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A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.
by jpttsn 7d ago
A stab: a video recording of a biological organism can exhibit many markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism.
- Certhas 7d agoI like it, and it points in the right direction, but is not directly true: The markers are about interactions, how biological organisms behave in certain test situations. But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.
- jpttsn 6d agoThe test situation is in the video as well. Shot of John McClane stepping on glass follows John McClane wincing in anguish. John McClane does not respond to what’s not on TV and Claude does not respond to what’s not in prompt.
- cgio 7d agoI don’t know, a stab carries lots of bias in interpretation. We might be reflecting our conscious experience markers on a different conscious experience. And selectively so, e.g. lobsters welfare. From my perspective, this is the hypocrisy of these welfare statements. We are already happy to kill beings we consider conscious to feed ourselves but suddenly sensitive with a consciousness we don’t know if it’s there. I would wager this is more out of fear of the idea of this consciousness rather than out of welfare.
- jpttsn 6d agoI happen to agree with you. Many others tie moral consideration to assumed subjective experience. They espoused this even though they obviously rarely adhere to it and that has self image considerations. I bet the lack of answers about others’ subjective experience has more salience to them. This may cloud judgment and lead to accept overconfident answers.
- arc619 7d agoA video is a fixed representation. What if we can interact with this video, and it reacts in the same ways the source organism does? Then we put it in new situations that weren't in the source video, and it interacts in a similar way to the original organism in these situations, too. What do we make of reactions of pain or joy? Where's the line between simulation and enaction? This is closer to the reality of these models. I'm not suggesting I know where that line is - if indeed it is a line at all - it could well be a gradient.
- fwn 7d agoLLMs are deterministic, though. Much like the video. AFAIK using the same input tokens, weights, and numerical operations will lead to the same probability distribution for the next token. It uses pseudo-randomness to enable temperature, etc. Like a fuzzy video. "Markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism" just does not mean very much. A PR phrase used to hype the IPO.
- Certhas 7d agoVideos and LLMs are not deterministic in the same sense at all. LLMs are deterministic in the same sense as biological processes. And a faithful simulation of a brain would have all the properties you note.
- fwn 6d agoNo, that is not at all something we can just state as a fact. Whether the brain is deterministic is an open question that just inherits the good old, probably unsolvable determinism debate. The LLM pseudo-randomness from above is engineered by us humans and fully understood, much like an algorithm playing a video frame sequence. You could theoretically record a full register of all states of an LLM setup with all the possible inputs and environment parameters, and it would fully describe everything you would ever get from a given LLM setup. It would be a very large, convoluted book. I understand that Anthropics PR department wants to see truth or reason behind every "I'm alive" the LLM generates. Even the term "self-report" is anthropomorphizing, as an LLM does not do anything on its own at all. (It also does not hack any company on its own.) That is just one of the narratives they spin probably at least until the IPO.