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Not the person you were asking but IMHO it all reduces to computational complexity, e.g. biological evolution provided the computational efficiencies that ultimately produced conscious minds and beings, whereas it is not obvious what scale of silicon, power or energy, and input data is sufficient for that to happen artificially. But that means my view is it is a matter of it being possible in principle, merely unknown in practice. Also my view is that denying this amounts to violating the Church Turing thesis of computational equivalence ("human brains are not magic, super-Turing, etc."), and I think a lot of talking-past one another in these public disagreements amounts to one side not actually having taken modern CS theory fundamentals enough to be persuaded of these couple of premises.

by jaggederest1 hours ago|

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That's my take on it too, roughly. I think if we get to trillion-parameter models and they don't exhibit what we'd call AGI, however you define it, then the current transformer based systems never will.

But calling them "unconscious" is a pretty high bar. Mice are conscious. The house sparrow pecking in my yard right now is conscious.

by suddenlybananas7 hours ago|

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>How do you know that artificial neurons are less capable of producing consciousness than biological ones? How can other people independently verify this?

How do you know that toasters or rocks aren't conscious?

by Jtarii6 hours ago|

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The only thing you can do is ask rhetorical questions to make your position seem obvious. Which should tell you how little you understand the thing in question.

by suddenlybananas5 hours ago|

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My point is it is very difficult to disprove that something has consciousness. What would be sufficient evidence that a rock is not conscious? The onus is on those making extraordinary claims (that a computer program is conscious) to provide evidence for it.

by ikrenji10 minutes ago|

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it's not very difficult, it's impossible right now. you know you yourself are conscious and that's all that you can prove. you can extrapolate to other people and animals and plants but that's not proof

by Jtarii3 hours ago|

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>The onus is on those making extraordinary claims (that a computer program is conscious) to provide evidence for it.

By saying that a computer program is not conscious you are also making an extraordinary claim. You would have to hold an agnostic position until there is a test for consciousness.

You are relying on intuitive obviousness and rhetoric to make the opposing side look ridiculous "how could a TOASTER be conscious, preposterous!", you aren't making a actual positive argument for your view.

by suddenlybananas2 hours ago|

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Let's say I insist that rocks are conscious and I ask you to disprove that. How would you go about doing that? It's a genuine question.

I assume that we both think rocks are not conscious, but I'm genuinely unsure of how one could prove this.

by Jtarii1 hours ago|

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I would agree that a rock is not sentient, but determining whether or not it is conscious would require a definition of consciousness and a machine that could test for it.

by DiogenesKynikos4 hours ago|

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LLMs are able to do almost everything that we consider human intelligence, and in many areas of intelligence, they have surpassed us. It's not at all extraordinary to assume they're conscious.

by suddenlybananas3 hours ago|

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That's simply not true.

by DiogenesKynikos3 hours ago|

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It absolutely is true.

LLMs know more than any human being, are simultaneously experts in nearly every field of science and humanities, are able to make novel mathematical discoveries, can write and understand every major written language, and can give you an intelligent answer to almost any question you pose to them.

How is that not human-level intelligence? If a human could do all of that, we would consider them a genius.