4 ms·

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but every

This is exactly the thought-terminating cliché that I see everywhere, and it's driving me up a wall. We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is, but everybody is 100% sure that LLMs don't "have any form" of it. Yes, I know about machine learning, but I also know about how natural biological systems learn. It is, just from what we know, very different, yes, but the crucial point is that it, also, has zero identifiable things that you could point at and say: oh, look, that over there is consciousness. So the fact that there is no such thing in an ANN proves nothing.

ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago
If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.
perpetuallunch 2mo ago
I like your argument. It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own. Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world. But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form. What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry? Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.
breuleux 2mo ago
> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.
- kelseyfrog 2mo ago
  If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories. Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.
  - mnewme 2mo ago
    No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.
    - indigo945 2mo ago
      There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?
      - mnewme 2mo ago
        That would still be circumventing. There are other architectures that could be more dynamic, LLMs are not. It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.
        kelseyfrog 2mo ago
        Would we realistically expect that folks who claim LLMs are currently not conscious to change their response when asked about dynamic LLMs?
        mnewme 2mo ago
mnewme 2mo ago
We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.

ChrisGreenHeur 2mo ago

If it drives you up a wall maybe you can look intoning there are any arguments for the positing driving you up there.

perpetuallunch 2mo ago

I like your argument. It is said that absent any input these thinking machines we are inert, quiescent. That they have no intrinsic motivation of their own. Whereas we, along with at least some other mammals but especially humans, seem to be infinitely inquisitive about the world. But our minds don’t exist in a substrate of hyper sterile rigid silicon form. What if some of the differences between us and our silicon based machines are merely embodiment (senses both internally and externally oriented, limbs and locomotion, etc) plus the noise of biochemistry? Would be very interesting to be a fly on the wall in the labs these experiments are, presumably, taking place.

breuleux 2mo ago

> We have absolutely no idea what consciousness is We do, in the sense that it is a definite feeling. What we don't have is a formal, objective, checkable definition of it. I suspect that no such definition exists: if we took the ensemble of all the intuitions and beliefs we have about what consciousness is or must entail, it may very well fail to be logically coherent. There may be no logically consistent conception of consciousness that includes the entities we strongly feel are conscious while also excluding those we strongly feel aren't. At that point we must either reconceptualize consciousness or treat it (and everything it "entails") as a brute fact, something that's true for no reason and is therefore not subject to the laws of reasoning.

kelseyfrog 2mo ago
If you ask people when they first realized they're conscious, you'll overwhelmingly receive responses detailing peoples' first memories. Do LLMs form and recall memories? With the appropriate harnesses, sure. Yet, the reluctance to label LLMs as conscious remains. These beliefs are incompatible and dissonant.
- mnewme 2mo ago
  No they don’t have memories. With an harness you just send historic data into the prompt.
  - indigo945 2mo ago
    There's no inherent, technological reason to feed the historic data into the prompt, though. You could train a network with a second input for model-states, and during inference, feed into that input historic model-states that occured for the same LLM when consuming input that is somehow associatively related to whatever input is currently being consumed. Can you definitely show that this would be meaningfully different from how humans "experience" memories?
    - mnewme 2mo ago
      That would still be circumventing. There are other architectures that could be more dynamic, LLMs are not. It is completely different. Our brain rewires itself to store memories, there is no memory storage for humans.
      - kelseyfrog 2mo ago
        Would we realistically expect that folks who claim LLMs are currently not conscious to change their response when asked about dynamic LLMs?
        mnewme 2mo ago

mnewme 2mo ago

We use the same terms for computers and brain, but the analogies are misleading. LLMs don’t even have memory, how do you have consciousness without memory? The architecture probibits any signs of consciousness.