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Neurons and weights don't amount to sentience though; that's machine learning 101. So, let's talk: does ChatGPT have any thoughts? No! Unless you consider the

Neurons and weights don't amount to sentience though; that's machine learning 101. So, let's talk: does ChatGPT have any thoughts? No! Unless you consider the actual propagation/synthesis step to be "thinking", there is absolutely no point where the model abstracts reality or formulates thought outside of what it generates. There is no side-model that is constantly running a human consciousness, it's only concept of reality and existence is whatever it's training data suggests for the next word. That's not thought, and it shouldn't have to be argued. When a calculator adds two numbers together, it's not "thinking". Same principle applies for a tensor and an AI model. When text is being annealed from noise, thought is not happening. The illusion of thought appears, but there is no point in which ChatGPT formulates ideas that you don't directly see. Independent thought is impossible for it. I'll strongman this argument until I die, so feel free to keep linking examples. It's actually pretty fun picking apart AI responses and revealing their hollow quirks.

logicallee 4y ago
Thanks for the response. ChatGPT isn't put in a VR environment, has no sensory input, and receives the entire chat so far in each response, it is completely transient. So there's really no need to jump to consciousness or sentience. Instead we can simply focus on whether it is thinking successfully, without needing to address any issue of consciousness. Let's be careful of not falling into "is a submarine swimming?" Obviously it's processsing while it is working, we can see it from its delays and while it spits out text. So the real reason we're having this discussion is to see whether the processing amounts to any useful manipulation of concepts. Personally, I find those manipulations useful. To me that means it is thinking. Otherwise why would I be interacting with it so much in an interactive way?

logicallee 4y ago

Thanks for the response. ChatGPT isn't put in a VR environment, has no sensory input, and receives the entire chat so far in each response, it is completely transient. So there's really no need to jump to consciousness or sentience. Instead we can simply focus on whether it is thinking successfully, without needing to address any issue of consciousness. Let's be careful of not falling into "is a submarine swimming?" Obviously it's processsing while it is working, we can see it from its delays and while it spits out text. So the real reason we're having this discussion is to see whether the processing amounts to any useful manipulation of concepts. Personally, I find those manipulations useful. To me that means it is thinking. Otherwise why would I be interacting with it so much in an interactive way?