At best, arguing about whether an LLM is conscious is like arguing about whether your prefrontal cortex is conscious. It is a single part of the equation. Its m

At best, arguing about whether an LLM is conscious is like arguing about whether your prefrontal cortex is conscious. It is a single part of the equation. Its memory system is insufficient for subjective experiences, and it has extremely limited capability to take in input and create output. As humans we seem to basically be highly trained prediction machines: we try to predict what will happen next, perceive what actually happens, correct our understanding of the world based on the difference between prediction and observation, repeat. A single cell organism trying to escape another single cell organism does this and to me it seems that what we do is just emergent behavior of scaling up that process. Homo Sapiens’ big innovation was abstract thinking allowing us to predict what happen next Tuesday and not immediately. If you want something really trippy check out experiments of situational awareness in chimps. You can flash a screen of letters to them for one second, distract them, then have them point out to you where the letters were, in order from A-Z. Different specialization for survival. And philosophically it seems like consciousness is just not that important of a concept. We experience it so we think it is the end all be all. We project it via anthropomorphizing onto anything we can draw a smiley face on. You can pick up a pencil, tell your audience it’s and is Clifford, break it in half, and everyone witnessing it will experience loss. But no mainstream philosopher would argue that the pencil is conscious. To me this proves that we place value on consciousness in a way that is even for us not cohesive. I am convinced that entities that are by other definitions alive and complex could exist that does not experience or have the concept of consciousness. Consciousness is also our measure of whether something can suffer and we use that yardstick to figure out if it’s ok for us to for example breed a particular animal for food. But clearly we are not able to apply that uniformly either. As we learned that pigs are smarter than dogs we didn’t start keeping pigs in our houses and breeding dogs for food. On the other hand this metric isn’t the worst one if we apply it backwards. What harm happens when you reset the context of an LLM? Basically, I don’t believe we need to be looking for consciousness but rather to expand our understanding of intelligent life and what kind of entities we can interact with and how.