2 ms·

Given the large visible differences in behavior and construction, akin to the difference between a horse and a pickup truck, I would ask the reverse question: I

Given the large visible differences in behavior and construction, akin to the difference between a horse and a pickup truck, I would ask the reverse question: In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency? Veering into the realm of conjecture and opinion, I tend to think a 1:1 computer simulation of human cognition is possible, and transformers being computationally universal are thus theoretically capable of running that workload. That being said, that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality.

ACCount37 6mo ago
What about modern LLMs isn't "agentic" enough? Doesn't matter if they're conscious for that. They're clearly capable of goal oriented behavior.
red75prime 6mo ago
> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency? Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this. Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it. Tokens are being fed back into the transformer. > that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality. Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa... [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
grantcas 6mo ago
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ACCount37 6mo ago

What about modern LLMs isn't "agentic" enough? Doesn't matter if they're conscious for that. They're clearly capable of goal oriented behavior.

red75prime 6mo ago

> In what ways do LLMs meet the definition of having consciousness and agency? Agency: an ability to make decisions and act independently. Agentic pipelines are doing this. Consciousness: something something feedback[1] (or a non-transferable feeling of being conscious, but that is useless for the discussion). Recurrent Processing Theory: A computation is conscious if it involves high-level processed representations being fed back into the low-level processors that generate it. Tokens are being fed back into the transformer. > that's a bit like looking at a bird in flight and imagining going to the moon: only tangentially related to engineering reality. Is it? Vacuum of space is a tangible problem for aerodynamics-based propulsion. Which analogous thing do we have with ML? The scaled-up monkey brain[2] might not qualify as the moon. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-paper https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-new-ai-consciousness-pa... [2] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/neuro.09.031.2009/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

grantcas 6mo ago

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