[starbugs]

> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious.

That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.

A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as long as I can reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine as a human being. Attributing that to a graphics card computing the next token deserves to be scrutinized.

[tasuki]

> reasonably assume that your experience is similar to mine

You could be the only conscious being in the universe and all of us just zombies: you have no way of knowing.

What's it like to be a monkey instead? Dog? Bat? Tree? We don't know.

No one's saying the graphics card is conscious. I could imagine the graphic cards could give rise to consciousness. But - crucially - I don't know. And neither do you.

You say you're conscious - where in you does the consciousness reside? Surely not the left pinky? What makes you you?

[butlike]

What if everything's conscious, we just can't understand the communication mechanisms at different levels? o.O

[Jtarii]

>That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly.

This is just a nonsensical rebuttal. We can easily experimentally verify that jumping from a skyscraper is dangerous.

[starbugs]

It's a pointless debate in a scientific, left brain sense. Who can prove that you aren't the only consciousness in the universe and you are basically dreaming your experimental results up? Experimental verifications exist only in a limited scope.

If your argument is that matter brings about consciousness somehow and therefore LLMs can in principle be conscious, that's as good as claiming the opposite. There's no experiment that can falsify either.

As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.

[Jtarii]

>As a being that knows what consciousness is intuitively, you already know that a graphics card is most likely not conscious.

I would say that it is more likely than not that a graphics card exhibits some form of consciousness. But I am a panpsychist, I believe an individual atom has some form of consciousness.

Ultimately consciousness has to come from somewhere, and it being a fundamental property of matter is a good a place as any.

[starbugs]

> I would say that it is more likely than not that a graphics card exhibits some form of consciousness. But I am a panpsychist, I believe an individual atom has some form of consciousness.

Fair enough point. But then I guess you'd also say that a piece of silicon or sand exhibits some form of consciousness. I don't think that's what people mean when they talk about the potential of LLMs (the algorithm) being conscious or somehow developing consciousness?

[demorro]

Consciousness is unique in that we, as yet, have not identified any externally observable properties that could not also occur in the absence of consciousness. This is not true with matter.

Normally when we debate what something is, what we are actually debating about is what it does, with the implicit assumption that the "is-ness" of a thing is defined as the complete collection of all the properties it exhibits.

As it does not seem possible to do this with consciousness, it is not possible to debate it. It is conceivable that this implies that consciousness cannot exist, but that depends on your metaphysics.

[tempfile]

Almost everyone in almost all contexts agrees on what matter is, though. I can't think of any conversation about material objects I've ever had where "is this matter?" was ever up for consideration.

Consciousness is almost the opposite. It consists of lots of weird properties, people disagree where it starts and ends, and people very frequently get tricked into thinking things we now obviously believe are not conscious, are. There is not even a working definition, a "local definition" that works for this conversation between us. It's just complete gibberish.

[sysguest]

maybe we can debate, but not arrive at conclusion?

[danw1979]

The difference is that you can experimentally show that jumping from a skyscraper is dangerous.