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Comment by Jtarii | Hacker News Reader

I would agree that LLMs aren't much like the human brain, that doesn't prove that consciousness is not occurring. Does a fruit fly experience anything? If a microscopic insect can experience something, why can't a CPU?

>if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary

Well there is neither any evidence that suggests LLMs are not conscious, and I also never asserted that they are. If I had to guess I would say that any information processing system will produce some kind of conscious experience, but I ultimately have literally no idea.

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There’s plenty. First, when we say “LLM”, what are we referring to? What is the entity that would be conscious in this case?

The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions.

There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.

>The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences

I'm not going to change my beliefs or how I think about interesting questions just because its the "socially conscious" thing to do.

>There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.

It seems like you are highly emotionally invested in this and that is precluding you from open engagement with the topic.

You're not engaging with the topic. Engaging with the topic is where one either asks questions and listens to the answer or actually seeks to increase one's knowledge on the topic. You're just saying things. That's lazy.

And, you're welcome to do what you want to do, it's your god given right to stay as ignorant as you want about any particular topic, but that comes with consequences. If you want to call that being socially conscious, sure, you do you, but if you're interested in why people keep getting annoyed at your loud proclamations of ignorance which you're trying to proffer as evidence of a curious mind, well, that's why.

It's just as intellectually lazy to leave "consciousness" undefined and proceed to claim that "X cannot be consciousness" because of social reasons. That's the definition of a circular argument.

In the same vein, airplanes can't fly because they don't flap their wings.

As for ignorance: have you tried to make an LLM produce the same output for the same input (as you state above)? Give it a shot, you'll be surprised.

I’m not leaving consciousness undefined. I provided a definition and asserted LLMs were not conscious by that definition. I solicited an alternate definition and was given none. If you’d like to claim the LLM is conscious, you need to define what you mean, for both “the LLM” and “is conscious,” because it’s not passing any of our existing bars for consciousness, and the only thing you can point to are characteristics also present in other objects we don’t consider conscious, so again, the burden of proof is in fact on you and that other fellow to provide some definitions here, because as sits you and the other commenter are just saying shit and refusing to engage with any kind of rigor.

And, to your point: I have, and I did, and I was not. If you’d like to refine your argument further - What LLM? Provide input how, and in what fashion? Under what conditions? - we can have that conversation, but if your assertion is “I can’t get ChatGPT to consistently produce the same output twice and therefore it is conscious,” that’s an incredibly facile argument.

You two seem to be laboring under the impression that this is terra ignota philosophically; it’s not. There’s an enormous amount of literature, thinking, ideas, concepts, frameworks, and approaches that already exist here that you’re welcome to engage with, but you’re not doing that, nor are you actually engaging with any of my arguments except to deny their existence.

Philosophically - sure. But philosophy is a feedback loop. Humans trying to build a model of their brain within their own brain. There is by definition not enough oomph there, and that model will necessarily be approximate at best.

Think that's what an out of touch techie would say? May I remind you that just a few hundred years ago the best philosophers were debating whether the world would descend into anarchy if more people realized that the big monkey in the sky doesn't exist. Just because philosophers talk about something doesn't mean it exists in reality.

As for same output - there's a parameter called "temperature". It governs the random wandering in the output of an LLM. Reducing temp gives more deterministic output, but also reduces the capabilities. Is it possible that randomness is also precisely the mechanism behind human creativity?

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