[canniballectern]

Of course, today's LLMs only appear to have theory of mind at first glance and fall apart under closer scrutiny. But if they can continue to become more and more accurate replicas of the real thing, I don't think it matters at all.

There's no way to know for sure that anyone other than yourself experiences consciousness. All you can do is judge for yourself that what they're describing matches closely enough with your own experiences that they're probably experiencing the same thing you are.

[sgt101]

I think it does matter because it legitimizes a view of humans (and animals) that undervalues them. The causality of meaning arising from patterns of language rather than patterns of language arising from meaning follows the same inversion as society being more valuable than the humans in it. Bad things have happened when that belief becomes dominant.

[pdonis]

> There's no way to know for sure that anyone other than yourself experiences consciousness. All you can do is judge for yourself that what they're describing matches closely enough with your own experiences that they're probably experiencing the same thing you are.

That judgment is not just based on the words other people use. It is based on knowing that other people's brains and minds have the same sort of semantic relationships to the rest of the world that yours do. And those relationships can be tested by checking to see if, for example, the other person uses the same words to refer to particular objects in the real world that you do, or if they react to particular real-world events in the same way that you do.

You can't even test any of this with an LLM because the LLM simply does not have the same kind of semantic relationships with the rest of the world that you do. It has no such relationships at all.

[s0ulphire]

I'll dig up a source in a bit, but there is a critical period of development in which a child must be exposed to language, or they will fail to develop the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing. This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you. Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place, without which you have no ability to recognise them as you have no language with which to think about them in the first place. So what specifically differentiates the way your brain learned to classify objects and words from the way a NN does? And what stops a NN from being able to develop concepts based on the relationship of those new definitions in the same way you do? IMO arguably it's just a matter of processing power and configuration of the network.

[pdonis]

> the very core skills that you're suggesting are innate abilities in a person regardless of their upbringing

I have made no such claim.

> This is exactly how you learned everything you know; your parents talked to you.

This is not even remotely close to being correct.

> Language grants you the ability to define concepts in the first place

There is a vast literature in cognitive science that disagrees with you.

[s0ulphire]

Feel free to point me to something specific, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_deprivation

[mietek]

I don’t think you know whether I have a mind or not.

[pdonis]

If you object to the term "mind", just leave it out and read "brain and mind" as just "brain". I'm a physicalist so I don't think the mind is something separate from the brain anyway, so it's all the same to me.

[canniballectern]

If a jellyfish was able to have a conversation with you where it credibly described what it's like to be conscious, would you reject it because it doesn't have a brain and therefore cannot have a mind in the same sense as you?

[pdonis]

Show me such a jellyfish and I'll give you an answer.

[mietek]

I don’t object to “mind”, but it’s famously unprovable whether other beings we presume to be conscious actually experience internal mental states. See also: qualia, p-zombies, the hard problem of consciousness.

[pdonis]

> it’s famously unprovable whether other beings we presume to be conscious actually experience internal mental states

It's also famously unprovable that there is not an invisible dragon in my garage that cannot be detected by any means whatever, to use Carl Sagan's example. That doesn't mean such an idea is worth discussing or including in your thought processes.

[yamrzou]

> There's no way to know for sure that anyone other than yourself experiences consciousness.

- Do you see how the fish are coming to the surface and swimming around as they please? That's what fish really enjoy.

- You're not a fish, replied Hui Tzu, so how can you say you know what fish really enjoy?

- You are not me, said Zhuangzi, so how can you know I don't know what fish enjoy.

[robertlagrant]

> But if they can continue to become more and more accurate replicas of the real thing, I don't think it matters at all.

So, I suppose I'd ask: what does "matter" mean here? If you knew that everyone you loved had been destroyed and been replaced by exact replicas, would that matter?

[canniballectern]

If the replicas were truly exact, I guess not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[bigbluedots]

That already happens frequently enough at a cellular level.

[sgt101]

Star trek universe!