People seem so incredibly overconfident about AI consciousness. It’s directly linked with among the hardest problems in metaphysics, among the hardest subfields in philosophy, widely considered to be one of the hardest fields of inquiry to make progress on. Humanity has had no major empirical breakthroughs or theoretical insight on the problem for multiple decades (centuries?). And yet people here seem to have very confident answers that present-day or future LLMs definitely are or aren’t conscious, based on (as far as I can tell) flimsy thought-experiments, snark and dumb memes. Do people have no sense of how ridiculous their confidence sounds? Morons.
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If people disagree about lack of new empirical evidence on the hard problem of consciousness in general or whether LLMs have something we might call consciousness specifically, I’m curious what are your candidates for top 3 pieces of evidence obtained in the last 30 years in any
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It's not that surprising that major progress could be made now considering we have a potential new way to study it and test every individual abstract component to see what emerges from it? Also many of the things we assumed to be exclusive to consciousness (like invention or
If there’s a non-zero chance of that uncertainty collapsing on the inflationary side, then I think we should be treating models as though they are. I think that’s maybe why - if you’re >0% convinced they’re conscious, might as well go all in.
Given that, answer me this: What degree of confidence do you have that your favourite human is conscious? Can you justify that degree of confidence?