[daveguy]

If that's claptrap this is article sewage waste. On the nose is an understatement.

It's not doing the same work, or producing the same output.

It's an episodic response to specific requests. If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either.

This article pretends that we understand human brains as much as we understand the simple algorithms of LLMs. And that's just laughable. Even so out of touch as to say consumption of "[humans] consume thousands of liters of water per years". As if there isn't multiple orders of magnitude more consumption for data centers. For data centers that produce a braindead simulacrum.

[Lerc]

>If you went into a coma between every question you were asked, you wouldnt be in a normal human state of consciousness either.

I don't think any one is saying AI has a normal human state of consciousness.

Nobody claims that people with anterograde amnesia are not conscious. Similarly, you could drug someone unconscious after every time they answer a single question. It's not a normal state of human consciousness, but I wouldn't want to say a person in that situation were not sentient.

It is true that there is much that we do not know about the human brain, but it is also true that many of the things that people describe as attributes that clearly disqualify AI have known analogues in humans.

From simple failures of perception in optical illusions, to the inability to notice quite significant changes in front of your eyes if the change happens during a saccade. There are a wide range of known limitations that humans have that reveal how much we overlook things we can't do, that when you consider them, reveals our own behaviour could be an more of an arrangement of systems than we would like to think.

[daveguy]

Every single one of your examples is one that comes nowhere near the blankness of an llm pile of numbers when it isn't answering a question. Maybe I should have said, is completely dead, rather than in a coma, between questions.

The quirks we observe in llms we only pretend have analogues in humans because we love to anthropomorphize. And it's easy to ansthropomorphise a language simulacrum. We've been doing it since ELIZA.

[Lerc]

I'm not sure why you think a temporary cessation of activity is relevant at all.

Would you think of a hypothetical machine that could freeze a human to absolute zero and restore them again sufficient to declare their behaviour when unfrozen as not that of a sentient individual.

How about if you had a picture of a black man and a white woman in front of a person and you swapped the heads, right in front of the observers eyes, but you picked just the right time so that even though they never sensed any time of not looking at the image, they did not notice the change.