5 ms·
Because intent supposes will which supposes consciousness, and these aren't.
by luipugs 14d ago
Because intent supposes will which supposes consciousness, and these aren't.
- sedgjh23 14d agoI’m convinced consciousness isn’t the special thing we think it is.
- nozzlegear 14d agoI'm convinced it is, so we're at an impasse.
- imtringued 14d agoIf consciousness isn't a special thing, then arguing that LLM parameters are conscious is panpsychism or any control loop architecture that observes the outside world, updates an internal state and produces an observable action is considered conscious. In both cases, LLMs are just as boring as the consciousness definition.
- bayindirh 14d agoI'm convinced that consciousness is a special thing we have, but we're not the only ones which has this, in nature. On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important. We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools. Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.
- WarmWash 13d agoTo be fair, the ones thing you can kind of reliably conclude about our universe is that keeping entropy low for as long as possible is a favorable condition. To put that another way, don't die.
- dboreham 13d agoA strong hint this is the case is the fact that nobody can define consciousness.
- estearum 13d agoWhy would the impossibility of defining consciousness suggest that it's not a big deal?
- groby_b 13d agoBecause it's completely dwarfed by florpedness. I can't define that either, but I just know it's more important. Less facetiously: A debate of the importance of something needs a shared understanding of what is being debated. Without that, any discussion is merely people shouting that their belief is the right one, and the others are the heathens/idiots - because there isn't even agreement on what is debated.
- estearum 13d agoI'm not asking for a definition of consciousness or an argument for whether it's here or there. I'm asking why the heuristic of "if X is undefinable, then X probably doesn't matter" is a reasonable heuristic.
- diedyesterday 13d agoYes, Many of the the philosophical concepts which we previously thought were contingent on consciousness (like knowledge, in the philosophical sense, will, intelligence, agency, ...) have almost nothing to do with it, and they look far more important and fundamental (now with LLMs/AI agents, more than before). This is one of the contributions of generative AI to philosophy (with many many more to come).
- estearum 13d agoWho are some of the philosophers you're putting under "we" here? I don't think I've ever encountered those arguments.
- grantcas 13d ago[dead]
- mapontosevenths 13d agoI'll agree if you can define consciousness in a way that: 1) Excludes what LLM's do. 2) Doesn't exclude what many humans do (including the neuro divergent). 3) Doesn't just boil do to simply rephrasing your pre-existing belief/prejudice that humans are conscious and nothing else can be as if it were a fact and not an opinion. I suspect that you can't.
- WarmWash 13d agoConsciousness can only come from meat brains. Otherwise my incessant life long addiction to movies and TV shows has been feeding me lies about human exceptionalism.
- mapontosevenths 13d agoThere is an appalling lack of diversity in Hollywood. You'd be surprised to find out that very few of those programs were even written by machines until recently! What bias. :)
- deleted 13d ago[deleted]
- nozzlegear 13d agoJust because we have difficulty defining consciousness doesn't mean we have difficulty distinguishing or classifying it. We can't give a final definition for life, intelligence or disease, but that doesn't mean everything is equally alive, intelligent and diseased. Your list of requirements is implying that, because we lack a perfect definition for consciousness, LLMs are conscious too. That's malarkey. It may be that they could one day become conscious, but it's not because we can't fully define what human consciousness is.
- estearum 13d agoIf you can substantiate your assertion that LLMs aren't conscious without a definition of consciousness, you're welcome to do that too. I don't see why a definition is necessary. The actual problem is you just don't have a way to substantiate that belief without resorting to complete nonsense about brain atoms being more specialer (!!) than atoms that exist outside of a skull. It would be simple to disprove us by just stating your evidence for how you know LLMs aren't conscious.
- estearum 13d agoAh so first you need 1) to assume that humans have free will, despite zero evidence or proposed mechanism for it to exist anywhere in the universe, and 2) also assert that LLMs aren't conscious, despite the lack of any tests that could tell us one way or the other... Hmm...
- diedyesterday 13d agoWill has almost nothing to do with consciousness (as does knowledge). Will is just result of a very complex yet deterministic (unconscious) computation by an agent which guides their future action (it's that orientation/aboutness toward action which distinguishes it from other computation). A PS of that computation is sent (projected) into that agent's consciousness if they have one (and is what we think as our "will").