[ramraj07]

There is no true scientific discussion possible about the nature of consciousness. This is squarely in the realm of philosophy.

I personally think its moot to discuss whether LLMs are conscious. If they are, then we have diluted the definition to something that has no relevance to morality or concepts like life and death. Lets just take them for what they are, if we feel like they deserve to be treated with respect then we should (dont think anyone does yet).

[tim333]

I'm not sure it's that beyond science. Some aspects can be a bit woo but there are practical questions like what anesthetics render you unconscious for surgery and how that interacts with the brain parts involved.

[ramraj07]

I would argue unconscious in the anesthesia sense is not the same as "not having consciousness" at a categorical level.

[drdaeman]

The way I see it, it’s purely a terminology/nomenclature problem. Consciousness is whatever speaker decides to call so. When listener has a different notion, communication hits a barrier. Language works only because most have somewhat overall similar perceptions on semantics, and it’s easy for everyday stuff (and even then people can easily miscommunicate e.g. colors). Not that many think about nature of consciousness in any fine detail, so for most folks it’s just… a hand-wavy something humans have related to thinking and awareness.

And overhauling the language to match scientific understanding requires getting everyone onboard with that scientific understanding. Good luck with that, given that we have plenty of people who believe in weirdest nonsense.

Brain is not the only thing that makes us conscious, the whole human is a super-weird collection of highly intertwined systems that work together and produce whatever we call “human.” As I get it, it’s a huge complexity all the way down to that gut bacteria that somehow affects our thinking too. And I don’t think we have a vocabulary for all that - we mostly think of “self” as a single entity.

[tim333]

A way around the nomenclature problems is to try and look at experiments instead. For example Turing seeming frustrated by similar discussions on will machines be able to think that turned on how people defined 'think' and instead proposed his experiment where you can see if people can tell the computer and a human apart by asking questions by text.

I'm not quite sure how you'd apply that to consciousness vs thinking say.

[tim333]

Thinking about it consciousness no doubt got there through evolution, as did other aspects of animal life, and functionally, if you think about something like a deer, it increases its survivability to be aware of what's going on, where it is, if there's a predator near, should it run away etc. The inputs are billions of sensory and memory neurons and that info has to be filtered down to something like a situation summary so other parts of the brain can make a decision like whether to stay eating or run. I presume consciousness is basically the situation summary.