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I always find these arguments sort of annoying because it really conflates what is actually going on in ML/AI systems with this weird pseudo-science fiction mystification. Yes Tiger's are made of atoms, but no you can't use atomic physics to describe tiger-behavior. With AI models, you can describe behavior directly in terms of the underlying code. The model weights are deterministic parameters that literally decide how the system behaves.
Also you've gotten reductionism vs abstractions completely backwards. Abstractions "throw out information". High-level models compress details to make systems easier to reason about. Also not every useful abstraction corresponds to a mind, subject, or being.
Some Thought Experiments:
LLMs don't have minds and they aren't conscious. They are parameterized conditional probability functions, that are finite-order Markovian models over token sequences. Nothing exists outside their context window. They don't persist across interactions, there is no endogenous memory, and no self-updating parameters during inference. They have personality like programing languages or compilers have personality, as a biased function of how they were built, and what they were trained on.
This is false for most modern implementations. The same model weights, even at 0 temperature, give different outputs for runs in different environments (where "different" can be as subtle as putting the same hardware and software under more or less load), because anything that changes the ordering of reduction operations over non-associative (e.g. floating-point) arithmetic can change the result.
Well, you can imagine you can, anyway. LLM execution has that in common with Molecular Dynamics simulations: you can write down the equations on paper, but you're never going to evaluate them that way.
You are right this is technically true, with the caveat that these changes are from really tiny floating point changes on really tiny weights. But importantly, these tiny changes are akin to small random noise perturbations in molecular physics engines. It's an implementation detail due to the impreciseness of numerical operations on tiny numbers. In principle, if you froze the weights and evaluated the model on a perfectly precise machine with exact arithmetic. The mapping from inputs to outputs would be deterministic. The existence of minor numerical nondeterminism on real hardware doesn’t change the fact that the system is fully specified by its parameters, architecture, inputs, and execution environment. In a way that the effect of atomic biology of living organisms on their behavior is not. It's a bad abstraction, the inferential gap is too far.
The last part is ostensibly true, LLM with billions of parameters are essentially billions of interconnected equations. It is hard to dig through it just like codebase with a billion lines of code would be hard to dig through. We know what those equations do in small cases, just like we understand what individual lines of code do. Scaling them up doesn’t introduce agency We can extrapolate that since mathematical equations/code have no agency, they don't suddenly start doing something else when they are scaled up.
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That's what I get for arguing at 3 am. I do know the difference.
See my latest reply to Toll for more.
They are more "conscious" than a rock. I do not know if they have qualia, but at least they contain conscious entities as sub-agents (humans).
Would you start objecting if someone were to say "China is becoming increasingly conscious of the risk posed by falling behind in the AI race against America"? Probably not. Are they actually conscious? Idk. The terminology is still helpful, and shorter than an exhaustive description of every person in China.
No, but the word "alive" is slightly more applicable here than it would be to a rock. Applying terms such as "alive" to a thermostat is a daft thing to do in practice, we have more useful frameworks: an engineer might use control theory, a home owner might only care about what the dials do in terms of the temperature in the toilet. Nobody gets anything useful out of arguing if it's living or dead.
Hold on there. You are claiming, in effect, to have solved the Hard Problem of consciousness. How exactly do you know that they're not conscious? Can you furnish a mechanistic model that demonstrates that humans made of atoms or meat are "conscious" in a way that an entity made of model weights can't be even in principle?
Entirely correct.
That is not mutually exclusive to anything I've said so far.
So once LLMs start having little green men inside them they will be as conscious as a corporation haha. Also a corporation itself is not more conscious than a rock, as the corporation cannot do anything without conscious agents acting for it. It has no agency on its own. If I create an LLC and then forget about it, does it think? does it have its own will? or does it just sit there on some ledger. If a rock has people carrying it around and performing tasks for it, has it suddenly gained consciousness?
