[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)