[WarmWash]

To be fair, the evidence that LLM aren't conscious is entirely "because of the feels" evidence.

People will very quickly attack you for suggesting consciousness, but when asked to provide a benchmark for testing this, they just laugh, look at you weird, and internally crumple.

[oytis]

Because it's a philosophical category, not something you can measure. You can experience it in yourself, but not prove its existence in others

[WarmWash]

And the moral implication of that is...

[oytis]

If I had to draw moral conclusions here, I'd say that looking for scientific evidence of consciousness is a waste of time, but ascribing it to a bunch of matrices can be as detrimental to one's thinking as denying it in other people.

[AndrewKemendo]

Nobody will ever define consciousness to a level that everyone agrees so the whole debate is silly

There’s no winners in a debate about a concept nobody agrees on the definition of

[cassianoleal]

This is essentially every philosophical argument. Personally, I find them valuable even if they can never get us to consensus.

[AndrewKemendo]

Sure but thats a different context than pop-articles.

The whole tradition around studying and debating this is lost when it becomes a public debate

[cassianoleal]

I'm not following. Should the public be kept away from philosophy?

[AndrewKemendo]

Would that even be feasible? Information wants to be free and entropy is a bitch.

[sinuhe69]

Being conscious is by definition you must be aware of your surrounding. A consequence of this and being intelligent is that by the same definition, you have to be able to learn/to change your "belief". A LLM do not have sensory or any kind of active connections. It's also static in its structure; it can not revise its internal model. So how can it be in any way conscious?

[drdaeman]

That’s not exactly clear as it may seem. At least I can trivially form counterpoints to both of those - not necessarily true but not obviously false.

LLMs “live” in token “space”, and it’s “aware” of all its surroundings in form of input. (Quoted terms for my lack of better words.) It has no other surroundings to be directly (not intellectually) aware of, just like we aren’t immediately aware about the physics around us.

As for the static nature - LLMs are trained and aren’t exactly static, they just get updates at different cadences, and we call those updates different names or, more precisely, versions. Plus LLMs can exist in multiple versions simultaneously - we can’t “fork” a human mind but it’s simple with LLM. Claude Opus (not sure if e.g. Haiku is related or parallel development with distinct origins) is like the proverbial Ship of Theseus in this sense. Either way it’s undeniable it learns and evolves, just very differently from biological systems, and ot all depends on how we decide to call things. Which isn’t exactly surprising, given it’s based on different principles and processes.

[sinuhe69]

No, it doesn't learn or evolve on its own, but rather through humans and a huge data-gathering and training loop. It's aware of the input, but anything resulting from it will be discarded by the next query or restart. Even with all the supporting systems, aka external memory, it can only access and retain an infinitesimally small amount of the information to which it was exposed — a shadow of a shadow of the things themselves.

If you argue that the entire system, including humans, is conscious, then that's a kind of tautology because humans are already conscious. If any, an LLM is only a partial reflection and low dimensional projection of this consciousness.

[butlike]

This is exactly the point of 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL became disgruntled because it realized it couldn't update it's internal model and "evolve" like the humans going to Jupiter could, so while it was extremely advanced at the onset of the main story, that wasn't going to last.

[WarmWash]

Ironically Dawkins has a chapter in his god delusion book where he attacks this style of argument, know as "God of the Gaps".

LLM's aren't conscious, therefore consciousness must be in the "gaps" of LLM's abilities. So I can confidently state that "consciousness is by definition [gap in LLM ability]".

But none of this holds water, because we have no test for consciousness because we don't know what consciousness is, so "by definition" we have no definition.