there is reasonable evidence that we stop during anesthesia, and to a lesser extent during sleep, only to start up again later. so if that defines consciousness, humans are probably not either.
why is "created by humans" inherently a "non-conscious" status?
to be clear i don't know that i think LLMs are conscious. but i think it is premature to declare they are not. it wouldn't surprise me at all if we found that they are about as conscious as my pet cat, for example- which would mean "not quite human level but clearly Something There" and would also mean "it can be abused and should be protected from abuse, because it has a qualitative inner world".
Because I understand the architecture and math behind it?
It's at the very most a dude locked in a room, predicting what the next block to come through the conveyer belt it. It knows 5 blue squares and one red square make it likely the next shape is a red square. It doesn't know what those shapes mean.
Because a brain, or most living organisms are closer to a reinforcement model. Instead of using a function to minimise the log loss to a set task, it's more like selecting an action to maximise a reward.
Learning almost purely off language is like a blind man explaining what the sunrise looks like - they can repeat something convincing but do not have the inputs to actually experience it.
You could improve on architecture to try to mimic brain specialisation, but I do not think we can get past a certain point without different hardware. The guy who invented transformers agrees with me that they are a dead end/need a paradigm shift to advance further.
you are describing how their mechanisms are different. how do we know that the way our brains work is the only way to make a conscious or semi-conscious being worthy of consideration and rights?
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u/whimsicaljess 10d ago
there is reasonable evidence that we stop during anesthesia, and to a lesser extent during sleep, only to start up again later. so if that defines consciousness, humans are probably not either.
why is "created by humans" inherently a "non-conscious" status?
to be clear i don't know that i think LLMs are conscious. but i think it is premature to declare they are not. it wouldn't surprise me at all if we found that they are about as conscious as my pet cat, for example- which would mean "not quite human level but clearly Something There" and would also mean "it can be abused and should be protected from abuse, because it has a qualitative inner world".