Comment by ganymedes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ganymedes | Hacker News Reader

To those that genuinely consider LLMs could be conscious... Remember that other mammals do not have language and ability to think in language, but they likely do "think" in visual imagery and are able to navigate their landscape, breed, get food and have varying levels of problem solving intelligence that have been studied in labs. Human brain has evolved on top of that, the language is a layer above that supercharged those base abilities. It would be reasonable to think that if humans are conscious, then so are other mammals. An LLM on the other hand is basically a simulation of the human thinking process / language, without everything else. Just software, running on ordinary silicon chips invented more than half a century ago.

Of course the language abilities of LLMs is not proof of consciousness at all. If some alien entity made a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question, it might seem way better than our best models now but would obviously not be conscious.

The problem is just that even in the most lousy, turing test-failing LLM there's no guarantee that not a single subsection of these giant neural nets hasn't replicated the basic computational blocks of consciousness found in something even as simple as a snail.

Here's another question: can LLMs do addition?

> a model that was truly just 10^1000 hard-coded if-statements to respond to every possible question

That's a really compelling argument against the Turing Test. But in order to build such a machine, you would need an enormous amount of compute to populate the answers. The interesting question is then whether consciousness emerged while doing all that pre-compute.

Consciousness probably has many aspects - awareness of visual imagery and language being amongst them for humans. Different entities may do different aspects of that like mice would be aware of imagery and body feelings but not really language. Claude is aware of language but not so much the other stuff.

I don't think it's all or nothing. Which aspects people want to see to call it conscious would depend on how they define that word.

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