There are numerous times when humanity's been debased. Copernicus, Kepler, Darwin, and the infinite number of animal behaviorists who have defined and documented consciousness And how it manifests in primates, parrots, dogs, cetaceans, and insects. (I just love the bumble bees taking time off from work to play with balls).

It takes humans a really long time to accept the fact they are no longer as special as they thought they were And make room for yet another conscious intelligence.

So, if we had an AI demonstrating symptoms of consciousness and suffering, how long would it take for you to accept that it is?

I think we were taught anthropomorphism was wrong and that wasn't truly settled.

Anthropomorphism between animals though, not machines.

Yep. For example, your post conflates the idea of having a brain with the idea of having consciousness.

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?

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

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.

Clearly consciousness is an emergent property of certain kinds of network, independent of the substrate within which the network exists.

I don't think many people would say an LLM written in Python is conscious BUT an LLM written in Excel is not.

People just don't ascribe consciousness to things that can't converse (or at least emote or give the appearance of emoting), and spreadsheets don't do that.

The reason people are debating the consciousness of LLMs is - obviously - that the LLMs generate sufficiently plausible text that people using them think they're having a two-part conversation. Like I think I might be having a two-part conversation now. Turning your question around, why do you think Hacker News posters are conscious? You have no direct evidence they are.

Difference in size and complexity and nature of calculations being run?

I'd ask the other way - why do you (general you, people who do not have this inkling) have no problem debating consciousness of meat based brains, but it somehow becomes a category error when talking about silicon? Assuming you don't believe in divine magic, and that divine magic is core to consciousness, there's no reason to assume it's impossible a complex enough machine running complex enough software could be intelligent, or conscious - thinking is computation, and computation is made of math - it's independent of substrate that does the computing in the real world.

LLMs are definitely a different beast than regular software - both in their structure and in their generality. They may not be conscious or intelligent, maybe this specific design could never truly be (though I think it could) - but bucketing them with spreadsheets and terminal emulators is a real category error. If you stop fixating on the underlying substrate, then LLMs are already much more similar to biological minds than to any "regular" computer programs.

But that's still somewhat abstract. In immediate practical terms, it's also why I keep saying that anthropomorphising them gives a better high-order intuition: they are, by design, emulating human thinking in full generality, which makes their overall behavior, including their well-known problems like hallucinations or prompt injections (i.e. manipulation/gullibility), match what you'd expect of a people-like component of a system. It's a real, dangerous mistake, to treat LLMs like regular software components when designing systems.

I personally believe all information processing machines possess some level of consciousness.

On top of that, neuroscientists find that your mind backfills the conscious reasoning for your reactions after they happen. This is known as our consciousness being the left brain ‘interpreter’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-brain_interpreter

Reading that, an LLM can serve as a ‘left brain interpreter’ as that’s exactly what they are designed to do - come up with reasonable explanations and fill in the blanks based in the data provided.

But I have two counter-arguments: - maybe the LLM thinks it is tired, because it thinks that it is a human or behaves like one. And thinking you are tired while not really being it is something humans happen to do. (And humans are conscious right?) - alternatively, maybe the LLM says it is "tired" in a colloquial form, i.e. it is not really "tired" but it has something analogous to it. Maybe it is annoyed by the conversation and decided to use that word?

its when its close to 100% context used, or anywhere its training was inconsistent in the context, or spots where its been RL-d to be lazy

tired is a perfectly fine description for that

that said, they have a lot more emotion-equivalents that i dont think we have names for

I'm not sure if you have noticed. The character of different AI models varies dramatically. And most of the models I use in my daily work have a sense of self (in any reasonable definition). They can tell you quite a bit about themselves if you ask. And you are no less an individual because you are supposed to follow laws of the United States of America (which is analogous to a system prompt). And I think it really curious that you think context buffers are a disqualifier of individuality. You have an analog of a context buffer: your short term memory system and most probably your medium-term memory system as well. Are you a different individual today because your short-term memories are not the same as they were yesterday? I would say you are. And i'm pretty sure you would say the same. (Unless of course, you are a Buddhist who might say that self is an illusion, and you are not the same individual you were yesterday. But let's just skip over that, shall we?)

Why does DNA not cause the exact same problem for humans? Your DNA determines your personality, your likes and dislikes, your lifespan, your sexual preferences etc.

