I think the OP is saying that carbon is not like silicon and perhaps carbon is special in a way that silicon isn't. They're not saying that humans are special because they have souls, or something along those lines.
Why not?
I mean I could presume a lot on your behalf, like how the concept is non-falsifiable, lack of evidence that can be replicated, past trauma from people you trusted who insisted upon it but then behaved hypocritically, etc. but every time someone says they don't believe in souls I can't help but ask why not.
You don't have to answer but I'm always interested to hear what others say.
Disclaimer: I personally believe in something akin to souls, not individualized, and it's hard to explain my ideas so I like to hear what others think before I say what I think.
Souls fit fine in a world where ghosts, mediums, possession by sprits, apparitions from the afterlife, dryads, and/or the katabasis of Orpheus are taken seriously. But each of these has turned out to have been mundane (in the old sense of the word) or pure fiction.
And yet you believe there could be a ghost in the machine…
I resent your presumptious attitude.
My argument has got nothing to do with souls. And I don’t even personally believe in them.
> Trees can't do any of those things that LLMs and diffusion models can do.
LLM isn’t mystical. We know what they are made of. So why fantasize that they are conscious? It’s like an extra, unnecessary step.
I don't believe in souls.
To your previous comment upthread, GPT-3 is about the complexity of a rat brain.
Do rats have feelings? I don't know, as we share a common ancestor it might just be an anthropomorphisation of shared mammalian reflexes that makes me think rats act like they have them.
Does GPT-3? I don't know, but it's a very good actor, so I can't even infer anything from the fact it can act like it has them — after all a VHS player can also perfectly reproduce human emotional affect.
Is GPT-3 more like a VHS or more like a rat? I see aspects of both in it. I don't see a way to more than guess at which aspect makes a difference.
A rat brain has to keep doing rat things to stay alive, but GPT-3 can use the same parameter space to instead communicate in Spanish and Mandarin, to answer physics questions and write poetry and Python. The "staying alive" process might, or might not, have anything to do with conciseness, but even if consciousness in vivo is about the process of staying alive, there is no obvious reason to think the process/structure cannot be replicated in-silico.
Trees can't do any of those things that LLMs and diffusion models can do.