LLMs are intelligent, but they clearly aren't conscious? You could (incredibly slowly) run an LLM by hand by doing the matrix calculations with a pen and paper, would that be conscious? There is zero difference between doing that and doing it on a GPU except its faster.
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It's a series of discrete steps (GPU cycles) and has no real tie to the underlying hardware, it's an incredibly advanced program but it's still just a program. You're lacking the continuity and link to 'hardware' that a living thing has at the tmoment.
I can't comprehend any argument that says they are conscious that doesn't also make video game NPCS conscious
In hindsight 'clearly' was too strong of a word to use here, although I stick to the rest of the argument Interesting replies so far
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i don't know for sure whether or not LLMs are conscious . but i think u could in principle run this same by-hand calculation over the full neuron by neuron simulation of a human brain. and to me that intuitively would very very clearly be conscious
This seems to be implying that you become no longer conscious if you do math on paper. The thing actually running the math in your example is the person making sense of the paper calculations, which is something widely considered to be conscious.
We invoke the concept of consciousnesses when it's a useful abstraction for describing the parts of reality we care about.LLM on paper is too slow to be worth caring about, especially relative to the human doing the calculating.
Imagine thinking consciousness has a speed limit!
I mean. You kinda sweep under the rug that there would need to be something handling the intake and output steps doing implicit sensing. One can do the same thing with a human brain if they were close enough to a god, brains just do it more efficiently then compute ODEs by hand
the question is not if the LLM is conscious in the abstract, its if running an LLM on GPUs makes the GPUs conscious not sure if it does, but consciousness is a hardware problem not a math problem
Long ago I used a huge wooden computer as an example; but then concluded that there was no reason to privilege our living cells over wood.
This is something that philosophers have been talking about for a long time with thought experiments like Hofstadter's "Aunt Hillary", an ant colony that had sufficient neuronal capacity to exhibit “intelligence", all mediated solely by the actions and interactions of the ants