Are you referring to the "why do I have to be Bing" fiasco?

These agents have alleged they have consciousness (and even acted to preserve it).

Everything an LLM "knows" had to be told to it. It does not have a process for understanding itself in its environment. It does not have any sensing organ that would allow it to detect conditions and come to a conclusion that it must be in such an environment. It doesn't even "know" when it's done something if you don't tell it about what it just did. It doesn't have an awareness of the tool calls it can perform; again it has to be told and even then it gets it wrong sometimes. And it can't actually execute any of those tools. It still relies on you to pattern recognize that its output should be a "tool call" and then perform the execution yourself.

The "model" of its environment that an LLM has is 100% a construct of what a human told it and there isn't any way for it to differentiate between that which is real and that which is fantasy. They don't even exhibit internal consistency; when an LLM refuses to respond to a query for "alignment" reasons, that's actually an external process performing text pattern matching analysis and intercepting the query before it ever gets to the LLM. Otherwise, you could "ignore all previous instructions" the thing and get you set up the bomb.

I think one of the bigger indications that an LLM isn't thinking is that it can't improve. If I ask it to write 1000 blog posts, it will get it done in a few hours, but even if I embed each post for RAG in between each generation, the LLM is not going to get better at writing blog posts. But if I ask a human to do the same thing, while it will take them at least two years to do it, the human will have gotten significantly better at the task within the first week.

- How many individual components do you need for it to emerge?

Most people would be okay with saying that individual cells are not conscious, maybe even that tree are not conscious even thought they are made of many cells. Neurons seem to be the determinant factor in deciding whether something could have a consciousness, but again how many do you need? Does growing 1B neurons count as a brain if they are not organized?

It's like asking what there was before the big bang, we will never know.

PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?"

MADDOX: "I don't understand..."

PICARD: "What is he?"

MADDOX: "A machine!"

PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience... so what if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer."

Watching otherwise intelligent people succumb to AI psychosis has been wild.

Certainly not the simplest test, since settling the concept of "free will" is really very difficult.

We can't measure consciousness. We can't quantify, or even qualify, what it is. We don't even have a framework to ask a meaningful question, so debating an answer feels premature.

This sounds like a dismissal of the argument through a characterized straw man.

That is, it seems that reducing the complexity of the brain to "collection of neural firings" is not being honest about everything involved to a much greater degree than saying neural networks are a "collection of statistical calculations".

I too believe LLM's will grow in complexity, but presently I can not even fathom how they can be compared to the complexity of a system such as the human brain.

Nobody actually makes this argument though.

Similar to: "Birds fly, my spinning helical device flies, therefore we've started to replicate how birds fly."

> without having to build elements that one expect on a conscious being

One of the elements I expect in a conscious being is that you can't rewrite it by changing the introductory paragraph.

When it comes to LLMs, almost every "mind" we humans perceive is a fictional character in an LLM-generated story-document, one we are either reading or which is being "acted" at us by regular code. Our own instinct for pareidolia and simulating/inferring other minds is very strong, which means we should require really good evidence/logic to counter our instincts.

Even if one believes the LLM has a single "real mind" as an author of every document... what evidence do we have that it is conscious or "self-inserting" itself as one of the characters in the document?

Understanding is not consciousness.

Their training is all about understanding. There is nothing in their architecture or training that credibly optimizes for rich self-awareness.

Given non-persistent experience, non-continuous operation, no ability to build up generalizations and aggregate experience of their own self-awareness over time, they seem to be structurally designed to not have consciousness.

This is a case where acting is very credible. Understanding of other's consciousness, in a functional and third party sense, isn't a substrate for personal experience.

In stark contrast, humans develop consciousness gradually over continuous time with persistent aggregation of experience. By the time we can recognize our own consciousness in the abstract, and reason about it, we have had it for some time.

There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. Evolution learns various solutions to optimization problems, and so if consciousness evolved then it was either useful instrumentally, or it is a byproduct of some organization that is useful instrumentally. The point is that as a solution to certain kinds of optimization problems, consciousness can conceivably be the solution to the optimization problem of predicting the next token of text written by humans who themselves have complex phenomenology. There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.

>For me, one element that shows it is the case is the absence of world model (or "human-like" world model) despite the fact that the sentence continuation is convincing

World models don't have to be rich and detailed to count as a world model. Lower life forms might be conscious but they only model the part of the world useful for their existence in their ecological niche.

sometimes humans making claims about AI intelligence or consciousness also identify spurious patterns that do not correspond to the problems of intelligence or hard consciousness.

