither was an experience.

by ofjcihen12 hours ago|

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What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”.

LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.

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The sense of self may be an emergent property of the grammatical structure of language and the operations of memory. If an LLM, by necessity, operates with the linguistics of “you” and “me” and “others”. And documents that in a memory system and can reliably identify itself as a discrete entity from you and others then on what basis would we say it doesn’t have a sense of self?

by AlecSchueler7 hours ago|

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> the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.

Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?

by mrandish6 hours ago|

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> Can such an algorithm reason about itself in relation to others?

No, but an LLM doesn't do that either. An LLM is an algorithm to generate text output which can simulate how humans describe reasoning about themselves in relation to others. Humans do that by using words to describe what they internally experienced. LLMs do it by calculating the statistical weight of linguistic symbols based on a composite of human-generated text samples in its training data.

LLMs never experienced what their textual output is describing. It's more similar to a pocket calculator calculating symbols in relation to other symbols, except scaled up massively.

by AlecSchueler39 minutes ago|

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> LLMs do it by ...

That they do it at all is the point and is what separates then from MP3 encoding algorithms. The "how" doesn't seem to me to be as important as you're suggesting.

You asked a hypothetical above about a different algorithm and now we've ascertained the reasons why that was reductive.

> LLMs never experienced ...

What is experience beyond taking input from the world around you and holding an understanding of it?

by digitaltrees5 hours ago|

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Toddlers learn over the course of several years of observing training data and for the first few years misspeak about themselves and others. What’s the difference?

by digitaltrees5 hours ago|

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How are you sure it doesn’t reason about itself? The grammar of languages encode the concepts of self and others. LLMs operate with those grammar structures and do so in increasingly accurate ways. Why would we say humans that exhibit the same behavior are inherently more likely to be conscious?

by vidarh12 hours ago|

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How do I know you have this "self"?

How do you know other humans do?

by svachalek11 hours ago|

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By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and clearly, clearly not conscious because they don't have our magic.

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Hard disagree. We reliably operate with the concept of a self that’s distinct from others. The chemical and physical processes change in response to stimulus.

by vidarh11 hours ago|

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Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.

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Based on that reasoning anything could be conscious. If that's a bullet you want to bite, fair enough.

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I do not know, because we have no known way of measuring consciousness.

I merely object to the notion that we know how to tell who or what has a consciousness.

by kortex10 hours ago|

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism

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I'll bite that bullet. In fact I contend the idea that "humans and maybe some animals are conscious, but other things are not" is the special pleading stand. Why are the oscillating fundamental fields over here (brains) special, but the oscillations over there (computers, oceans, rocks) not? If they are, where do you draw the line? It smacks of "babies dont feel pain" (widely believed until the 80s! the 1980s!) sort of reasoning.

by root_axis8 hours ago|

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Actually I don't really have any problems with panpsychism. It's a pretty uncommon perspective, but when discussing conscious machines, it at least presents a consistent criteria for consciousness.

by ofjcihen12 hours ago|

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[flagged]

by vidarh12 hours ago|

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Ad hominems are always a nice way of getting out of answering something you have no answer to.

by amenhotep6 hours ago|

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It's not an ad hominem. In fact, it's perhaps the most good faith interpretation of your words possible. Ad hominem would be calling you stupid because you obviously know that you have a self and only your own stupidity could explain your inability to see how your self is generalisable. When you go around pretending you genuinely think maybe humans don't have selves, really the only way to take you seriously is to think that maybe you're a p-zombie.

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It was an ad hominem, and so is this.

I do not pretend. I asked honest questions that clearly neither you nor the previous person are able to answer.

by vixen998 hours ago|