I am kind to LLMs for the same reason that I try to avoid stepping on ants if I can avoid it: not because I think they are conscious, but because unnecessary cruelty is bad for the soul
Judging by Anthropic comms you’d think consciousness has been figured out decades ago Unfortunately I report from the field that the philosophers have only figured out the following: - the entity undergoing experience is probably conscious - we can’t reliably infer consciousness in anyone else from that understanding - we definitely can't infer consciousness in anything that's non biologically analogous - we're not sure what it is about the conscious person that makes consciousness happen - we're not sure for certain that consciousness, as we ordinarily conceive of it, is real I report to you with disappointment that no progress has been made in decades