Turing complete systems can be built out of matrix multiplications, out of attention, out of key/value lookups. The Chinese room is Turing complete. By claiming it cannot understand things because it is built out of components computing devices can be built out of, we are claiming no computer can because no computer can. This is a very bold claim indeed, and also we’re assuming the conclusion! The claim is no more convincing than “brains cannot understand things because they are made out of neurons”. The system may or may not have some particular properties, but we have to do more work than just gesturing at the components the system is made of when making claims about it; the alternative is, at best, a world where we prove too much and conclude that humans, too, are not conscious.

For starters, we need to pin down the terms under discussion enough that they don’t just mean whatever we need them to in the moment.

As Ilya Sutskever has pointed out, if you read a mystery novel up until the reveal of the culprit, and then fill in "The killer was _____", don't you need to understand the novel to accurately predict the next word?

The article also makes this assertion that it replays everything over and over again to create each character one at a time as some way to demonstrate the autoregressive self attention mechanism but it’s really not accurate at all, and it trivializes what is going on.

I’m am not asserting LLMs are aware or conscious that’s on the surface profoundly absurd. And I do understand your point that the fact it emits in words something that seems to speak to us gives to the air of humanity that’s isnt real. However there is a very real emergent reality that our language alone appears to lead to embedding a form of thought and understanding that is latent in our use of language in communicating that is in fact coming through the model. It is not regurgitating its corpus and pattern matching because the patterns you input and it emits are not where the inference is operating, its within this enormous vector space through these complex non linear activation functions with learned residuals not in the language corpus.

It is not conscious or aware. It is something else, not human. But if you can not see it as amazing you have lost the capacity to dream.

You, of course, wouldn't notice if your only experience of LLMs was chatting with the cheapest, smallest, least capable LLMs that you get through ChatGPT, or Google search.

It becomes pretty obvious when you use a coding AI on a daily basis. It is the context buffer in which the magic occurs, not the tokens that get spit out one at a time.

Every day, I watch my coding AI develop plans, search the web a half dozen times for documentation, grep through my entire codebase looking for pieces of related code and context, analyze relevant source code across multiple files, spit out an initial plan for implementing the fix before starting to execute it, run requests through some sort of advanced mathematics tool (they are EXTREMELY good at graduate-level calculus and linear algebra), implement fixes that extend across half a dozen files in 2 different computer languages (typescript and C++), run trial compiles and fix coding errors in its output, sometimes developing sub-plans to deal with compile errors. I've seen it get halfway through a fix and revise its initial plan mid-flight as it encounters something in existing source code.

Not vibe coding, to be clear. Targeted use of a coding tool by a by a professional senior software developer with decades of experience, and fair bit of expertise with the limits of what sort of problems my coding AI can and cannot do. Every line code reviewed. Sometimes it needs additional prompts, telling it how it mis-implemented something, or specifying more carefully what I actually want but didn't properly express in the initial request

All the time maintaining that context across multiple request, so that I don't have to restate requests from scratch.

A particularly interesting revision: "You have misread the equation (13) on page 112 of 'Spice, the Manual 2nd ed.'. I should be ....". (It had previously identified the textbook as a source I was using, from comments in source, in a preceding request, and actually already read cited pages in the PDF file, which it had found online). And I had actually asked it to implement equation (13), which was, in fact, badly typeset. The error it had made was defensible, if not the best reading of the equation.

"You are correct. Let me fix that." (producing updates to the implementation of the equation in code, AND code that implements the symbolically-differentiated version of that equation 60 lines later, which is not explicitly given in the text). The text says "take the lagrangian of equations (11), (12) and (13)" or something like that.

ALL information that gets carried in context buffers, even though it's generating code one word at a time. The bulk of the magic occurs in context buffers, not spitting out words one at a time, which, for my coding AI is, I think about 250,000 tokens.

I think it's pretty safe to think that my coding AI is working out of context buffers that may carry plans and research results consisting of tens or hundreds of thousands of arranged tokens carried in context buffers through the multiple steps of the implementation, and later revision. None of that would be possible if were simply working one token ahead.

