since we're doing the AI conscious debate again, i want to remind everyone that despite how nice the insanely surface-level analogies seem, we would do well to scrutinize things at an appropriate level of detail this --> is not the same as this -->
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i'm not making a claim one way or the other, i think it is certainly a good debate /whether or not/ machines can be made conscious but the current debate of "are LLMs conscious?" is just such an unserious one at so many levels
biological neurons are near-infinitely complex living, acting cells whereas LLM neurons are comparatively simple math functions
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I mean, an artificial neuron doesn’t have to worry about storing its dna, energy, oxygen, blood etc. other things that cells have to worry about (if we want to go that deep we can include the chips the ai is run on to its complexity). Boils down to its primary function, tbh not
If you're comparing physical substrates, you want to look at GPUs, the most complex objects humanity has ever produced. The closest biological analog of weights would be the connectome, which is likewise relatively simple and easy to specify. Though I don't see any reason why "complexity of unit of substrate" should be decisive or even particularly informative here.
I think the only relevant question is whether consciousness is fundamentally informational or if it's something else. I think most secular people don't have a credible alternative to informational.
Extremely real
