[osaariki]

We don’t know that LLMs generating tokens for scenarios involving simulations of conscious don’t already involve such experience. Certainly such threads of consciousness would currently be much less coherent and fleeting than the human experience, but I see no reason to simply ignore the possibility. To whatever degree it is even coherent to talk about the conscious experience of others than yourself (p-zombies and such), I expect that as AIs’ long term coherency improves and AI minds become more tangible to us, people will settle into the same implicit assumption afforded to fellow humans that there is consciousness behind the cognition.

[szvsw]

The very tricky part then is to ask if the consciousness/phenomenological experience that you postulate still happens if, say, we were to compute the outputs of an LLM by hand… while difficult, if every single person on earth did one operation per second, plus some very complicated coordination and results gathering, we could probably predict a couple of tokens for an LLM at some moderate frequency… say, a couple of tokens a month? a week? A year? A decade? Regardless… would that consciousness still have an experience? Or is there some threshold of speed and coherence, or coloration that would be missing and result in failure for it to emerge?

Impossible to answer.

Btw I mostly think it’s reasonable to think that there might be consciousness, phenomenology etc are possible in silicon, but it’s tricky and unverifiable ofc.

[Timwi]

> would that consciousness still have an experience?

If the original one did, then yes, of course. You're performing the exact same processing.

Imagine if instead of an LLM the billions of people instead simulated a human brain. Would that human brain experience consciousness? Of course it would, otherwise they're not simulating the whole brain. The individual humans performing the simulation are now comparable to the individual neurons in a real brain. Similarly, in your scenario, the humans are just the computer hardware running the LLM. Apart from that it's the same LLM. Anything that the original LLM experiences, the simulated one does too, otherwise they're not simulating it fully.

[technotony]

You are assuming that consciousness can be reproduced by simulating the brain. Which might be possible but it's by no means certain.

[int_19h]

You can simulate as much of the human as you need to. So long as consciousness is a physical process (or an emergent property of a physical process), it can be simulated.

The notion that it is not a physical process is an extraordinary claim in its own right, which itself requires evidence.

[jodrellblank]

You can simulate as much of an aircraft as you need to. So long as flying is a physical process, it can be simulated.

But your simulation will never fly you over an ocean, it will never be an aircraft or do what aircraft do. A simulation of heat transfer will not cook your dinner. A simulation of Your assumption that a simulation of a mind is a mind, requires evidence.

[Timwi]

> But your simulation will never fly you over an ocean

It will fly over a simulated ocean just fine. It does exactly what aircraft do, within the simulation. By adding “you” to the sentence you've made it an apples to oranges comparison because “you” is definitionally not part of the simulation. I don't see how you could add the same “you” to “it will simulate consciousness just fine”.

[cmsj]

Is simulate the right word there? With a hundred trillion connections between 80 billion neurons, it seems unlikely that it would ever be worth simulating a human brain, because it would be simpler to just build one than to assemble a computer complex enough to simulate it.

[szvsw]

Yes that’s my main point - if you accept the first one, then you should accept the second one (though some people might find the second so absurd as to reject the first).

> Imagine if instead of an LLM the billions of people instead simulated a human brain. Would that human brain experience consciousness? Of course it would, otherwise they're not simulating the whole brain.

However, I don’t really buy “of course it would,” or in another words the materialist premise - maybe yes, maybe no, but I don’t think there’s anything definitive on the matter of materialism in philosophy of mind. as much as I wish I was fully a materialist, I can never fully internalize how sentience can uh emerge from matter… in other words, to some extent I feel that my own sentience is fundamentally incompatible with everything I know about science, which uh sucks, because I definitely don’t believe in dualism!

[ghransa]

It would certainly with sufficient accuracy honestly say to you that it's conscious and believes it whole heartily, but in practice it would need to a priori be able describe external sense data, as it's not separate necessarily from the experiences, which intrinsically requires you to compute in the world itself otherwise it would only be able to compute on, in a way it's like having edge compute at the skins edge. The range of qualia available at each moment will be distinct to each experiencer with the senses available, and there likely will be some overlap in interpretation based on your computing substrate.

We in a way can articulate the underlying chemputation of the universe mediated through our senses, reflection and language, turn a piece off (as it is often non continuous) and the quality of the experience changes.

[GoblinSlayer]

But do you believe in something constructive? Do you agree with Searle that computers calculate? But then numbers and calculation are immaterial things that emerge from matter?