[Status 95% serious; 5% shitpoasty:] LLMs are not conscious. But I have been 100% confident and wrong before (about cat emotions (literal house cats 🐈)), so I feel like I have to follow this sort of thing in case I’m wrong and also to be able to have conversations with people who are wrong. Also tbf it might, might suggest useful metaphors or otherwise be indirectly useful. Also maybe useful for moral reasoning. Besides having strong, brittle beliefs I actually don't think about consciousness all that much which might be surprising bc of its seeming close relationship w meditation. Meditation makes it less weird and less interesting maybe. Also think neuroscience needs another 5-50 years to simmer before it’s useful to think hard about it.
Interesting coverage by @skdh of my disproof of baseline LLM consciousness and the current state of confusion and debate around artificial consciousness. Her video is worth checking out but contains two things I'd like to point out. First, Sabine says that the real question is
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afaict all theories of consciousness are necessarily grounded in metaphysics(pejorative), even self-reference based: sure, you turned the camera on itself, but where did you get the camera would love to see a counterexample if you have one
His theory seems like it would declare people with no hippocampus nonconscious
What does "consciousness" actually mean to u? Like p1. There are so many definitions that either seem to depend on wrong assumptions (eg indirect realism), reify conditions into objects (eg the original notion), or are completely mundane nonmysterious (eg medical)