(I'm more of the Dennett persuasion. Let's NOT discuss the empirical facts here, because they add up funny and I don't like it)
But we absolutely believe we are conscious.
Perhaps it's a useful idea.
Even our decision making as I understand it, from the functional MRIs we know our subjective perspective of how and why we made simple decisions is wildly inaccurate.
Obviously free will and feeling like you control your actions is hugely important for us. But in a physical sense free will does not exist.
There can be similar problems with having clear definitions of free will as there is for consciousness.
For example, if I define free will as the capacity to formulate and evaluate various plans, and select one to implement, it seems compatible with physics.
I'd consider (deterministic) chaos to be pretty much free will anyway?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
[ Accidentally on purpose, time-loop stories like Groundhog Day almost perfectly illustrate this. Each time-loop people start out acting the same way: Deterministic, not random. But if the protagonist interacts with them (or the protagonist's actions ripple out), this changes the (initial) conditions, so people's behavior is no longer (as) predictable at all. Some of these stories even literally quote the butterfly effect. ]
throw98709•1w ago
Nobody sane believes the current LLMs are conscious, ffs
strogonoff•1w ago
The reason is that there is no working definition of “consciousness” or “sentience” that does not imply “human-like”, which in turn implies ability to feel and suffer, and what we do with LLMs would generally be considered something that would make beings with human-like sentience and consciousness suffer.
[0] Some definitely do, though; or at least they behave with LLMs in a way one would behave with a conscious being.
gavinray•1w ago
If you follow the line of thinking that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, arising out of complexity, it doesn't seem far-fetched to me to believe that someday in the future, a silicon-based computing machine (rather than a biological, carbon-based computing machine) might be "conscious" -- whatever that means.
strogonoff•1w ago
It’s circular and self-referential. In defining consciousness we, to phrase it in the least nuanced way, are trying to define a thing through which we define things. The best definition we have reduces to something along the lines of “what we, humans, experience”. By its very nature it makes us unable to fathom or even recognize a hypothetical consciousness if it is entirely unlike ours and/or operates on radically different scales; anything we call “conscious” is implied to be human-like.
Kim_Bruning•1w ago
From an objective, empirical, scientific point of view, consciousness and feelings are not really fantastically defined.
But looking at diverse tests that ARE available, modern LLMs seem to get interesting scores on a number of them.
The counter-argument being -of course- that no one ever made those tests with LLMs in mind. But that's not something you should come up with post-hoc. Define better experiments instead!
(The ethical issues you mention should probably be (re-)evaluated once systems have continuous memory/context)
strogonoff•1w ago
An LLM produces better output if you treat it badly (threaten violence, gaslight, etc.), which is hardly true for a human unless you count humans in slavery-like conditions.
Kim_Bruning•1w ago
strogonoff•1w ago
> You know, that’s a weird thing, we don’t circulate this much in the AI community… Not just our models, but all models tend to do better if you threaten them.
[0] https://au.lifehacker.com/ai/114236/news/googles-co-founder-...
sh3rl0ck•1w ago