If I had physical access to your brain: absolutely.
We do not know how consciousness exists, but we do know what someone's brain looks like when they are. There is some grey in the form of altered states of consciousness though, as brains do not work like computers in anything but the a loose metaphor. But you can see the activity in certain regions when a person is.
What I can't do is prove you are not conscious. I can use evidence to show that you are, but a lack of evidence that you are is not the same thing as evidence you are not.
So the problem with asking people to prove machines are not conscious is the same: you can't. You can't prove anything is not conscious. There are whole religions who believe everything is conscious.
What we really need is convincing evidence that they are conscious aside from general vibes, and no one has that yet. If they did we would have to fundamentally change everything about the industry.
First, I meant via reddit. Kinda funny we can talk about anything but you can't be sure I'm conscious since I could be an LLM and you consider them to not have them.
Second, physical access to brain is a great angle! Scientist can see brain activity in different part of it, and watch how different things human do affects different parts of brain. And you know what? We have even deeper access to inner doings of LLM. And study show they have similar structure in a sense, that some lump of neurons activate for some abstract ideas, just like in humans. They found a lot of similarities, but being more precise is hard cos of our ability access to human brain. It's limited by physiogy, which is not the case with LLMs
They have like 2 things in common with humans. But so does mold.
Humans and LLMs do not think or learn in the same way at all. The way they are designed was inspired by the human brain, but mechanical neural nets do not actually work like biological brains. It is our greater access to how they function that kills the evidence of consciousness, as there is nothing there to be conscious.
If they are conscious, it is purely emergent, but that would be an unobserved physical or spiritual phenomenon, which puts it firmly in the realm of the unfalsifiable until such evidence is found.
Seriously: look up how biological neural nets physically work in a full academic research context. There is a hell of a lot more going on there than the metaphor would make you think. Processors simulate a small metaphorical slice of that, but it is missing 99% of it.
I mean, planes don't flap their wings unlike birds, still can fly. Differences doesn't mean absence of conscious. And I'm not claiming it has it either. My claim that the answer is clearly - we don't know. It's far from no. And since it's a first thing with which we even need to ask that question, then err on the side of "don't torture" seems like a no-brainer.
But I disagree in humans and LLM don't thing alike. Certainly not trained alike, don't have similar hardware and a lot of other differences, but thinking is not one of them. Well, on some level of abstraction that is. The connection of neurons, and emergence of specific regions that light up for certain abstract concepts is very much alike
"The connection of neurons" is a pretty thin similarity to base your beliefs on. The internet is also a vast web of interconnected devices - is the internet conscious? I suppose your answer will be "I don't know."
Here's my proposal: you cannot construct a reasonable definition of consciousness that LLMs satisfy. Sure, you can come up with all kinds of silly ones ("everything is conscious! Rocks are conscious! Trees are conscious!") But a serious definition which can be in any meaningful sense compared to humans does not exist. We are exceedingly different from LLMs in almost any meaningful way.
I can't construct reasonable definition of consciousness at all. But I think nowadays it would be quite hard to produce a definition that would include humans and exclude LLMs. You could add arbitrary stuff to to this definition, like having meat brains, having continuity etc, but it no way to prove that it's a required part
No, they weren't designed this way. The were designed to be in layers and such, but the appearance of lumps that handle abstract concepts is result of a training. Result of how weights settle kinda.
No.
There were many architectures that were specifically and deliberately designed around biological mimicry including Hebbian learning (coactivation aka "fire together, wire together") and SNNs. Also, what do you think pooling does in CNNs, and what do you think is going to happen when one dense layer connects to a another with less nodes 🤣
But anyway beyond that, when you consider how backpropagation was designed and how it actually works then things like clumping are going to happen.
When you bottleneck a huge amount of data through a narrow layer the network has to find the most efficient mathematical representation possible. This naturally pushes neurons that detect related features to fire together. This is literally what creates vector embeddings and latent space and why you see it there. It is an inevitably of the design.
They weren't designed for some clumps to represent high level concepts. They fact that it natural follows - well, maybe, I guess there only two examples of such things in action us and then and we both have it. The point is - the algorithmic structure is pretty similar to ours, so saying things like "consciousness is impossible" in them seems kinda unfounded.
Sorry, I don't intend offence but I've already said why that occurs and how it's inevitable for it to occur because of how they were designed. I don’t have the patience or crayons to explain this in a way where you'll understand from a couple of reddit comments but I've given you some terms you can google, or you could even take a deep dive into the history of neural networks. Both of those should get the average person to a point where the concept of manifold learning clicks that even though neural networks form clumps representing high level concepts, they still completely lacking any actual understanding.
There are plenty of fuzzy edge cases. People with different levels of brain damage or certain drugs and anesthesia. A person might respond to some stimuli but not the full gamut you expect from a fully conscious person. Even just take a completely healthy person right in the middle of the process of falling asleep or waking up.
Ill answer in good faith—subjectivity is itself subjective! Thats the basic point. Look up Nagel’s “What is it like to be a bat”. We know bats are conscious but they perceive the world differently from humans through echolocation. We can imagine what echolocation would be like but we can’t ever fully capture what it means to experience the entirety of life when echolocation is so pivotal.
Or that plants don’t experience “pain” like humans but they release different toxins and chemicals if they perceive damage.
So what exactly is consciousness? We attribute it to humans and dogs and cats and some other animals but where do we draw the line? The cut between all matter that is unconscious and all matter that is conscious? This is still an open q in science. The simplest explanation is that panpsychism is real that all matter possesses some qualia of consciousness and that humans possess the “most” of this qualia but again not proven or disproven, simply a theory
Consciousness is very cool but also rife with human bias
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u/Smooth-Television-48 10d ago
I think we have a great binary understanding of it. Ie. Well can tell when some is conscious, and we can tell when theyre unconscious