This is not a genuine argument and tries to make the entire question of consciousness into one something that is just supposed to be evident and obvious and to suggest anything else is just silly.
The author starts by deconstructing artificial processes, but doesn't stop to deconstruct biological ones. A good faith argument would seek to find common ground and do its best to compare apples to apples. Instead, this piece attempts to make the large as possible cavern between the two which makes the Gap seem almost impossible to bridge.
In reality, you can deconstruct biological consciousness quite easily and it doesn't take too long before you hit some questions that really start to make you think.
For example, the author says you need emotions to be conscious.
> without a body, a computer program could have no desires or emotions, and I believe desires and emotions are necessary for consciousness.
After many paragraphs of straw man arguments, the author seriously just drops that, gives no explanation, and then continues on.
No explanation of why you might believe that.
No explanation of why you need a body to have a desire or emotion.
Don't we have known cases of individuals who don't experience emotional range? Are we just going to say that they are not conscious and just gloss over that?
I mean you can use whatever definition you want, but if you're just going to create something on the fly in the middle of the article, you're not being good faith in your argument.
It's not too difficult to think of individuals in a coma when they still have brain activity. Or individuals who lack long-term memory. Or you could deconstruct by moving down the biological order of intelligence towards insects, for example. The author attempts to do nothing like this.
I'm quite disappointed by this article because there are good arguments for and against here but articles like this try to turn things into a marketing battle.
AI doesn't really have any of that yet, but we're maybe not so far off
At a deconstructed level, I struggle to find a meaningful difference between the two.
it's more like someone writing about a character getting angry in a book... I don't think anyone would argue that a character actually experienced anger, right? there's no subjectivity in that experience... it's the output of someone else's experience on what they'd expect the character's reaction to be, not a genuine outcome of that character's experience
That's the same here, LLMs are outputting the result of the written experiences of others... not its own experience, which it does and can not have.
Put another way, it only "knows" what it just output by reading it... it doesn't actually build experience to know anything.
We might be closer than ever to building these things, but they're not here yet.
But also, what's the difference between having the memory of a prior experience and actually having gone through that experience?
For humans, reading a book about an experience and living an experience is different, because for a human the actual experience has so many more inputs attached (the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc).
For LLMs, when they train on a memory they can actually truly recapture that memory entirely by replaying the senses exactly. And LLMs are no longer limited to just text, they can do sound and video as tokens too.
Though, it's not clear why that matters to a consciousness. Whether your inputs are of one type or two or two hundred, there's no clear indication that a specific number is required as a catalyst.
LLMs are still expensive to train, I don't think there are many people doing this with claws regularly or at all? unless you don't mean train and you're referring to memory, which is not training... most memory is just some manual form of retrieval that's shoved into the context window