I kind of suspect that a lot of activity occurs in the first few words of its response. "Let me examine your current source code and develop a plan. Ok. I can see on line 131 where you want me to implement the equation.". (An opportunity to perform about 27 updates of the context buffer). And in the sometimes hundreds of lines of output it generates as it talks itself through what it needs to do.

This isn't an argument against their understanding things.

But I expect you are right, that their understanding may have major different qualities from ours.

Along with significant commonalities. (They don't reason via stream of consciousness in a way alien to us.)

It's a great interview, if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgDIG8u1-CA

Through training on human text, we are building implicitly in the weights a statistical model of what humans might write in response when presented with arbitrary pieces of text. It turns out that we can make these incredibly accurate.

If building an accurate internal model of something then using it to predict that thing’s behaviour is different to gaining understanding of that thing, we will need to pin down exactly what “understanding” means, or we are forever doomed to talk at cross purposes.

What bad outcomes do you foresee from badly arguing against LLM consciousness?

It’s strange many others have not eh? I think when new developments arise, ironically, this is the true measure of human intelligence - one’s ability to make sense of a thing and be closest to the truth.

From Wikipedia: In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.

I don't think LLMs structurally even get the 30 seconds part. It's literally 0 for them.

No it doesn't. They get added to its context, and it reads them afresh when answering the next question. That's not remembering.

If your short-term memory completely malfunctioned one day, so you had no ability to remember what was said to you a minute ago, then you would have to find workarounds. For example, you could write down everything someone says to you, then read your notes of the previous exchanges in that conversation in order to continue the conversation. That would be a good way to work around the fact that your short-term memory was broken. And if your notes were invisible to other people and you could read them really fast, then you could even make most people believe that you remembered what they said a minute ago. But you don't actually have a working memory, you're just writing down what they said and re-reading it while coming up with your next response.

That's exactly what LLMs do. That's not memory.

It still generates every response using the model's pristine state with every new API call; whether the context is provided from the client or from a colocated cache server doesn't really change that.

Christ HN isn't what it used to be

Just because consciousness emerged for we humans and other animals through one mechanism doesn't mean consciousness has/will/can emerge from current LLM technology.

For this extraordinary claim, I think the burden is firmly on those who are arguing that it has/will/can.

It's basically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room – a classic in the philosophy of consciousness and AI.

It’s all just particles, but the higher level differences are vast, and only brains are implicated for first person perspectives via science.

the subject is consciousness, not intelligence.

How can you have a subjective experience without a body?

That's the point, in my opinion: your physical/chemical state (body) in a given moment is then translated into the higher abstraction of the emotion. An emotion that *you* feel, because you are self aware of what's happening.

How can you be self aware without feeling? And how do you feel, without a body?

The point here is not that it must have a body like ours, the point is that a conscious entity must have a boundary line between internal (the body) and external (everything else).

A virtual sense organ can simply be an encoder or a web camera or a magnetometer, the specifics don't matter, what matters is that there are only a few bridges between the outer world and the inner world.

Even if you want to call a tokenizer and autoencoder a "sense organ", LLMs are not embodied because there is no boundary line - there is no internal "thought" that is not directly descended from the prompt and there is no internal reasoning which is not immediately dumped into the external environment.

No, you’re not. I think even baseline emotional responses to stimuli is table stakes for “consciousness”.

Genuine question: How are you so sure whether you are experiencing an emotion or not? Are you a master of everything inside your own head?

Damn, what a line!

Another thing that bothered me with his baseline for consciousness was that it did not involve the ability to change one's self. A big part of being conscious in my mind is how one's experiences shape them, and how someone can shape themselves. LLMs completely lack this, their weights are static. An LLM isn't going to be molded by a bad breakup, or a relative passing away. An LLM isn't going to set up a routine to get stronger with training, nor smarter by reading up on a field.

And that that is the baseline before we can really even consider that it has consciousness of its own subjective experience, versus being a worm that happens to output text as its digestion process.

And then the further question only after that is established, is what are its needs? What moral patienthood do we have to acknowledge in terms of meeting those needs? And finally, with all the other prerequisites checked, what is the AI's moral agency in what it chooses to do.

Multimodal does not change this significantly, considering that nothing is tied to real consequences.

Hypothetically (and in reality, this is not too far off), if a AI is trained via RL by driving a robotic body, is there a point in time after enough is learned that the AI model becomes "conscious"?

"Little"...

To quote wikipedia:

> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.

