> There is no sign of any intent or internal motivation.

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.

That is a lazy definition. A machine doesn’t even want to watch TV. Apes are conscious, dolphins are, maybe octopus, but definitely not LLMs

> That is a lazy definition.

I didn't even try to define consciousness, but you're welcome to try yourself.

Yes, our current systems are likely still to primitive to be properly conscious. Probably.

But I wouldn't rule out that ChatGPT 10 or Claude Fable 15 might get conscious.

You are committing a type error.

Consciousness does not necessarily arise from computation, just as simulating snowfall on the computer does not make it cold

We can’t measure the temperature of consciousness like we can the temperature of simulated snow.

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.

I'm with Turing on this one.

Nope, only if the architecture changes. Still probabilistic prediction models

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.

> 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

There is absolutely ZERO evidence or possibility that LLMs are currently conscious, everyone working in AI knows this, (and don’t listen to the marketing hypes).

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

What evidence would take you from "LLMs aren't conscious," to "LLMs are definitely conscious"? Just asking because the responses tend to be genuinely interesting and give insight into what's important to people.

There is no "evidence" that anything has consciousness, nor could there be. To clarify, by that I don't mean nothing is conscious, I mean that it's never been an evidence-based proposition.

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.

Yes there is no definitive proof, but the reverse is also not true. Please read some science on that in neurology and biology. Yes it is hard to define, though there are definitions and those are not fulfilled by a LLM, What’s missing is a bearer: no state persists between calls, nothing is maintained against pressure, nothing costs the system anything.

though more an more animals seems to be conscious as we previously thought

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.

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

Mass Effect distinguishes between AI, which is sentient enough to be a person; and VI (Virtual Intelligence) which is more like a conversational user interface. What we have built in real life may qualify as a VI by the Mass Effect standard, but it's a crappy one.