You would really like Michael Pollan's latest book [1], entirely devoted to his exploration of consciousness researchers' POVs on this exact topic.
My favorite quote is that ~"perhaps Descartes was only half-wrong when suggesting I think, therefore I am; it seems rather closer to I FEEL, therefore I am."~
[1] <https://www.amazon.com/World-Appears-Journey-into-Consciousn...>
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I've grown thousands of plants; I've read two of the author's other books devoted to plants; in this book Pollan makes compelling arguments for plant sentience (over a much-longer timeframe).
Sure, perhaps plant consciousness is a bit of a stretch, but they're certainly intelligent and curious creatures. He makes both arguments supporting plant volition.
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If you haven't seen My Octopus Teacher (Netflix), do. I'm a bald 275lb bluecollarguy... and I wept/awed (both). So beautiful, we bundled neurons.
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Bonus quote ~"color is where reality and magic appear as-if together"~ [color isn't real, but is perceived]. We most-often see what's most-predictable, not necessarily what we actually detected [in the case of color: nothing but nanometers].
What we can do is simulate very simple brains by simulating relatively few neurons as they appear in worms. In this sense we are multiple magnitudes away where the increasing complexity implies exponential increasing difficulty.
I would think we are so far away that there will be unknown unknowns we encounter on the way.
Yeah, but it's hard to explain this to people, especially AI-pro people. Too many are convinced that all we are doing is a cut-down version of the human brain, and it's hard to explain to them that, no actually, we aren't modeling the human brain to the level of granularity you think we are.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/ai-is-nothing-like-a-brain-an... https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9665914/
This is why making more neuromorphic NNs is still an active area of research, although they typically all focus on another extremely simplified model (spiking neural networks).
And it seems that, given enough input/outputs/compute, it is possible to train the necessary function.
Details of how the building bricks look like (matmul, electromagnetism or quantum effects) are not that relevant in the broader picture.
What is missing right now, is the fact that the function in question changes over time in biomachines, while our LLMs are static at inference time.
a) The brain might have an entropy source (then it can't be modeled as a function). Trivially to fix, and in some sense, with diffusion models starting from random numbers, AI has done so.
b) The hidden function might be not computable. I would have no idea how that would work, but I think this is what it boils down to if people say "the human brain is more than a machine".
b) well, it can be the case that, say, certain kinds of computation are either too inefficient or outright impossible within the current model.
Who knows...
If consciousness really evolved gradually, you would expect to see for example dogs or gorillas having less of it, but if they has less of it, why does it function the same way? Like for example animals can be scared, happy, anxious etc, they can experience the full range of emotions and thoughts, so their conscious experience seems just as rich as ours. What I mean by this is, if you can be "less conscious", then what does that mean _exactly_? Is it that you have less content in consciousness, or is it that you feel more like you are asleep? Or something else? We don't have any examples in animals of "less conscious", I would argue.
This makes me think that rather than having emerged gradually, evolution found a mechanism by which consciousness exists, and then some animals have that mechanism and others don't. I think that if it is a mechanism, then this mechanism is located in one part of the brain, not many parts functioning together (though one possibility is that this mechanism coordinates brain activity in such a way to enable consciousness).
LLMs, then, are particularly unintuitive to us, because they've got to the language part first, long before they've reached even hamster-level self-awareness. They're not, however, biological networks, so there's no reason these properties need arise in the same order, or indeed in the same ways.
I'm not entirely convinced by that second paragraph, but I think the logic holds together.
I think that consciousness comes before self-awareness, even though self-awareness is kind of a vague term. Self-awareness can either be an abstract knowledge that you are an organism and a discrete entity in the world (world knowledge/self knowledge), or it can be more basic and be a form of conscious experience, but as my point was, I think conscious experience is broader and does not necessarily need to be about self-awareness.
Some questions are just ill formed.
Plus even if "LLMs are alive and conscious", this still would scratch the surface of the morale/ethical/societal considerations that people really care about.
