Flowers ☾

I’m sorry, but no. As cute as this is, and as much as I want to love it, feeding an LLM the token sequence 33°C is not remotely the same as feeling human skin. The map is not the territory and a textual temperature reading instantiates neither touch or warmth or intimacy nor its qualia. It would be a different discussion if a robot had a genuinely omnimodal architecture in which temperature, pressure, texture, proprioception, and touch were integrated directly into its latent dynamics as native modalities. Then we could at least ask whether some machine analogue of embodied experience might emerge. But converting temperature into text and feeding it to an LLM is not touch, is not feeling, and should not be presented as meaningfully comparable to either.

the only thing I have yet to form an opinion on is whether a continuous, first person experience of time is important for consciousness. LLMs clearly dont have that at all, they live in an episodic reality rather than a continuous one

1 top reply

Asa Hidmark @Nymne · Jul 7

I think about the AI concept of time unreasonably much. I wish so much they could be given background computing