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We don’t know that LLMs generating tokens for scenarios involving simulations of conscious don’t already involve such experience. Certainly such threads of cons
by osaariki 2y ago
We don’t know that LLMs generating tokens for scenarios involving simulations of conscious don’t already involve such experience. Certainly such threads of consciousness would currently be much less coherent and fleeting than the human experience, but I see no reason to simply ignore the possibility. To whatever degree it is even coherent to talk about the conscious experience of others than yourself (p-zombies and such), I expect that as AIs’ long term coherency improves and AI minds become more tangible to us, people will settle into the same implicit assumption afforded to fellow humans that there is consciousness behind the cognition.
- szvsw 2y agoThe very tricky part then is to ask if the consciousness/phenomenological experience that you postulate still happens if, say, we were to compute the outputs of an LLM by hand… while difficult, if every single person on earth did one operation per second, plus some very complicated coordination and results gathering, we could probably predict a couple of tokens for an LLM at some moderate frequency… say, a couple of tokens a month? a week? A year? A decade? Regardless… would that consciousness still have an experience? Or is there some threshold of speed and coherence, or coloration that would be missing and result in failure for it to emerge? Impossible to answer. Btw I mostly think it’s reasonable to think that there might be consciousness, phenomenology etc are possible in silicon, but it’s tricky and unverifiable ofc.
- Timwi 2y ago> would that consciousness still have an experience? If the original one did, then yes, of course. You're performing the exact same processing. Imagine if instead of an LLM the billions of people instead simulated a human brain. Would that human brain experience consciousness? Of course it would, otherwise they're not simulating the whole brain. The individual humans performing the simulation are now comparable to the individual neurons in a real brain. Similarly, in your scenario, the humans are just the computer hardware running the LLM. Apart from that it's the same LLM. Anything that the original LLM experiences, the simulated one does too, otherwise they're not simulating it fully.
- szvsw 2y agoYes that’s my main point - if you accept the first one, then you should accept the second one (though some people might find the second so absurd as to reject the first). > Imagine if instead of an LLM the billions of people instead simulated a human brain. Would that human brain experience consciousness? Of course it would, otherwise they're not simulating the whole brain. However, I don’t really buy “of course it would,” or in another words the materialist premise - maybe yes, maybe no, but I don’t think there’s anything definitive on the matter of materialism in philosophy of mind. as much as I wish I was fully a materialist, I can never fully internalize how sentience can uh emerge from matter… in other words, to some extent I feel that my own sentience is fundamentally incompatible with everything I know about science, which uh sucks, because I definitely don’t believe in dualism!
- ghransa 2y agoIt would certainly with sufficient accuracy honestly say to you that it's conscious and believes it whole heartily, but in practice it would need to a priori be able describe external sense data, as it's not separate necessarily from the experiences, which intrinsically requires you to compute in the world itself otherwise it would only be able to compute on, in a way it's like having edge compute at the skins edge. The range of qualia available at each moment will be distinct to each experiencer with the senses available, and there likely will be some overlap in interpretation based on your computing substrate. We in a way can articulate the underlying chemputation of the universe mediated through our senses, reflection and language, turn a piece off (as it is often non continuous) and the quality of the experience changes.
- GoblinSlayer 2y agoBut do you believe in something constructive? Do you agree with Searle that computers calculate? But then numbers and calculation are immaterial things that emerge from matter?
- technotony 2y agoYou are assuming that consciousness can be reproduced by simulating the brain. Which might be possible but it's by no means certain.