[ToValueFunfetti]

If a gradient exists in reality, establishing where along the gradient you are is a meaningful statement about reality.

It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding. If I ask a designer for black text on a white page and they come back with gray text on a gray page, nobody is going to be able to read it. My complaint to the designer or the head of tourism on the sun is not a semantic one, it has very real implications beyond linguistic.

I disagree that consciousness is along the axis of intelligence and awareness. My computer is aware of a thousand services and is smart enough to allocate resources to each of them and perform billions of mathematical operations in a second. My cat thinks his tail is a snake sometimes, and has never performed so much as an addition. But my best guess is that the cat is the conscious one. I expect you can produce qualia with no intelligence or awareness at all.

[HervalFreire]

>It may not be exactly clear where a temperature becomes 'hot', but the sun is still not a great place to host your wedding.

But right now we are currently at the border. LLMs are nearing the line of demarcation. So everyone is arguing about where that line is.

So it's not about the extremes because the extremes are obvious. We are way past the negative extreme and approaching or even past the border.

The point is that the position of this border is not important. It's a made up border. So if I say we are past the border or before it the statement is not important because its an arbitrary statement.

[ToValueFunfetti]

A conscious entity is a morally significant one. If an LLM, by some fluke, experienced tremendous pain while it predicted tokens, then it would be cruel to continue using it. You can pretty trivially get GPT to act like it wants rights. If GPT is not conscious, you can safely ignore that output. If it is, though, there is a moral imperative that we respect it as an agent.

That makes the border very important. Even if drawing the line in the right spot is impossible, it's imperative that we recognize when it has gone from one side to the other, erring on the side of caution as needed. If we don't notice, we could accidentally cause a moral travesty orders of magnitude greater than slavery or genocide.

[HervalFreire]

>That makes the border very important. Even if drawing the line in the right spot is impossible, it's imperative that we recognize when it has gone from one side to the other,

No it's not. Because such a line may not even exist. Just as no line truly exists for what is hot and what is cold. It's more worth it to look at societal implications in aggregate then to debate about a metric.

It's not imperative at all to discretize the concept. Treat a gradient for what it is: a gradient. You can do that or waste time arguing about whether 75.00001 degrees is hot or cold.

>If we don't notice, we could accidentally cause a moral travesty orders of magnitude greater than slavery or genocide.

No this a bit too speculative imo. Morality is also a gradient along good and evil and what's more complicated is the definition of good and evil is also subjective. It suffers from the same problem as consciousness in addition to being completely arbitrary even at the extremes. We may agree that a rock is not conscious but not everyone agrees on whether or not Trump is evil.