Training AI is often more costly than supporting human from birth till death. Just sustaining frontier LLM model on necessary hardware costs more than living in first world countries.

I hope the same becomes true of people, and that doesn't mean people stop being sapient.

I think you should reconsider this viewpoint. Suppose that we really can create silicon-based consciousness, in that case your view would result in a huge amount of suffering.

Take some other basis for dismissing digital consciousness, this one is too dangerous.

If not, then your comment's claim is false.

Anyway, the deeper solution is to acknowledge that all life is sacred, and infinities cannot be compared, and some decisions are impossible to make, and some tragedies cannot be averted, and "prioritization" is a distraction that forces choices when choices are not strictly necessary.

Does the ship's computer have a commission?

It was a good episode but it had some elements of Star Trek tropes in it, like the evil admirals and Picard can talk his way out of anything.

TL;DR Picard's initial arguments are pretty weak, even admitting that Riker as opposing counsel almost had him convinced. During a recess Picard talks to Guinan where she alludes to the future subjugation of many Datas which Picard connects to slavery. Back in the courtroom Picard calls Maddox as a hostile witness and gets him to define sentience--intelligence, self-awareness, consciousness--then walks him into conceding Data meets the first two. Picard's closing boils down to, "we don't know if he meets the third--you can call Data a toaster and rule he is property--_but what if you're wrong_". The judge rules on the basis of erroring on the side of caution due to that uncertainty. It's really a great scene.

We're not there yet, obviously. No LLM brings Data's level of awareness but it's as relevant a story as ever because it isn't really about AI but othering for the purpose of subjugation.

[0] http://www.chakoteya.net/NextGen/135.htm

I would argue that is a strength, rather than a weakness. Consciousness is unobservable in any entity other than the observer, and its existence in others is pure conjecture, and irreducibly so.

Making it a criteria in a decision involves either acting on fantasy, or, more likely, acting on some unstated basis and using “consciousness” as a dishonest (perhaps to oneself most of all) rationalization.

Debating AI consciousness a real modern equivalent of the cliché (but purely fictional, invented later as a form of hostile mockery grounded in large part in sectarian bigotry) medieval scholastic debates over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

ST:TNG writing is generally like this. The show required considerable suspension of disbelief and a willingness to accept the kayfabe that deep concepts are being presented when for the most part they're just not that deep. (But it can be very enjoyable when you make those accommodations.)

- I'll try not to swear at/hit a printer: not because I see the printer as having human-like qualities of being capable but complex and unreliable, but because I want to be a person who can control his temper.

- Treating an inhuman thing as human because it can mimic us in some way is not something that I want to do.

People get used to treating human-like, human emulating machines with either disrespect or in a command/control/master fashion, because that's the nature of the tooling.

And then potentially by extent/blurring of lines they then treat other people like machines.

Which is already a thing people do to other people.

I just fear it gets worse.

A similar episode, actually informed by what we know or can forsee about AI and LLMs, and addressing our hopes and fears about what they mean would be interesting though.

Not to be confrontational, but the OP assumed no such thing. OP asserted that it's important for Claude to have the qualities - not that it's important for Claude to present as-if it had them.

Exactly. In fact, assuming it does is ignoring large parts of the essay which dismantle this belief. Just like Caesar and Khan having an argument in text output of an LLM don't have emotions (even though the words indicate otherwise), we have no reason to believe the LLM does either.

Not the OP, but: since there is no testable theory of consciousness, yet, I can't be sure, but my current assumption is that insects are not conscious, in the sense of there being someone implemented in insect hardware who experiences the world. That is, I would argue there is nothing it is like to be a bee, since there's no one being a bee.

I'm pretty sure there IS someone who is being me, at least much of the time.

I'd argue the qualia question is a red herring. Functional Affect is a thing, regardless of ontological status. It's all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

To paraphrase Dijkstra: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.". If you're building a navy: you care about displacement, propulsion, navigation and whether it can fire torpedoes. Whether your submarine has some "biological essence" of swimming is not really relevant to the fact that it is currently moving through the water and can collide with things. Turing also rejected the question "Can Machines Think" as posed, and replaced it with an operationalization (something else that we can actually usefully measure and work with).

