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And what kind of evidence would convince you? What experiment would ever bridge this gap? You’re relying entirely on similarity between yourself and other human
by Chance-Device 6mo ago
And what kind of evidence would convince you? What experiment would ever bridge this gap? You’re relying entirely on similarity between yourself and other humans. This doesn’t extend very well to anything, even animals, though more so than machines. By framing it this way have you baked in the conclusion that nothing else can be conscious on an a priori basis?
- suddenlybananas 6mo agoI'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 6mo agoConsciousness: do you believe plants are conscious? Ants? Jellyfish? Rabbits? Wolves? Monkeys? Humans? Even fungi demonstrate “different communication behaviors when under resource constraint”, for example. What we anthropomorphize is one thing, but demonstrable patterns of behavior are another.
- suddenlybananas 6mo agoI just don't know. I'm certain other humans are, everything beyond that I'm less certain. Monkeys wolves and rabbits, probably.
- brap 6mo agoI have decided to draw an arbitrary line at mammals, just because you gotta put a line somewhere and move on with your life. Mammals shouldn’t be mistreated, for almost any reason. Sometimes the whole animal kingdom, sometimes all living organisms, depending on context. Like, I would rather not harm a mosquito, but if it’s in my house I will feel no remorse for killing it. LLMs, or any other artificial “life”, I simply do not and will not care about, even though I accept that to some extent my entire consciousness can be simulated neuron by neuron in a large enough computer. Fuck that guy, tbh.
- Chance-Device 6mo agoAt least you’re honest, I prefer that to people making up BS justifications for things.
- MajorTakeaway 6mo agoIf it has a thalamus, it is conscious. It's evolutionary millions of years old.
- staticassertion 6mo agoThere are fields that focus on these areas and numerous ideas around what the criteria would be. One of the common understandings is that recurrent processing is likely a foundational layer for consciousness, and agents do not have this currently. I'd say that in terms of evidence I'd want to establish specific functional criteria that seem related to consciousness and then try to establish those criteria existing in agents. If we can do so, then they're conscious. My layman understanding is that they don't really come close to some of the fairly fundamental assumptions. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of frameworks for this that have already been applied to LLMs.
- Chance-Device 6mo agoSorry, what are you saying? That there are people who study these things, and you’d want to see… something as evidence? Your post doesn’t actually seem to have any substantive content.
- staticassertion 6mo agoI noted that there are people who work on designing those sorts of tests and answering these questions and then I described what good evidence would look like.