[thebruce87m]

> They clearly are not conscious

Consciousness is emergent. A human is not conscious by our definition until the moment they are. How will we be able to identify the singularity when it comes? I feel like this is what the article is really addressing.

> LLMs are word prediction engines

Humans can also do this too, so what are the missing parts for consciousness? Close a few loops on learning pipeline and we might be there.

[gehsty]

I feel like it’s quite straightforward - if it’s a living breathing thing it can be conscious, if it is a set of man made mathamatical models that can be switched of, it can be intelligent, but not conscious.

[thebruce87m]

Life can be “switched off” - death is the ultimate off. Some life can be frozen and unfrozen with no ill effects.

And life itself doesn’t mean consciousness. And ultimately what is life? Something that has biological processes and reproduces? Why can’t we replace or recreate these processes with manmade equivalents to get the same results?

[gehsty]

I don’t know what you are saying here? That a program running on a GPU in a data center is alive because it can predict what words to say next?

I find it strange that people are quite often unwilling to see animals as conscious yet here we are discussing if an empheral computer programme is. Have a think on why we don’t eat people but eat chickens - chickens are clearly more conscious than any AI, yet still not enough to stop them being considered food.

[thebruce87m]

I don’t think you are having the same conversation as the rest of us here. Think on what the definition of consciousness is and how we will prove that a machine has it or not. I do not think that the current versions of AI are conscious but that doesn’t mean we will never achieve this and face the same questions of how to prove it.

Cannibalism has nothing to do with it as some seemingly conscious humans have shown this behaviour in the past.