[twobitshifter]

The OP said: nozzlegear 19 hours ago [–]

Yes, LLMs don't think on their own, for one; they think when you invoke them.

My rebuttal is that people only think when invoked just the same and can enter states where there is no consciousness just the same. The OP has already accepted that LLMs think, but it seems that you are arguing they do not? This car business is confusing and the LLMs not checking themselves is also wrong, there’s even a benchmark for this https://correctbench.github.io/

[cauch]

No.

OP says: LLMs never think when not invoked.

What you said: I have example where, sometimes, human think when invoked.

That's the difference: human brains are intrinsically different because they are built to be able to think without being invoked, even if there are situations where they think when invoked.

There are tons of obvious examples of human thinking without being invoked. Just take a bath and you will see :)

[nozzlegear]

To be clear: the person I was replying to asked if the way a human thinks was any different from an LLM with a context window. That's the context of my answer. An LLM is a machine, it can't do anything unless we invoke it or give it the instructions and capabilities to do so. It has no free will, it can't just decide to compose a symphony one day unless those are part of its instructions. It can't do anything unless we tell it to do so and give it the capabilities to do so, it doesn't even exist unless it's loaded into memory. That's obviously different from human consciousness, and that's the whole of the point that I'm making.

You can argue that humans are just biological machines reacting to external stimuli, but that's a philosophical argument that I'm not interested in having and frankly, I think it'd be selling yourself short a little bit.

[twobitshifter]

Thank you I appreciate your opinion. I do think that we are reacting to external stimuli even though our ego is uncomfortable with being deterministic in any way, which is the free will point that you hit on. I think that is likely to be the point that keeps the argument going as it’s not a settled debate absent any AI, which we clearly all see as either deterministic or semi-random when the temperature gets turned up.

As far as the argument about being loaded in memory, if there’s any consciousness in AI, it’s obviously in different form than a biological consciousness. We’d have to agree that consciousness does not require a body to get past this.