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This is a bad argument. A brain frozen in ice also doesn’t demonstrate consciousness, and we don’t interpret that as a counterclaim to “the human brain exhibits
by BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
This is a bad argument. A brain frozen in ice also doesn’t demonstrate consciousness, and we don’t interpret that as a counterclaim to “the human brain exhibits consciousness.” Saying an LLM can be conscious implicitly means an LLM while it does things.
- thfuran 3y ago>Saying an LLM can be conscious implicitly means an LLM while it does things. But that's not like saying a human brain is conscious while it does things. A brain is continuously doing a thing, whereas an LLM is either inert at rest or briefy doing a thing before returning to exactly the state it was in beforehand. There is no underlying process that could even conceivably support ongoing consciousness. If there is consciousness, it is present only for the span of its interrogation during an inference, after which it is immediately destroyed.
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoYes it would have to be transient, though thats not to say a continuous experience couldn’t be created by connecting together the transient conscious experiences in sequence because of the persistent state of the context window. My only point though was that nobody who says an LLM is conscious thinks the conscious part is the weights sitting on a hard drive.
- thfuran 3y agoYou are quite mistaken about the level of technical understanding required to make the claim that eg chatgpt is conscious. Many people have no conception of the distinction between the service and the model but still come to the conclusion through interacting with it that "chatgpt" is conscious.