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To me, the absurdity of the idea of p-zombies is why I'm convinced consciousness isn't special to humans and animals. Can complex LLMs have subjective experien
by jquery 11mo ago
To me, the absurdity of the idea of p-zombies is why I'm convinced consciousness isn't special to humans and animals.
Can complex LLMs have subjective experience? I don't know. But I haven't heard an argument against it that's not self-referential. The hardness of the hard problem is precisely why I can't say whether or not LLMs have subjective experience..
- twoodfin 11mo agoHow would you differentiate that argument from similar arguments about other observable phenomena? As in… No one has ever seen or otherwise directly experienced the inside of a star, nor is likely to be able to do so in the foreseeable future. To be a star is to emit a certain spectrum of electromagnetic energy, interact gravitationally with the local space-time continuum according to Einstein’s laws, etc. It’s impossible to conceive of an object that does these things that wouldn’t be a star, so even if it turns out (as we’ll never be able to know) that Gliese 65 is actually a hollow sphere inhabited by dwarven space wizards producing the same observable effects, it’s still categorically a star. (Sorry, miss my philosophy classes dearly!)
- jquery 11mo agoThe scientific method only makes predictions about what the inside of the star is using the other things we've learned via the scientific method. It's not purely self-referential, "science" makes useful and repeatable predictions that can be verified experimentally. However, when it comes to consciousness, there are currently no experimentally verifiable predictions based on whether humans are "phenomenally conscious" or "p-zombies". At least none I'm aware of.