5 ms·
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
by euroderf 1mo ago
Consciousness requires qualia. My 0,02€.
- tsukikage 1mo agoWe don't understand what those are or how they come about, so how does that help us objectively reason about whether a particular black box does or does not have them, especially when it behaves as though it does, beyond arbitrary I-know-it-when-I-see-it "things I don't like don't have the property" style declarations?
- DonaldFisk 1mo agoThat's the definition that matters. And as it's impossible to describe in words what it's like to experience qualia, and LLMs are trained on words, they cannot know what it's like. Even if images and sounds are included in their input training data, those are just arrays or sequences of numbers, not the experience of seeing and hearing.
- jstanley 1mo agoTheir training data isn't qualia itself, but neither is your training data. Qualia are something you get on the inside in response to inputs. I don't see why LLMs can't have them. I'm not saying they do, but I don't think your argument proves that they don't.
- DonaldFisk 1mo agoMy training data on qualia is actually seeing, hearing, and otherwise sensing things, not just reading about them.
- fc417fc802 1mo agoAh yes, because you used the magical pixie dust that makes experiences "real" therefore you're actually seeing and hearing while a multimodal LLM doesn't really experience what it sees and hears "for real". We can be certain of this because, despite not being able to quantify or even rigorously define the phenomenon we intentionally deprive the LLMs of access to said magical pixie dust.
- t_von_doom 1mo agoI agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness? Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot? If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?
- DonaldFisk 1mo agoPeople aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that. I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
- fc417fc802 1mo agoOkay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it? For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.
- DonaldFisk 1mo agoI've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable). Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.
- 1mo ago
- StevenWaterman 1mo agoThat doesn't really solve the problem. We can't conclusively say the models don't have qualia. Hell we don't know if a perfectly accurate atom-for-atom simulation of a human brain, would produce qualia.
- jwr 1mo agoI would (tentatively) agree — but that doesn't invalidate my argument: qualia are not objectively measurable, so you still can't tell if a machine is conscious.