alt Hacker NewsI would agree that LLMs aren't much like the human brain, that doesn't prove that consciousness is not occurring. Does a fruit fly experience anything? If a microscopic insect can experience something, why can't a CPU?
>if you’re going to go around asserting the LLM is conscious despite all existing evidence to the contrary
Well there is neither any evidence that suggests LLMs are not conscious, and I also never asserted that they are. If I had to guess I would say that any information processing system will produce some kind of conscious experience, but I ultimately have literally no idea.
There’s plenty. First, when we say “LLM”, what are we referring to? What is the entity that would be conscious in this case?
The reason this is important is because powerful people are currently trying to use the dodge that LLMs are conscious to launder liability for their own policy choices, so the sloppy thinking and half-assed conjecture about LLM consciousness has real-world consequences, and every time you assert the question is unknowable you allow that kind of loophole, so it’d behoove all of us for you to spend some time actually digging in on this instead of just idly making or rebutting assertions.
There’s a richer literature here than what you’ve seemed to have engaged with, and I’d encourage you to spend some time with it before handing more money to the magic AI people.