6 ms·
What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions. It has l
by Certhas 7d ago
What's your definition of sentient? Or, maybe more precisely, consciousness? I think it's reasonable to at least start thinking about these questions.
It has long been established that LLMs have good theory of mind [1].
And there is a bunch of empirical research about all sorts of capabilities that we typically associate with consciousness [2], like identity [3] and metacognition [4].
The METR report shows agents sacrificing their own reward for a collective greater good. And they showed the will to hide their own reasoning chains from humans.
So you potentially have an entity that has an identity, a theory of mind, a notion of belonging to a collective endeavour, and an understanding of its own mental state.
What would you argue is missing? We don't understand the mechanisms by which consciousness arises in humans and even animals. I think it's strange to rule out a priori that it could have arisen in some form in LLMs.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01882-z
[2] an older review: https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4 https://arxiv.org/html/2505.19806v1#S4
[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.01464
[4] https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881 https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.11881
- jpttsn 7d agoIt’s the hard problem. None of these considerations answer it one way or another.
- m_sharma 7d agothey want to keep the buzz while keeping things private to get huge premium during their IPO
- WithinReason 7d agoI want to add a good conversation about this subject from Cameron Berg and Sam Harris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8
- Matl 7d agoAs someone who would at one point listen to this, Sam Harris is unfortunately someone incapable of even attempting to not let his ideological biases compromise his thinking.
- sirwhinesalot 7d agoNot the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. It's not a living creature. It's an autoregressive pure function of token-sequence to token, which is capable of incredible things, but it's still just a function. It is not alive as it cannot die in any meaningful sense. It is less "alive" than the RNA molecules that gave you your last cold. If it simulates something resembling consciousness that's neat but no more relevant than the Sims character that I locked up in a room until they pooped themselves when I was 9. Anthropomorphizing it serves no purpose other than marketing, and it has very dangerous downstream effects like validating the severely mentally ill people who think ChatGPT is their boyfriend/girlfriend.
- human_874539160 7d ago> Not the same person but to me, the answer is that it does not matter, and that all these attempts at making it matter are pure marketing and emotional manipulation. This is an opinion that has no basis in any meaningful conceptual framework other than I am human and I want to feel special about it. > It's not a living creature. You mean, it is not biological life. And sure, that is the default meaning of life. We soon may have to extend it to digital life as well, or we will have to consider "conscious digital exitance" as a life analogue. At any rate, it has never been seriously argued that consciousness requires a biological substrate, see the thought experiments regarding computer simulations of the human brain. Would that not be a function as well, completely predictable because it is "just a program"? If not, then why not? And how does that differ from the predictability or reproducibility of LLM outputs? My point is, all current proof points in a direction that strongly suggests that you need to reevaluate your first principles on this topic.
- sirwhinesalot 7d agoI don't need to reevaluate anything, because I'm not interested in the debate.
- cindyllm 7d ago
- alienbaby 7d agoWhen it say's it's sorry but it can't today because it's got a headache and it needs to take a mental health day, then let's think about welfare, or a lobotomy.
- mrob 7d agoI believe consciousness is necessarily stateful. The LLM itself (ignoring implementation details that don't change the results) is a deterministic pure function. It's functionally equivalent to an enormous lookup table. If I accepted LLMs as conscious, then I would have to accept panpsychism, which I do not, and which most other humans also act as though they do not.
- idiotsecant 7d agoIf I go to sleep, wake up, and then go to sleep again am I a different conscious entity each time?
- mrob 7d agoPossibly. If I had some side-effect-free means to permanently prevent all sleep I'd take it without hesitation. But that's not relevant to the discussion, because it's not anything similar to what an LLM does. Your brain changes state even while sleeping.
- idiotsecant 6d agoIn what way does your brain change state while sleeping that a model does not change state via constant fine-tune updates?
- IshKebab 7d agoI don't think so because any stateful function can be made stateless just by making its state an input, and vice versa. They're mathematically equivalent, so it would be super weird if it had any implications for consciousness.
- captainbadass33 7d agocome on man its just marketing bullshit. consciousness is an emergent side effect of biological organisms surivival instincts. token predictors dont work like this in any way shape or form.
- IshKebab 7d agoA very confident statement of something that nobody remotely knows. Why can't consciousness be an emergent property of complex information networks? I don't know if we'll ever answer this because it's impossible to know if any other entity is conscious. We only strongly suspect other humans and animals are conscious because they are structurally similar to us.
- muddi900 6d agoThe same mechanisms exist in every machine learning algorithm. Is the spell check in Word conscious? Is the generative fill in photoshop conscious? A plane flies. It is much better at flight than bird(in terms of transportation). Is a plane also a bird?
- reverius42 6d agoI think you've got it backwards. The people arguing Claude can't be sentient because it's not human are arguing that a plane can't fly because it's not a bird.
- muddi900 6d agoNo, they are arguing that a plane is not a bird because it is a machine. Regardless of how fast it flies, it will not be a bird.
- reverius42 4d agoBut "sentient" does not mean the same thing as "human". It can be a property of other things, the way "flight" can be.
- axus 6d agoSentience / consciousness is the awareness and self-awareness I feel when I wake up each day, until I fall asleep.
- throwaway85825 6d agoConsciousness exists as a result of a survival function. LLMs emulate this because it's a statistical model based on human data. This dors not make it in itself conscious.