Because even with other humans, we can argue if they exist or if they are mere npc in a solipsist world view.
We say "it's raining" but that doesn't imply agency to whatever is causing it to rain.
Also, please don't invoke solipsism, if you want to debate that, you're by definition obligated to do it with yourself.
About solipsism, yes sure.
I didn’t had time to add it at the moment, but I initially also wanted to discuss more on the prosaic points. So here we go:
Recognizing sentience/consciousness to something actually is not that a big factor in defining behavioral response. Let’s just look at how humans are treating other humans, other mammals, other animals, other life forms. Or taken the other cultural scheme around, in some animist folk one can perfectly consider that any rock on the ground have really an inner soul life just as much as oneself, it doesn’t mean it will consider possible interactions with the rock as equivalent. And, wink to the Overton window, practicing institutional cannibalism doesn’t imply that eaten people are disrespected in their dignity, quite the contrary.
All that to say that "are LLMs conscious" is not even a moral important point. Paperclip maximizer² and can the famous Dijksta’s quote "The question whether computers can think is not more interesting than the question whether submarines can swim." already show how pointless morale debate on LLM and consciousness are, even when one consider potential logistical threats/opportunities they could represent.
¹ https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/123739/its-raini...
² https://www.lesswrong.com/w/squiggle-maximizer-formerly-pape...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...
I was about to post the exact opposite question? How could it not be an emergent property? Unlike consciousness, the concept of emergence is pretty well defined: An emergent property is a characteristic or behavior that a complex system has, but which its individual components do not have on their own.
Consciousness itself doesn't have a well agreed upon definition, but I would posit that _most_ people would agree humans have it, and _most_ people would agree individual cells (neurons) do not have it. If you agree with those two statements, then consciousness is an emergent property by the definition I gave above
We can all agree on what color something is, but we can’t describe the color a priori, only by example. I think consciousness may be a similar phenomenon and the only test is by shared experience. If so then we are in deep trouble because we will not be able to anticipate when a system becomes conscious.
Why cannot this be applied to consciousness as well? I mean, it's surely much more difficult to do compared to colors but... impossible?
Previous comment used the word "anticipate" and I think they mean that we won't know in advance before we run the trial and error process.
When they say "deep trouble" I assume they mean because creating a non-friendly conscious AI might pose an existential risk for humanity.
However there is also the ethical issue of creating a consciousness and then destroying/murdering it.
The logical conclusion is that the brain makes me.
Consciousness can be not-emergent but also not metaphysical, think sci-fi-type undiscovered physics or matter.
Of course both of those suffer from the recursive problem of just kicking the can one level up. But I guess that's fundamentally unsolvable so who cares.
One thing that gives me pause about the inevitability hypothesis is that the type of connection, or manner of information processing, may matter: there might be something about neurons that isn't (currently) reproducible in silicon. I don't know, and there's not (yet) any evidence for or against, but it at least seems like plausible speculation. We just don't know enough about any of this right now.
Why is that?
But I think my issue with the emergence theory is that it seems to imply to me that consciousness is non-physical and non-local. So what entity is actually experiencing the consciousness? It's not that I believe consciousness is physical and local, but people who make the emergence argument seem to believe it is and I can't figure out how that is supposed to work.
A linear dynamic, say x_n+1=lambda x_n, or x_n+1=(1-x_n), is never chaotic. But if you multiply them, x_n+1=lambda x_n (1-x_n), it depends on lambda if the system is chaotic.
None of the components are chaotic. But for specific combinations, chaos emerges as an property.
In physics, the mass of mesons and the nucleon is emergent. It's completely different from the constituents' mass. Different from an atom, where its mass is very close to the mass of its nucleus and its electrons.
Or something like that. This gets to the "dorm room bullshitting" level right quick.
Idk, it's really hard to articulate my thoughts here and yes it is pretty close to the conversations I had in college on various substances. Lol.
And we are only doing it for a few decades. Evolution had million of years of "try and error".