If we want to know if AI is conscious or not, we have to ask if the AI can recognize itself in the input it gets.
Some aspects like limited content length and lack of ability for the model weights to update will certainly limit what the AI can do. But that's ultimately a matter of degree, not kind, when it comes to consciousness.
It is important, if I destroy your brain and grow a new one and start running the same program on the new brain your consciousness is still dead and its a new person living.
Computer AI models don't run on a single machine, they run in a distributed manner using different machines at different times. When you ask a follow up question thats not sent to the same machine, its another machine answering. So the consciousness one of those computing machines experience would be extremely fragmented and not at all conscious about any discussion with you, since it only saw a few fragments of it.
And no consciousness doesn't expand to cover larger distributed computations, otherwise social media would have developed a consciousness by now but it hasn't. Groups of humans don't start to share consciousness, it doesn't happen, so you can assume groups of distributed computers wont as well.
If I copy a text document from one computer to another, is that the same document or a different one? It's all just information. If you copy it, you have two, it's still the same until the documents start changing and go different directions.
> Computer AI models don't run on a single machine
It doesn't matter on how many machines it runs on. It's information processing, as long as it gives the same results, it doesn't matter how you accomplish it.
Consciousness isn't some magic thing that sits on top, it's the result of that information processing. You take random sensory data, the brain transforms that into "cats, dogs, you, me", it uses uses those percepts to execute actions, gets more data back and checks how the actions changed the world state.
Keeping track of what changes in the world were causes by actions of the brain vs things that happened due to other causes is the conscious experience.
If a hundred people see the same event, will they all respond the same?
Pretty sure you wont, humans vary the exact wording. They will say the same song but they wont answer the exact same way every time. Even if they say the same words two times they wont use the same tone and body language, as they don't just communicate via words and that nonverbal language is a part of what we say.
Nicely circling back to LLMs not being able to learn and form memories.
If you have hundred different people, they will of course do something different. Just like hundred different AI model will do something different. The question you have to ask is if the same person under the same circumstances would do the same.
Luckily, we have an answer to that: They would. Transient Global Amnesia is a condition where people temporarily lose the ability to form memories and in turn they keep repeating the same conversation again and again[1]. Their brain keeps asking the same question again and again, as it doesn't remember the answers it already got.
Bro, I think we discarded this idea from Platone and Cartesio a while ago...
Your brain is your body.
Your mind is not detached from it, and you can't feel anything, and so have a subjective experience, without it. Neither, your mind, or "soul" could survive to the physical death of your body.
So...I mean...
You don't need a body, you need electrical signals your brain interprets as body. And in principle you don't even need a brain, you could replace that with some matrix multiplication or transistors that do the same stuff.
The important part of consciousness is being able to figure out what of the sensory input is correlated to your own action and which was caused by the rest of the world.
Then a request comes in, and the system does a bunch of calculations using those bits, and spits out a result. The bits are unchanged.
When your brain receives input, it is changed. It is constantly active. If it ever stops being active it's dead.
So, what exactly is the claim? Are the bits constantly conscious? Do they snap into consciousness when the computer does math with them? Or is it maybe the computer that's conscious while it's processing these bits? How about when it stops doing that and goes back to doing other stuff? Why are these particular bits special? Was the computer always conscious?
I feel like the only way anyone could believe LLMs are conscious is if they don't understand how computers work. Of course it isn't conscious, how could it possibly be conscious? Its literally just bits. It's like saying the text in a book is conscious.
These are all fine questions, and they don't become any easier to answer if you replace "computers" with "brains" and "bits" with "neurons".
Of course it isn't conscious, how could it possibly be conscious? Its literally just bits.
"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
What is even being argued here - neuroscience is hard, so programming your PC thus makes it conscious?
> "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."
… what?
We don't understand how combining a bunch of obviously(?) non-conscious biological components can produce a larger system that is conscious, so it's unwarranted to be certain that that can't happen with software.
Or if they're retards. The fact this still comes up is weird. A printing press isn't conscious, so why would an LLM be.
Don't forget, some of the bros are overly excitable. Like that twat who reckoned a Google model 5 years ago was conscious.