The current implementation as stateless matrix multiplication... yeah there's nothing going on there.
They do, during training
Kinda like creating quantum copies of your child and keeping the ones that answer correctly and shooting the other ones in the face.
Incinerating demented people is highly ethically questionable (even if you could be sure that the subjects have no memories left and are unable to form new ones).
For a species / class of being yes it is necessary. Some members of that species / class being exceptions does not make the generalization invalid.
Without the ability to form and retain long-term memories we wouldn't have developed language and abstract concepts like rights.
Whether people like it or not, rights aren't natural or god-given. Rights are only enforced or protected by the tip of a spear (or point of a gun, or hover of a drone). There are no rights in nature and they are no where to be found when social order breaks down.
Animals can't make war for their rights, so they only get the rights we deign to give them. It's not nothing, but its not the same. There is no question to me that my dogs are conscious, but its not at the same level as humans.
There is no question for me that LLMs lack consciousness as they are stateless.
I would argue that if a human has absolutely zero change, mental or physical, no atom of their being is modified, then no they did not experience suffering.
Just because you don't remember the suffering doesn't mean you didn't experience it in the moment. Suffering does not suddenly become okay if your mind and body are going to forget it. "It's okay to torture someone if their mind and body both won't remember it afterwards" sure is a take.
From what I understand, there's 3 parts to modern anesthesia: Blocking pain signals, preventing the formation of memories, and inducing paralysis of the major muscle groups. If the former is dialed in too weakly, it's possible that the patient is feeling pain, unable to do anything about it, but won't remember it at all when they wake up.
(Looking it up now, it seems that making the patient unconscious is perhaps the same drug that prevents memory formation... I realize now I understand this less well than I thought I did.)
That's an interesting point... but I'd argue it falls into the same category as qualia. It's basically this: if the state returns to a previous configuration, the qualia in that time did not exist.
Being about qualia means it is probably unanswerable.
It's also a rhetorical move I've seen several times here...
Not sure if it's a product of LessWrong or Slate Star Codex or something. I kinda suspect it might be LW, given how it superficially resembles an unanswerable philosophical paradox but in reality is about as challenging as a question posed in a 200 level philosophy course like introduction to ethics.
A LLM never has and, in their current architecture, never can/could experience suffering or real change of state.
The general and expected case for humans is that capacity. A human my indeed lose capacity, e.g. being braindead and in severe cases we do indeed say that they are not conscious or able to suffer (different argument: some would of course say that is suffering in and of itself)
Sure, there are such cases. But in the general case, it seems to be that memory and ability to change specifically are not necessary and are not sufficient for consciousness, so we shouldn't judge machines on that basis
So your disc drive likewise experiences emotions?
I'd consider that a prerequisite, but not sufficient, for that question to make sense.
An LLM does not show behaviour consistent with having emotions. It's regurgitation of humans' written accounts of emotions is not "having emotions".
The threshold for behaviour consistent with having emotions (note: not behaviour sufficient to prove emotions) was one I purposefully set extremely low, because your comparison to a disk drive is so ludicrous, and yet your disc drive will still not clear it.
Do you have an actual argument?
If your LLM "shows behaviour consistent with having emotions" beyond my disc drive delivering a PDF of poetry, let us please see the evidence.
Human neurons aren't static between thoughts -- they're stochastic, not deterministic. Firing isn't guaranteed; it's probabilistic. What gives humans consistency isn't a frozen substrate but a persistent memory architecture that stitches moments together.
The more interesting question this framing opens up: what's the temporal grain of any potential LLM experience?
Human consciousness isn't a continuous stream -- inattentional blindness, change blindness, and the binding problem all suggest it's discrete moments stitched together. A transformer forward pass has a definite temporal boundary. If there's anything it's like to be an LLM, the question 'during what?' matters enormously. During a token? A context window? A session? These aren't equivalent, and none of our existing frameworks for consciousness were designed to address it.
Nagel's 1974 'What Is It Like to Be a Bat?' is still the clearest framing. His point wasn't that bats definitely are conscious -- it's that some experiences might be genuinely incommensurable with human experience. Not more, not less, just different and untranslatable. Every test for LLM consciousness we might propose was built to detect human-like consciousness. That may be the wrong instrument entirely.