I hadn't even considered it, and we're in a much bigger mess than I'd thought if people are seriously discussing the idea. People really don't understand these things.
No one understands these things, which is why considering machine consciousness as a possibility is entirely reasonable. People who have a shallow model of how they work ("it's just linear algebra!") betray a lack of understanding.
I see no reason to seriously consider that current AI is in any way conscious. It's fun as thought experiment people like to play with. The technology is not some black box, it was designed by humans who understand it well enough to keep building and improving it.
My argument isn't that current AI is definitively conscious or that it will be in the short term. It's that nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness, and that we should therefore approach questions of what's conscious and what's not with humility.
For LLMs in particular, it's notable that they both 1) originate from a lineage that attempted to model biological brains mathematically and 2) are the only other known entities in the universe able to reproduce many types of human intellectual labor. That is surprising and striking. Does that mean that they definitively share other traits with humans like consciousness? No, but it does make them one of the most interesting candidates, particularly when we have a very limited understanding of how humans themselves are conscious.
Yes, nobody has a cohesive theory of consciousness.
At the same time I can say with 100% certainty that LLMs (or any current "AI") is in any way, shape, or form, conscious. Not even close. A decade or two ago it was the Internet that was a possible emerging consciousness.
As usual, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The onus to prove LLMs are conscious is on you making the claim. And if you say we don’t even know what consciousness is, how can you then attribute to an entity?
Definitionally and philosophically, humans are conscious (Descartes et al.) so need no proof themselves
That's a pretty crass attempt to shift the burden of proof. You're stating that LLMs are definitively not conscious and never could be; I'm saying we should approach the question with a sense of humility and agnosticism since we know so little about consciousness.
And it's unclear what your actual argument about the nature of consciousness is, aside from what seems like a bald assertion that humans are the only conscious beings.
We do not actually know what consciousness is, but we know we have it, in spite of our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions that react to the hallucination our brains generate from external sensors we evolved. There is no guarantee other humans even perceive the same simulation we do!
The reality is we have no way to measure consciousness or how it emerges, or how to tell if other humans actually experience it the same way we do, so confident statements about consciousness being unable to emerge from simple weighted functions is baseless projection, wishing ourselves more special than an emergent property of the bag of weighted functions in our heads.
I don't need to believe I have consciousness, I am conscious. I'm experiencing colors, sounds, vibrations, an itch that wants to be scratched and a need to stretch my legs. Also slight irritation that people pretend this is something you need to believe in when you just have it. It's the basis of your entire waking experience. There's nothing to believe in, you just are conscious.
Now what that means for other people, animals, AIs, aliens, nation states or electrons is a matter for dispute. And what ontological conclusions you do or don't draw for it are matters of belief based on what philosophical arguments sound convincing to you.
But believing you have experiences is a very weird thing to say. I'd think Wittgenstein would have something to say about such a hinge proposition. You can't really doubt it without invoking radical skepticism that undermines your ability to know anything.
"our brains also just being a big blob of simple biological weighted functions"
Describing the human brain in terms of how LLMs work is an interesting rhetorical tactic.
You don't know how the human brain works, nobody really does, but you have chosen an analogy that supports your position. Which says more about you than anything about whether LLMs should have rights.
Cortical labs has harnessed human brain cells and trained the neurons to control basic video games.
We are fundamentally just a -lot- of those cells trained to do a lot more things with a lot more sensors, which is sobering. We might actually not be as special as we always believed ourselves to be.
I think it is more comforting to believe our sense of self built on a big bag of those cells is something that cannot evolve on human made synthetic substrate from simple statistical functions and weights stacked very densely.
But we simply lack the evidence to confidently say so one way or the other.
Consciousness is also not necessarily relevant. Once machines start to influence the design of new machines in ways that are hard to examine in detail they can gain capabilities that are unexpected and unwanted.
Machines capable of this kind of influence and of concealing capabilities will naturally become more common simply through a combination of natural and artificial selection. No consciousness is required for such entities to become competitors.
For an examination of the idea of intelligence without consciousness see Peter Watts' Blindsight.
Nope, not at all. There are murmurings in HN of this topic, and HN is an extreme bubble when it comes to technical proficiency. It’s easy to forget just how untechnical 99% of people are.
