I don't think that the way we frame the question about consciousness makes it easy to resolve.
But I do want to point out that humans are very diverse. There're many functional adults lacking any internal motivation besides getting food, sleep, and some kind of entertainment. There're millions of people who just act on external stimuli.
So the gap between the "least conscious" human and the "most conscious" machine might be more narrow than we expect.
I didn't even try to define consciousness, but you're welcome to try yourself.
But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.
Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold
As you write consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, but it may, at least to some degree, we don’t know. We don’t have reliable methods of testing for the presence or absence of consciousness, or even a rigorous and agreed upon set of metrics to measure.
Where as simulated snow is most certainly not real snow at all.
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.
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.
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.
It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.
LLMs still can’t reason (don’t confuse with the marketing word) , plan, or understand the world, no emotion, no subjective experience, no memory, no intent.
And yes I would change my opinion if it were logically different, other architectures may pave the way there, but not LLMs
We are conscious because we declare ourselves to be, by fiat, not because of evidence or a well-considered rationale. Our conception of consciousness or understanding isn't formal, checkable or objective, it's entirely grounded in subjectivity. As such, any and all arguments for or against consciousness or understanding in LLMs are based on feelings. We feel that we are conscious, therefore we are. Regarding anything else, "we'll know it when we see it." There's nothing rigorous about it.
though more an more animals seems to be conscious as we previously thought
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.
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
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.
I had an eye surgery last year. The first day after was magical, I felt like I was on acid because the entire world felt different.
I went for a checkup one week later and told the doctor the vision has gone down since. They checked and it was objectively the same as on the first day. They told me: "People get used to good vision very fast".
I think it's just human nature.
Still, tthey are the stuff of sci-fi: it is the first time in recorded history that we can communicate with language with something that is not human! The consciousness "problem" is just a distraction.
Do androids dream of electric sheep indeed.
We flew right by that and now we are pretending it was no big deal. There is a lot to learn about psychological coping mechanisms deployed by humans desperate to maintain the illusion of absolute control
For example, free will and determinism may be orthogonal concepts (compatibilism).
Eg the rules of chess are written as if the players have free choice. Similarly, algorithms are often analysed as if the antagonist that provides the data has free choice (so we assume the worst case to be sure).
That's a very different non-determinism from assuming a probability distributions.
And different frames might be accurate depending on context. You might know what chess bot you are playing against and that chess bot might be a deterministic computer program, or might be a computer program that uses radioactive decay to randomise.
And as you suggested, free will is yet another kettle of fish.
How else could they be written?
My sense is that the whole machine consciousness debate really kicked off since LLMs started being able to spew out a bunch of words in a row that sound like they make sense. Since only humans could do that before now, and humans are conscious, therefore...
I don't think language has anything to do with consciousness.
What do you think of the bicameral mind theory?
Now I'm sure some of the problem is about how you define consciousness. I would define it as the experience of qualia. My dog seems to be just as conscious as me, she just can't talk about it. All mammals seem to experience love, and fear, probably so that they will take care of their offspring and avoid getting eaten. Can you experience emotion but not be conscious? That doesn't make sense to me.
Other people define it differently, so it's hard to have conversations about this stuff.
> Subjective conscious mind is an analogue of what is called the real world. It is built up with a vocabulary or lexical field whose terms are all metaphors or analogues of behaviour in the physical world. Its reality is of the same order as mathematics. It allows us to shortcut behavioural processes and arrive at more adequate decisions. Like mathematics, it is an operator rather than a thing or repository. And it is intimately bound up with volition and decision
So your dog has consciousness to some degree, but it’s going to be generally less rich than yours.
It’s interesting to think about what it means to think without language and everything that comes with language (metaphors, adjectives, etc...).
You don't want to call machines conscious? Fine. Call it quasiconscious, semiconscious, technoconscious, whatever makes you feel alpha human, and move on to our current reality where we confront the existence of thinking machines rather than footnote it into obscurity.