[dumpsterdiver]

> Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious

The phrase “the trap of anthropomorphism” betrays a rather dull premise: that consciousness is strictly defined by human experience, and no other experience. It refuses to examine the underlying substrate, at which point we’re not even talking the same language anymore when discussing consciousness.

[marliechiller]

I think these ideas are orthogonal. I do not think that conciousness is defined by human experience at all - in fact, I think humans do a profound disservice to animals in our current lack of appreciation for their clear displays of conciousness.

That said, if a chimpanzee bares its teeth to me, I could interpret that to be a smile when in fact its a threatening gesture. Its this misinterpretation that I am trying to get at. The overlaying of my human experiences onto something which is not human. We fall for this over and over again, likely as we are hard wired to - akin to mistakenly seeing eyes when observing random patterns in nature.

In the case of LLMs though, why does using a mathmatical formula for predicting the next word give any more credence to conciousness than an algorithm which finds a nearest neighbour? To me, its humans falling foul of false pattern matching in the pursuit of understanding

[fragmede]

Why does a neuron, which is simply a cell that takes in chemicals and electricity, and shits out neurotransmitters; why does 90 billion of those give rise to human intelligence? Neurons are just next chemical state machines. We can model individual ones on a computer. Yet 90 billion of them together make up a human brain, and gives rise to consciousness and intelligence. If you get stuck on the next word prediction part, and ignore the ridiculous scale that's involved with training a model, you miss the forest for the trees.

[qsera]

Great progress came from inverting things that were believed to be self evident. Earth being the center of the world appear to be self evident when you look up at a night sky. But what was the truth?

Right now humans think it is self evident that physical laws give rise to consciousness. Arguments such as yours arise from this implicit assumption that premeditate all our thoughts and reasoning. But this is a dead end. Like how the earth centeric model reached a dead end and run out of steam before it can explain all the observations.

So to progress I think we should turn this down on its head and ask what if consciousness is fundamental? And the cosmos (or the experience of inhabiting one) arises from it? May be some recent advances in quantum mechanics and hypothesis like MUH are already in that direction...

[richhhh]

What makes you certain that human thought is more than pattern matching?

As I understand it neuroscience hasn’t come up with a clear explanation of thought, much less a mind or consciousness. It seems to me complex pattern matching is a reasonable a cause of consciousness as anything else.

[roxolotl]

A lot of the comments in this thread are ignoring his primary point. He's not saying pattern matching doesn't equal consciousness. He's actually saying something more fundamental. He's saying there's no reason to believe that language pattern matching/algorithms are more, or less, conscious than other similarly complex algorithms.

The stance being presented here isn't that LLMs aren't conscious but that we as humans are much more willing to assign consciousness to language algorithms than to pathing or other ones.

[qnleigh]

This is a good point and I agree. I sort-of addressed it in my reply above.

[threethirtytwo]

Replace the word chimpanzee with human in your own argument and realize that the same logic applies to other humans.

When another human smiles you assume he is happy and not just baring his teeth at you because that’s what you do when you smile. You are “anthropomorphizing” other people. You fall for the same category error in a daily basis when you interact with people; it is not just chimpanzees.

> In the case of LLMs though, why does using a mathmatical formula for predicting the next word give any more credence to conciousness than an algorithm which finds a nearest neighbour?

First we don’t know whether LLMs are conscious. People speaking here are talking about the realistic possibility that it is conscious.

Second the algorithm is much more than a next word predictor. The intelligence that goes into choosing the next word such that it constructs arguments and answers that are correct involves a lot more then simple prediction. We know this because the LLM regularly answers questions that require extreme understanding of the topic at hand. It cannot token predict working code in my companies code base without understanding the code.

Third, we do not know what drives human consciousness but we do know it is model-able in a very complex mathematical algorithm. We know this because we have pretty complete mathematical models for lower resolutions of reality. For example we can models atoms mathematically. We know brains are made of atoms and because atoms are mathematically model-able we know that human brains and thus consciousness is mathematically model-able.

The sheer complexity of the LLM model is the problem we cannot have high level understanding of it because conceptual understanding cannot be simplified into a few concepts.

   To understand the LLM requires simultaneous understanding of likely billions of concepts at the same time and how all the weights interact in the LLM. 

What you are missing with your analysis is that this is the same reason why we don’t understand the human brains. The foundational math already exists as we can models atoms in math and thus since the brain is made out of atoms we should be able to model the brain… but we can’t. We can’t because it is too complex.

   To understand the human brains requires simultaneous understanding of likely billions of concepts at the same time and how all the weights interact in the human brain. 

I italicized two sentences here to help you understand the logic. Our thinking is more foundational then anthropomorphization. The argument has moved far beyond that. You need to think deeper.

The key here is that we don’t understand human brains and we don’t understand LLMs. But since the output LLMs produce are very similar to the output produced by the human brain… and since for no logical reason we assume human brains are conscious… what is stopping us from assuming the LLM is conscious?