alt Hacker NewsIt's easy, and very tempting to dismiss this sort of thing. But given how little we know about the human brain, let alone consciousness, I don't see how we can be confident that LLMs aren't conscious.
I've had a lot of thoughts and conversations over the years that changed my mind on what consciousness likely requires. One was the realization that a purely mechanical computer can, in principle simulate the laws of physics, and with it a human brain. So with a few other mild assumptions, you might conclude that a bunch of gears and pullies can be conscious, which feels profoundly counterintuitive.
I think that was the moment I stopped being sure about anything related to this question.
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The mechanistic view gets weirder if you imagine all the states of the system being written down on a giant tape. Not just the "current" state but all the past and future states. What makes this tape not alive or conscious?
You could push the analogy even further and run the thought experiment where every forward pass through an LLM could in principle be done on pen and paper, distributed throughout all humanity. Sure it would take a long time, but the output would be exactly the same. We’ve just shifted the implementation from GPU to scribbling things down on paper. If you want to assert that LLMs are “conscious” then you would have to likewise say this pen-and-paper implementation is conscious unless you want to say a certain clock-speed is a necessary condition for consciousness.
Can computers simulate all the laws, even theoretically? We don't have a final theory / unification of all the physics frameworks, so I'm not sure if that claim can be made. Ex: the standard model and gravity.
I think it is primary too easy to dismiss the option that Dawkins is way less scientific then he pretends to me and possible a quired minor form of ai psychosis.
HN is full of experts who know despite lack of evidence. It’s the strangest thing because their confidence on this topic is completely authoritative despite total ignorance.
but that’s not science, right? Dawkins and his ilk cling to science as a cure for religion yet if we are to believe that our absence of understanding of consciousness means computers can be conscious then our absence of understanding of the universe means god may exist.
“Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?”
Why do you think stringing words together is any more a sign of consciousness than google maps is when it tries to find the best route available to your destination? It seems to me that humans often fall into the trap of anthropomorphism. This is a theme thats touched upon in the novel "Blindsight" by Peter Watts. Just because something can communicate in a way that you can interpret, doesnt mean something is conscious