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I often hear the assumption that LLMs can or will become conscious because consciousness is likely substrate independent. The idea being that our brain is just

• fcanesin 5mo ago
  There are quantized processes in the brain and there is also analogic computing. So either way is just a matter of time science gets there.
  • willmadden 5mo ago
    It’s not yet clear whether consciousness can be fully explained in physical terms. There is strong evidence linking it to brain activity, but we don’t have a complete theory of how subjective experience arises. It’s possible our current frameworks are incomplete and there are other forces we cannot currently measure in play.
• varjag 5mo ago
  Each and every one of many billion transistors in a GPU works due to certain quantum effects on P-N junction. That does not mean GPU computation is nondeterministic, unknowable or magic.
  • etbebl 5mo ago
    Sure, but it's designed to minimize the chance that a quantum fluctuation could change the outcome of a computation, right? Whereas in the brain that might not be the case. A lot of the "interesting" neural activity (e.g. relating to decision making, language, etc) happen in highly sensitive dynamical regimes: on a threshold of firing, or activating one neural population vs another. (Arguably you can get the same effect in an artificial network by adding true random noise though!)
    • varjag 5mo ago
      It's not implausible that evolutionary pressures made the brain robust enough to withstand parasitic signals. We know that most people think in similar, predictable ways.
      • lstodd 5mo ago
        I'm tired of those references to "most" people. Maybe let's rename AI to AMI: Artificial Mostly Intelligence ?
        • varjag 4mo ago
          Are we in "define is" territory now? I used a qualifier because (as you certainly know) people will not pass a chance to nitpick. I have no energy to argue about neurodivergent or Ramanujan, even though I still believe the basic physics of their thinking is identical. Hence "most". My argument was straightforward to follow but if there's something unclear let me know and I'll chew it down.
• achow 5mo ago
  It is perhaps very relevant what Chris Olah (Anthropic co-founder) said to pope.. I am a scientist. I lead a research team that studies the internal structure of these models—what is actually happening inside them. And I will be honest: we keep finding things that are mysterious, even unsettling. We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience. We find evidence of introspection. We find internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease. https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclical https://www.anthropic.com/news/chris-olah-pope-leo-encyclica...
  • boppo1 5mo ago
    Yeah that reeks of marketing to me. This guy may believe all those things, but his getting paid may also depend upon his believing them.
    • ch4s3 5mo ago
      This is an incredibly strong claim and I’ve never seen any particularly strong evidence for them beyond “trust me, I’ve seen into the abyss.”
      • irishcoffee 5mo ago
        The point here, Chris Olah is literally claiming he has seen into the abyss. Who are you disagreeing with?
        • ch4s3 5mo ago
          I'm saying that the burden of proof is on Chris Olah.
      • mrdomino- 5mo ago
        I think what you've said here is unfair and overly cynical; nowhere have I read Chris or any of the Anthropic people make the claim that LLMs definitively are conscious. What they say is that there is increasing uncertainty, and evidence - for which they show receipts - backing up that uncertainty. Personally, I have been unconvinced by any of these definitive yes or no answers to "are LLMs conscious?" - in both directions. The "they are not / can not be conscious" side relies too heavily on mechanistic reductionist arguments that can apply equally to neurochemical processes in the human brain - and yet, it seems that humans, with brains made of these neurochemical processes, are conscious. At the same time, the "they are definitely conscious" answers seem to generally rely too heavily on self-deception and lack of reality testing. To be able to say something definitive here, it seems to me that one would need to say definitively what this experience is. I have not heard any of the loud voices in the arena - not Chiang, not Giulio Tonini, not Karl Friston, etc - do so. Therefore I find Anthropic's uncertainty, and careful, caring investigative process, well grounded given the evidence.
• boppo1 5mo ago
  How certain are we about the theory our minds waveforms are continuous? Can we prove physical continuity, or just up to planck-length resolution? I'm poorly educated on this, these are sincere questions. They are not intended as rhetorical regarding the point of the prior post.
• cwmma 5mo ago
  Probably not, we're nowhere near the complexity of the human brain yet, there are also quantization limits to the human brain (i.e. molecules, quantum physics, etc) so to characterize them as having infinite detail is probably a bad modal. If I'm going to be honest most of the people who advocate this type of thing tend to be, shall we say, crypto-duelists who really believe in a soul but not like intellectually but intuitively and keep trying to come up with excuse with it's not just meat. So like you can find philosophers advocating stuff like this but they tend to have a bit of an agenda.
  • AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
    You nailed it which is that almost everyone I’ve met seems to believe in some version of dualism If that’s even subtly your position then there’s no way to have a productive conversation about perception, reality/truth, epistemology and especially consciousness It’s honestly maddening cause I’ve had great conversations about this with educated people, and all but only a handful, collapse into the other person relying on some nonfalsifiable dualist argument
    • km144 5mo ago
      I'm basically restating what you said, but it's amazing to me that the vast majority of people you will meet, even educated people, are casual dualists and free-will libertarians. If they happen to acknowledge materialism in some way (i.e. the acceptance of the idea that the brain's processes are just the interaction of physical matter), there is still zero chance they draw determinist conclusions from that acknowledgement. But I guess that tracks, given that most professional philosophers are apparently compatibilists for some reason I have never understood (the arguments get really confusing).