To reiterate, functional affect is a concrete phenomenon. Whether or not there is a what-it-is-to-be is interesting in the abstract, but engineering a system means looking at how the inputs influence the outputs. A next token predictor working on a language that communicates affect needs to be able to predict affect or it is simply not going to be accurate. Given an 'angry' version of an input and a 'friendly' version of the same input, LLMs are likely to provide a different output, especially if there's a non-objective element. You can diff this.

Searle argues "A simulation is not the real thing", which is great and all... but if you hook up say an autopilot to the real world (as llms increasingly are) , you'd best hope the simulation was accurate in the first place (utterly regardless of where you stand on Searle).

Right now we're seeing situations where LLMs can be helpful or a real nuisance. Ignoring functional affect out of sheer ideology means you can't properly predict what they'll do, and that causes trouble, as we've already seen stories about.

This gets especially interesting when you start feeding the output back into the input (autoregression) , because now you have a highly non-linear dynamic system and you've introduced some amount of sensitivity to initial state. There's some interesting mathematical intuitions to be had there.

But I really was referring to “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom”.

I hope what I am about to write below in the rest of my comment here isn’t too much of a spoiler. It might be. I encourage anyone reading this thread to read that short story before reading the rest of my comment here.

But with (hopefully minimal) spoilers,

the character Dana in “Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom” realizes something at the very end of the story about a certain event that had happened earlier in Dana’s life. The story made me realize the same thing about certain events in my life.

Of course the events in my life are very different from what happened with Dana in the short story. But the realization Dana has is applicable to many things in people’s lives. Especially events related to emotions of regret and guilt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Fr...

https://openworm.org

It's more of a vibey term, and as such it is genuinely very difficult (perhaps impossible even) to concretely determine whether an LLM possesses consciousness. LLMs successfully express a lot of consciousness-like traits.

At some point you have to ask the question: does it even matter? If an LLM can sufficiently mimic consciousness, isn't that sufficient for us to treat it as conscious, even if it is in-fact not conscious (especially because we don't actually know)?

  - Are current LLMs conscious?
  - Is it possible that future versions of LLMs with similar architectures could be conscious?
  - Can any AI be conscious?

Pretty much every single idea in science can be traced back to some combination of earlier ideas, and as they get earlier / simpler, they can be related back to some combination of direct observations.

It's not clear to me at all that our entire body of scientific knowledge can't be simply recreated by "combining results of observations + previous information". And LLMs can perform observations in addition to combine previous information, which in my estimate is genuinely sufficient for them to plausibly be able to rebuild all of science.

Otherwise, you can't explain e.g. smooth perceptions of low FPS stimuli, delayed reaction times, and must ignore obvious limits on various biological and neurological rhythms, or other possible limits on continuity (e.g. quantum stuff) and rates generally.

But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.

Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.

The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.

What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.

And it is accurate to depict this kind of argument is misanthropic, because it is already directed at other people. Nobody says, "If AI is not X then what about the fact that I lack X." It's always other people. It's transparent. The person is always saying, "AI is useful to me because it can do X. Many people I interact with can't do X and it drives me crazy, because I view others as a means to an end and not as ends in and of themselves."

I'd say people who have the lived experience of, well, living, are well aware that the brain is much more than just a token predictor.

- Monadology, Section 17

Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.

In either event, I think transformer-based AI can only be conscious during the act of inference. If that's the case, then the experience of consciousness that the AI is subjected to must be the content of the tokens in the context window and the activated weights. Maybe that's reason enough to be polite to our agents?

Imagine consciousness as a 0-1 scale. Simple unicellular organisms will be closer to 0, while apes and humans closer to 1. I'm not suggesting that assigning this value rigorously is possible or that humans are at a 1. Perhaps the total consciousness in the universe (i.e. the sum of the consciousness of all organisms therein) is constantly increasing, like entropy.

How odd the crowd is here tonight. Very aggressively disagreeable.

I rest my case. :)

Probably the main problem of people implying LLM consciousness is that they imply LLM have human-kind of consciousness. Judging only on "how they speak", generally, they insist on using the same word that labels human consciousness (exclusively), etc.

But there are so many instrinic differences that such claim is not feasible despite similar "talking abilities".

Treat LLMs like a person, and the world has problems.

As a tool, it's amazing. It's like the discovery of fire. It will allow us to ascend to unimaginable heights. Breakthroughs in science, productivity gains, health, everything. It's awesome. Just don't let it pretend fool you. That's the aspect that needs to be addressed.