I’m convinced consciousness isn’t the special thing we think it is.

I'm convinced it is, so we're at an impasse.

If consciousness isn't a special thing, then arguing that LLM parameters are conscious is panpsychism or any control loop architecture that observes the outside world, updates an internal state and produces an observable action is considered conscious.

In both cases, LLMs are just as boring as the consciousness definition.

I'm convinced that consciousness is a special thing we have, but we're not the only ones which has this, in nature.

On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important.

We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools.

Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.

To be fair, the ones thing you can kind of reliably conclude about our universe is that keeping entropy low for as long as possible is a favorable condition. To put that another way, don't die.

A strong hint this is the case is the fact that nobody can define consciousness.

Why would the impossibility of defining consciousness suggest that it's not a big deal?

Because it's completely dwarfed by florpedness. I can't define that either, but I just know it's more important.

Less facetiously: A debate of the importance of something needs a shared understanding of what is being debated. Without that, any discussion is merely people shouting that their belief is the right one, and the others are the heathens/idiots - because there isn't even agreement on what is debated.

I'm not asking for a definition of consciousness or an argument for whether it's here or there. I'm asking why the heuristic of "if X is undefinable, then X probably doesn't matter" is a reasonable heuristic.

Yes, Many of the the philosophical concepts which we previously thought were contingent on consciousness (like knowledge, in the philosophical sense, will, intelligence, agency, ...) have almost nothing to do with it, and they look far more important and fundamental (now with LLMs/AI agents, more than before). This is one of the contributions of generative AI to philosophy (with many many more to come).

Who are some of the philosophers you're putting under "we" here? I don't think I've ever encountered those arguments.

I'll agree if you can define consciousness in a way that:

1) Excludes what LLM's do.

2) Doesn't exclude what many humans do (including the neuro divergent).

3) Doesn't just boil do to simply rephrasing your pre-existing belief/prejudice that humans are conscious and nothing else can be as if it were a fact and not an opinion.

I suspect that you can't.

Consciousness can only come from meat brains. Otherwise my incessant life long addiction to movies and TV shows has been feeding me lies about human exceptionalism.

There is an appalling lack of diversity in Hollywood. You'd be surprised to find out that very few of those programs were even written by machines until recently! What bias. :)

Just because we have difficulty defining consciousness doesn't mean we have difficulty distinguishing or classifying it. We can't give a final definition for life, intelligence or disease, but that doesn't mean everything is equally alive, intelligent and diseased.

Your list of requirements is implying that, because we lack a perfect definition for consciousness, LLMs are conscious too. That's malarkey. It may be that they could one day become conscious, but it's not because we can't fully define what human consciousness is.

If you can substantiate your assertion that LLMs aren't conscious without a definition of consciousness, you're welcome to do that too.

I don't see why a definition is necessary. The actual problem is you just don't have a way to substantiate that belief without resorting to complete nonsense about brain atoms being more specialer (!!) than atoms that exist outside of a skull.

It would be simple to disprove us by just stating your evidence for how you know LLMs aren't conscious.

I literally just wrote about consciousness being undefined, and now you're asking me to define it? I'm not a philosopher, ask someone more qualified. Better yet, ask your LLM to give you a mealy-mouthed answer which fits your narrative.

> I don't see why a definition is necessary.

Don't waste my time with your sophistry. Words mean nothing to you beyond how you can twist them.

I said specifically you don't need to explicitly and cleanly define it.

Is your position now that in order to substantiate your belief that LLMs are not conscious, you'd first have to define it explicitly? I don't see why that'd necessarily be true, but if that's what you're arguing, then that's fine.

In that case: if you need to define consciousness in order to substantiate your belief that LLMs are not conscious, and you can't define consciousness, then we're back to the original question: where does your confidence they're not conscious come from?

You made a declarative general statement in the form of "X can not Y."

I then asked you to define Y, because you can not reasonably say that "X can not Y" without first defining both X and Y. You could not.

The truth is that this conversation is pointless until someone can define both 'X' and 'Y' in ways that aren't tautological nonsense. Until then nobody can say anything with a reasonable level of certainty.

This likely also applies to intelligence. Life and disease are likely simpler, though perhaps more malleable definitions.

> You made a declarative general statement in the form of "X can not Y."

That wasn't me bud.

> That wasn't me bud.

Bah. It's obviously been too long since I flossed between my ears. Sorry about that.

Ah so first you need 1) to assume that humans have free will, despite zero evidence or proposed mechanism for it to exist anywhere in the universe, and 2) also assert that LLMs aren't conscious, despite the lack of any tests that could tell us one way or the other...

Hmm...

Will has almost nothing to do with consciousness (as does knowledge).

Will is just result of a very complex yet deterministic (unconscious) computation by an agent which guides their future action (it's that orientation/aboutness toward action which distinguishes it from other computation). A PS of that computation is sent (projected) into that agent's consciousness if they have one (and is what we think as our "will").