4 ms·
Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
by mnewme 3mo ago
Thinking LLMs are conscious is as ridiculous as thinking a thermostat wants the room to be warm
- ImHereToVote 3mo agoOr that a slug dislikes salt lol.
- mnewme 3mo agoWell at least the slug has intent.
- ImHereToVote 3mo agoHow do you know that? What if it's just a biological neural network that responds to stimuli?
- mnewme 3mo ago[dead]
- IshKebab 3mo agoWhy though? There are only two reasonable reasons I can think of: 1. Scale. There's clearly a scale of consciousness (a jellyfish isn't very conscious but an ape is). Current LLMs are so small (on the scale of brains) that they must be not very conscious at all. 2. Structure. There might be some fundamental structure of computation that is required for consciousness that LLMs don't have yet. For example the ability to form memories (they don't really have that), or some structure of weights that gives consciousness. My guess is it's definitely 1. and probably also 2. But I don't think that means thinking LLMs are conscious is completely ridiculous, just a bit premature. I would not be surprised if they are conscious in 50 years. The real question is how would we ever know that they are. The only reason we know animals are conscious is by direct experience, and we'll never have that for AI. Anyway this blog post looks like typically worthless philosophy.
- ChrisGreenHeur 3mo agoNo matter how large the llm hardware is it won’t be made of brain meat. The stuff we actually know is conscious.
- IshKebab 3mo agoEven though we know brains are conscious it seems absurd to thing that there is some non-computational magic in the brain is the secret to consciousness. There are some religious people who clutch at nonsense like quantum microtubules, but nobody has found anything real that would preclude pure computation from being conscious. (And yes that does have all sorts of mind-bending consequences.)
- ChrisGreenHeur 3mo agoPure computation not having existence would be such a thing. And calling Penrose religious is a bit weird, are you really serious?
- IshKebab 3mo agoHe seems to be sorting of wanting there to be a higher meaning to life but at least not falling for traditional religions. > I think I would say that the universe has a purpose, it's not somehow just there by chance ... some people, I think, take the view that the universe is just there and it runs along—it's a bit like it just sort of computes, and we happen somehow by accident to find ourselves in this thing. But I don't think that's a very fruitful or helpful way of looking at the universe, I think that there is something much deeper about it. Anyway I was more thinking of Hameroff who also seems to be .. maybe "spiritual" is a better word. He believes in quantum Buddhism or some nonsense like that.
- mnewme 3mo agoYes, there is a lot of philosophy on that, but the way LLMs work is inherently different from brains, though we use similar terms, hence the confusion. You are right there may be artifical intelligence, just not with LLMs LLMs are still statistical models that predict the next token; that hasn’t changed, even when they are autoregressive.There is no intent whatsoever. I agree on the last part, pseudoscientific
- criddell 3mo agoNot a fan of panpsychism?