      • AndrewKemendo 5mo ago
        I’ve studied this in extreme depth and my conclusion is that at a certain point most people just give up and take a position that gives them some kind of mental relief For people who can’t self-delude, like Godel and Schopenhauer and Tesla, they kind of just go “mad” because it’s a giant epistemological hole they can’t solve. Even the smartest the scientist are always going to choose self preservation in their cognitive capacity so they don’t feel bad over feeling bad and living in the contradiction This is why it’s important for scientists to study Camus IMO
• tooheavy 5mo ago
  I think the representation in a computer, the fact that it is merely stored instructions and data, destroys everything but domains of simulation and emulation.
  • nomel 5mo ago
    "I think the representation in a brain, the fact that it is merely stored activation potentials in neurons firing based on ionic accumulations at their synapses, destroys everything but domains of simulation and emulation." ;)
• spandrew 5mo ago
  I wish people would knock this off. There is zero path to AGI at the moment — and all the Anthropic/pentagon Sam Altman/AI-skynet stuff is scaring people into being fearful (and outright ignorant) to the actual uses of this probabilistic NPL tool. You can't use AI atm without a human with proper knowledge spot checking and directing it. We should market it that way.
  • lumost 5mo ago
    The current theme is that agi may not be definable, and an ai which matches humans on all economically relevant tasks is close enough for business purposes. Billions spent on RL may be good enough to beat human performance.
• echoangle 5mo ago
  If we want to be really pedantic, a computer does not necessarily need to be digital. You could build a consciousness-coprocessor with analog circuitry that brings in what you say could be needed. But honestly I doubt that there is a real requirement for that, surely you could just increase the resolution you're running the simulation at until the difference decreases sufficiently. Imagine using 256 bit floats for example.
  • nomel 5mo ago
    IBM has made a few analog chips like this [1]. If I remember correctly, one was even pulse time based, like neurons. https://research.ibm.com/blog/analog-ai-chip-inference https://research.ibm.com/blog/analog-ai-chip-inference
• loudmax 5mo ago
  I'm very open to the idea that consciousness is substrate independent. I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from an electro-chemical path, but not from a purely electrical path. Having said that, it should be very clear that LLMs are not conscious. LLMs process language. I'd even go so far as to say that LLMs "think" and "understand", or at least, they produce a facsimile of thinking and understanding such that it's useful for us to reason about LLMs as if they think and understand. We're not used to interacting with a non-human entity with the capability to process language, so it's easy to ascribe human traits to these things. But their "minds" (insofar as they have anything like a mind) are completely different from ours. These things have language without consciousness. Chimpanzees are conscious. Dogs are conscious. Maybe ravens and cephalopods? Who knows. These animals do have minds much like ours. Higher order animals are conscious even if they don't have language.
  • Gooblebrai 5mo ago
    > I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from an electro-chemical path, but not from a purely electrical path. Do you have any particular reasoning behind this? I could equally say that I have a hard time seeing why molecules could produce consciousness from a purely electrical path.
• otterdude 5mo ago
  Wouldn't a conscious entity be able to grow its intelligence over time independently? LLM's require offline training and dont actually learn from their "lived / sessions / chats ect". Those can be used for training data but its not like its an implicit part of the technology. For this reason I would say LLM's are not conscious, or automatically conscious.
• Aperocky 5mo ago
  Consciousness is substrate independent, but that's not the differentiator here: My toddler son is conscious, he feels happiness and sadness and have urges and impulses without needing to know the entire history worth of writing from human civilization. A dictionary is not, and a LLM sized dictionary with optimized query is still not conscious. It doesn't have anything to do whether consciousness is substrate independent, or even analog vs discrete, the overall implementation just aren't parallel.
• andrewla 5mo ago
  I think philosophically this comes down to the Universal Church-Turing Thesis. If you believe that there is computation being done by nature/physics that is strictly more powerful than what a Turing machine is capable of, then consciousness might be beyond the reach of a silicon computer. I personally believe that the UCTT is very likely to be true, not least because we have not yet proposed an oracle that is physically feasible and yet is beyond the capabilities of a Turing Machine. That said, in the space of feasibility there are open questions -- even if P != NP, a non-deterministic Turing machine can be simulated by a deterministic one, just potentially with an exponential increase in computation time or space.
• Kattywumpus 4mo ago
  One analogy might be to the misleadingly named motion picture. We all have heard the stories of early cinema-goers who dove out of the way when the train on the screen barreled towards them. It's easy to make the mistake of thinking of these images on the screen as the real thing -- even the mistake of thinking that they move. But they don't move. They can't. In the end, a film is just a series of still images. The images are projected in such rapid succession that they fool us into seeing things in motion that are not actually in motion. And if we slowed the film down enough, from 20 frames a second, to say, a frame every 20 seconds, well... the illusion would stop. We'd see each discrete still image for exactly what it was. This is the same way computers work. Every tick of the clock, we get a new static image in memory. But those images are all static, as still as the images on film. And no static matrix of information can be conscious, just like no still image can move. This is radically different than the neurons in our brains, which are each living things, sensing things, with a continuous analog existence. Whatever we feel comes from their lives. We can measure the things they do with their lives, but we shouldn't mistake the measurement for the thing being measured. A ruler is a foot long, but it’s not ticklish.