If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.
If that’s even subtly your position then there’s no way to have a productive conversation about perception, reality/truth, epistemology and especially consciousness
It’s honestly maddening cause I’ve had great conversations about this with educated people, and all but only a handful, collapse into the other person relying on some nonfalsifiable dualist argument
Are there any non-duelist, scientific theories out there that could plausibly be tested? I can't say I've seen any but if you know of any then I'm curious to hear about them. From what I've seen, anyone trying to explain phenomenal consciousness in scientific objective terms falls into at least one of these three strategies:
1.) Saying that consciousness "arises" inevitably or is an emergent phenomenon of a complex information processing system. There are a number of theories along these lines but they aren't falsifiable from what I've seen and usually at some point rely on some magic unexplainable step or are actually dualist.
2.) Defining consciousness just as the easily explainable stuff via biology, such as being awake vs. asleep.
3.) Dismissing the idea that subjective experience exists at all. I sometimes wonder if people arguing strongly for this are something like a philosophical zombie and there's nothing inside them experiencing.
My mental model includes integrated information theory and Karl friston free energy principle, and something about temporal computation on a physical graph structure.
Which camp would this fall into? 2 seems closest but kind of undersells it...
Every scientific theory that is predictably/measurably correct is not dualist by nature.
Dualism assumes that there’s a non-measurable variable (usually undefined) but nevertheless has a causal input in action determination
Dualism is precisely non-scientific if you are using the classic Baconian-Khaneman you epistemological process because it introduces variables that cannot be measured
There are a lot of people out there who have their own versions of definitions but again there’s no consensus, I personally do not throw my hat in with any written definition other than my own and I’m hesitant to share that.
Saying that “dualists have an answer” doesn’t actually solve it if there’s no shared definition
Much like the term “intelligence” has no consensus, so being able to determine what is “artificial” versus “not artificial” intelligence continues to be this philosophical or almost religious position.
Creating a consensus on what the term “consciousness” means mechanically, would effectively destabilize the entirety of society. Imagine if the consensus definition of consciousness is applicable to all mammals. That means that there would be valid justification then to make it illegal to harm any mammal. You can see why this would incentivize people to not come to consensus on these things.
So in my perspective it is not socially feasible to find consensus and therefore a way to test it because religious leader might have incompatible definitions of consciousness than let’s say an epilepsy doctor.
As much as a scientists want to actually make progress in the world ultimately what holds us back are somewhat arbitrary social conventions because reasons.
For people who can’t self-delude, like Godel and Schopenhauer and Tesla, they kind of just go “mad” because it’s a giant epistemological hole they can’t solve.
Even the smartest the scientist are always going to choose self preservation in their cognitive capacity so they don’t feel bad over feeling bad and living in the contradiction
This is why it’s important for scientists to study Camus IMO
LLMs process language. I'd even go so far as to say that LLMs "think" and "understand", or at least, they produce a facsimile of thinking and understanding such that it's useful for us to reason about LLMs as if they think and understand. We're not used to interacting with a non-human entity with the capability to process language, so it's easy to ascribe human traits to these things. But their "minds" (insofar as they have anything like a mind) are completely different from ours. These things have language without consciousness.
Chimpanzees are conscious. Dogs are conscious. Maybe ravens and cephalopods? Who knows. These animals do have minds much like ours. Higher order animals are conscious even if they don't have language.
You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.
Billions spent on RL may be good enough to beat human performance.
But honestly I doubt that there is a real requirement for that, surely you could just increase the resolution you're running the simulation at until the difference decreases sufficiently. Imagine using 256 bit floats for example.
LLM's require offline training and dont actually learn from their "lived / sessions / chats ect". Those can be used for training data but its not like its an implicit part of the technology.
For this reason I would say LLM's are not conscious, or automatically conscious.
My toddler son is conscious, he feels happiness and sadness and have urges and impulses without needing to know the entire history worth of writing from human civilization.
A dictionary is not, and a LLM sized dictionary with optimized query is still not conscious.
It doesn't have anything to do whether consciousness is substrate independent, or even analog vs discrete, the overall implementation just aren't parallel.
I'm poorly educated on this, these are sincere questions. They are not intended as rhetorical regarding the point of the prior post.
;)
I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease.
https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclica...
Personally, I have been unconvinced by any of these definitive yes or no answers to "are LLMs conscious?" - in both directions. The "they are not / can not be conscious" side relies too heavily on mechanistic reductionist arguments that can apply equally to neurochemical processes in the human brain - and yet, it seems that humans, with brains made of these neurochemical processes, are conscious. At the same time, the "they are definitely conscious" answers seem to generally rely too heavily on self-deception and lack of reality testing.
To be able to say something definitive here, it seems to me that one would need to say definitively what this experience is. I have not heard any of the loud voices in the arena - not Chiang, not Giulio Tonini, not Karl Friston, etc - do so. Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.
> Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.
I'm inclined to agree mostly, but from the outside its impossible to separate marketing, belief, scientific inquiry, and just plain enthusiasm. Its all to opaque.
Later, Google was having fun feeding whole bunch of youtube content to artificial neural networks, unsupervised, and figured that certain parts of the network would, too, specialize, only to have the activation functions be run backwards and render an abstract image of a cat¹.
None of that is terribly new or surprising for anyone having studied and dealt with neural networks. The only difference today is that the field has completely flip flopped from approaching the subject with scientific rigor and cautious excitement to being a clueless billionaire infinite money printing machine fed on deceiving anthropomorphism and FUD.
¹: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/using-large-s...