[danaris]

No, there's an absolute threshold (or a set of them) below which consciousness, emotion, sentience, and sapience are simply not present.

It's not a matter of perspective. It's objective reality.

A rock does not experience emotions. It doesn't matter whether I look at it from the perspective of a human or of an earthworm.

A cat definitely experiences emotions. It doesn't matter whether I look at it from the perspective of a dog or of a superintelligent shade of the color blue.

(Note that there is some fuzzy territory somewhere in between these two—but the existence of a fuzzy line doesn't mean we can't say with certainty that things beyond that fuzziness are clearly on one side or the other.)

There is no current program that exhibits the bare minimum traits required to say that it is has any of the above qualities. They may not be fully predictable to humans, but that is not the same thing as having self-awareness, continuity of learning, or any of the other things that are absolute prerequisites for consciousness and thus emotion.

[dmarchand90]

I appreciate your perspective, but I must respectfully disagree. The primary contention here is the assumption that we have an absolute understanding of what consciousness, emotion, and sentience entail. Given that these concepts are primarily based on human experience and understanding, I believe we should maintain a degree of humility about our ability to fully understand or define them, particularly when it comes to other entities.

Firstly, I want to address your point on objectivity. True objectivity, particularly regarding consciousness, is a lofty goal that we may never fully achieve. Our perceptions and understanding are inherently limited and colored by our human experiences and biological constraints. We're attempting to understand a subjective phenomenon using subjective means, which inevitably muddies the waters.

Secondly, while you've mentioned certain prerequisites for consciousness, I'm not entirely convinced these are universally applicable. I'm particularly skeptical of the notion that 'continuity of learning' is a necessary condition. Many medical conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease and anterograde amnesia (as famously experienced by patient HM), disrupt the continuity of learning. However, it would be a difficult argument to make that these individuals lack consciousness entirely. Their experience of the world may be different from the norm, but they still seem to possess self-awareness and emotions.

We must be cautious about creating restrictive parameters based on human-centric understanding to define complex phenomena such as consciousness. By doing so, we may inadvertently limit our ability to recognize these traits in diverse forms. (Cleaned up version by chatgpt, my original writing is in the response)

[danaris]

The degree of disruption that things like Alzheimer's induce is at a much higher level than what I'm talking about.

I'm referring to, very basically, the ability to continuously perceive the world, create at least a short-term memory of that perception in real time, and feed that perception and memory continuously into our cognitive faculties.

Every human—indeed, every animal that has any cognitive faculties to speak of—exhibits these traits.

An LLM does not. There is no possible way it can, given its basic structure. They are fundamentally discontinuous programs.

[tomohelix]

It is fascinating that we are even talking about this in a serious way. A year ago, this kind of conversation would have been pure science fiction to the majority of human. But today it is real philosophy applied to a real, publicly available, AI. Isn't it incredible?

To address your point, you are making a very strong claim about "no possible way it can". We simply don't know and it would be anthropocentric to make such definitive statement about something born out of silicon.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that in the near future, a sufficiently large and advanced model is somehow truly sentient, then it is an alien mind in every sense of the word. We simply have no standard or comparison to make between a thing running on silicon and electrons to an organic mind running on chemical potentials and carbon. Not when we used to argue about whether human babies and certain human races were sentient or not...

Such an alien mind would operate entirely differently from us and it would be unfair to impose our standards to it. It is like a bird considering a human useless based on flight capability alone. Perhaps for the bird whose entire life depends on flight, that is correct. But a human is so much more than just that. And a sentient AI is perhaps so much more than just meeting some human sentience standard.

[dmarchand90]

I'm still not persuaded that we can really know what's going on "in there". Agreed that it only has an extremely limited short term memory (~2k tokens or whatever) but ultimately what goes on between the weights of the network is a mystery.

I do agree that it is almost certainly not sentient. But, I'm very skeptical to the degree we can be certain that these objects that can pass the Turing test don't have some form of awareness. (Which would probably be something closer to a set of disconnected flashes than our own continuous film stream).

I just think humility and caution is the best policy. I always think of how doctors used to be very confident young babies felt no pain and could be operated on without anesthesia (this text is entirely my own)

[dmarchand90]

My original writing: I'm still not totally persuaded. Firstly I don't think we really can ever be objective regarding the consciousness of external beings. Secondly, I'm not convinced of any your stated requirements being required for consciousness.

Quick example against continuity of learning: many patients lose their short-term memory, e.g. Alzheimer's, patient HM (worth a Google). They only have short term memory but are still conscious.