Yeah not, but I also don't think China is actually conscious. We're all using that as linguistic shorthand for "Chinese Leadership" or "Chinese populations" This nation state idea itself lacks a mind. It is controlled by conscious agents (humans) but it itself lacks consciousness.
You are smuggling in the claim that I am claiming to solve the problem of consciousness. I'm not. I'm claiming that LLMs lack properties that any plausible theory of consciousness requires (Or realistically my own theory). I'm saying that system A lacks necessary conditions for property P, therefore A does not have P. I don't need to prove the full positive theory of P.
My basic theory(really a constraint) of conscious behavior:
I'm willing to entertain another plausible theory of consciousness if you have one you prefer. Or if you think you have an animal that we consider conscious that exists in a Markovian state.
Maybe I need to reread your opinion, but my understanding is that you are in the "LLMs are conscious/have minds" camp of thought. If you are then this is exclusive, because I am making the claim that these clearly not conscious tools are personified as having personalities due to human's innate social bias to attribute personality to things. But that doesn't actually make them conscious/mind-having. It's sort of like this video: Social bias towards consciousness
It is helpful to consider another analogue: the concept of being "alive". A rock is clearly not alive. A human is. So are microbes, but once we get to viruses and prions, the delineation between living and non-living becomes blurry.
Similarly, it is entirely possible that consciousness can be continuous. I'm not a pan-psychist, I think it's dumb to think that an atom or a rock has any degree of consciousness, but consider the difference between an awake and lucid human, one who is drunk, one who is anesthetized or in a coma, someone lobotomized, a fetus etc. We have little idea what the bare minimum is.
A rock is no more conscious for being held than it was before. I think it's fair to say that the rock+human system as a whole is conscious, but only as conscious as the human already was. Think about it, there already is a "rock" in every human: a collection of hydroxyapatite crystals and protein matrices that make up your bones. And yet your consciousness clearly does not lie in your bones. Removing your femur won't impact your cognition, though you'll have a rather bad limp.
Humans are already made up of non-sentient building blocks. Namely the neurons in your brain. I think we can both agree that a single neuron is not meaningfully conscious, but in aggregate?
And guess what? We can already almost perfectly model a single biological neuron in-silico.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/
In principle, there's nothing preventing us from scaling up to a whole rat brain or even a human brain, all while using artificial neural nets. I am of course eliding the enormous engineering challenges involved, but it can clearly be done in principle and that's what counts.
(I'm aware that the architectures of an LLM and any biological brain are very different)
We have examples of sentient systems with no persistent state, and humans to boot. There are lesions that can make someone have complete anterograde amnesia. They can maintain a continuous but limited capacity short-term memory, but the standard process of encoding and storage to longterm memory fails.
They can remember the last ~10 minutes (context window) and details of their life so far (latent knowledge) but do not consolidate new memories and thus are no longer capable of "online" learning. I do not think it's controversial that such people are conscious, and I certainly think they are.
That demonstrates, at least to my satisfaction, an existence proof that online learning is not a strict necessity for consciousness.
Further, I do not think that using an external repository to maintain state is in any way disqualifying. Humans use external memory aids all the time, and we'll probably develop BCIs that can export and import arbitrary data. There is nothing privileged about storage inside the space of the skull, it's just highly convenient.
I have strong confidence that I'm conscious, and so are you and the typical human (because of biological and structural similarities). I am also very confident that rocks and atoms aren't. I am far more agnostic about LLMs. We simply do not know if they are or aren't conscious.
My objection is to your expression of strong confidence that they aren't conscious. As far as I can tell, the sensible thing to do is wait and watch for more conclusive evidence, assuming we ever get it.
I do not believe that my thoughts on the topic came up, at least in this thread. As above, I do not make strong claims that LLMs are conscious. I maintain uncertainty. I don't particularly think the question even matters, since I wouldn't treat them any differently even if they were. "Mind" is a very poorly defined term (and we're already talking about consciousness, which doesn't do so hot itself). I think that conceptualizing each instance of an LLM as being a mind is somewhat defensible, even if that's not a hill I particularly care to die on.
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