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I guess I'll just say that it's not obvious that language has much to do with consciousness, so it's not obvious that a language model has moved things into the

I guess I'll just say that it's not obvious that language has much to do with consciousness, so it's not obvious that a language model has moved things into the shadows. Like, maybe we're in the shadows, but I don't think you can blame GPT 3 for that. In 1974 philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, "Conscious experience is a widespread phenomenon. It occurs at many levels of animal life, though we cannot be sure of its presence in the simpler organisms, and it is very difficult to say in general what provides evidence of it. (Some extremists have been prepared to deny it even of mammals other than man.) No doubt it occurs in countless forms totally unimaginable to us, on other planets in other solar systems throughout the universe. But no matter how the form may vary, the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism." He's clearly willing to recognize consciousness to non verbal creatures.

RugnirViking 3y ago
The point is, how can you tell if a being is conciousness. We can start with the idea that we think these models aren't (I think they aren't!) A lot of your arguments seem to be based in asking questions of the being, whether it can experience things. But seeing as we can't read minds, we can't tell whether it actually believes or experiences what it is saying. So we have (had) to trust that a creature capable of explaining such things is concious. Now we can't do that, hence the dividing line that we feel must exist now moves into some unobservable territory. I'm not commenting on whether such a line exists, just that it's kinda hard to test right now, so any argument about it has to go into hypotheticals and philosophy