[ACCount37]

Do you have, by chance, a set of benchmarks that could be administered to humans and LLMs both, and used to measure and compare the levels of "consciousness, self-awareness and volition" in them?

Because if not, it's worthless philosophical drivel. If it can't be defined, let alone measured, then it might as well not exist.

What is measurable and does exist: performance on specific tasks.

And the pool of tasks where humans confidently outperform LLMs is both finite and ever diminishing. That doesn't bode well for human intelligence being unique or exceptional in any way.

[zahlman]

> Because if not, it's worthless philosophical drivel.

The feeling is mutual:

> ... that doesn't bode well for human intelligence being unique or exceptional in any way.

My guess was that you argued that we "don't understand" these systems, or that our incomplete analysis matters, specifically to justify the possibility that they are in whatever sense "intelligent". And now you are making that explicit.

If you think that intelligence is well-defined enough, and the definition agreed-upon enough, to argue along these lines, the sophistry is yours.

> If it can't be defined, let alone measured

In fact, we can measure things (like "intelligence") without being able to define them. We can generally agree that a person of higher IQ has been measured to be more intelligent than a person of lower IQ, even without agreeing on what was actually measured. Measurement can be indirect; we only need accept that performance on tasks on an IQ test correlates with intelligence, not necessarily that the tasks demonstrate or represent intelligence.

And similarly, based on our individual understanding of the concept of "intelligence", we may conclude that IQ test results may not be probative in specific cases, or that administering such a test is inappropriate in specific cases.

[ACCount37]

Well, you could do the funny thing, and try to measure the IQ of an LLM using human IQ tests.

Frontier models usually get somewhere between 90 and 125, including on unseen tasks. Massive error bars. The performance of frontier models keeps rising, in line with other benchmarks.

And, for all the obvious issues with the method? It's less of a worthless thing to do than claiming "LLMs don't have consciousness, self-awareness and volition, and no, not gonna give definitions, not gonna give tests, they just don't have that".