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I believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function
by mrob 23d ago
I believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function. It's functionally equivalent to an enormous lookup table. If I accepted LLMs as conscious, then I would have to accept panpsychism, which I do not, and which most other humans also act as though they do not.
- idiotsecant 23d agoIf I go to sleep, wake up, and then go to sleep again am I a different conscious entity each time?
- mrob 23d agoPossibly. If I had some side-effect-free means to permanently prevent all sleep I'd take it without hesitation. But that's not relevant to the discussion, because it's not anything similar to what an LLM does. Your brain changes state even while sleeping.
- idiotsecant 23d agoIn what way does your brain change state while sleeping that a model does not change state via constant fine-tune updates?
- IshKebab 23d agoI don't think so because any stateful function can be made stateless just by making its state an input, and vice versa. They're mathematically equivalent, so it would be super weird if it had any implications for consciousness.
- joshheitzman 23d agoThis assumes the functionality of brains can be fully captured as a deterministic mathematical function, but the function of the brain may well depend on nondeterministic quantum states that can't be reduced to stateless functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
- CamperBob2 23d agoWhen they started leaving notes for their future selves, that rationale became a little more interesting. We're seeing the first stirrings of object permanence.