[indigo945]

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it.

Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

[breuleux]

> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is

We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.

[kelseyfrog]

If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories.

Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.

[mnewme]

No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.

[indigo945]

There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?

[mnewme]

That would still be circumventing. There are other architectures that could be more dynamic, LLMs are not.

It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.

[kelseyfrog]

Would we realistically expect that folks who claim LLMs are currently not conscious to change their response when asked about dynamic LLMs?

[kelseyfrog]

Memory is definitionally the faculty of the mind by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. There's no special carve out for 'except when it's an LLM.'

[breuleux]

Why, exactly, is this distinction relevant? The brain must store episodic memory somewhere too. From a cursory read, it seems to me that our experiences are processed through the hippocampus and amygdala into a high-level annotated encoding of historical data, stored somewhere else (unclear), fetched based on various triggers, replayed and reinterpreted by the neocortex, and, I assume, sent back through the hippocampus once more for updating. Sure, it's all in the brain, but I don't think physically separating the storage makes it fundamentally different.

I mean, I've replayed old memories in my head before. Sound, image and all. That's kind of like sending historic data into a prompt, isn't it? Of course it's not exactly the same thing, but the difference isn't exactly load-bearing, if you'll excuse the claudism. I feel like we're grasping at straws.

[mnewme]

Actually not quite true: Memory is distributed across synaptic weights rather than sitting at an address or location.

The difference is that human retrieval isn’t a read operation, reconsolidation means recalling a memory destabilizes it and re-stores an altered version. The act of remembering modifies the thing doing the remembering. An LLM’s weights don’t change when you put history in the prompt, and the prompt is discarded intact afterward. There is no state that would indicate any form of consciousness.

There is no form of subjective experience.

We used analogies from nature to describe computers and the same vocabulary and now because of this people now draw reverse conclusions that are not necessarily true

[perpetuallunch]

I like your argument.

It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own.

Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world.

But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form.

What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry?

Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.

[mnewme]

We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.

[ChrisGreenHeur]

If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.