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Before I get into the consciousness question, I have to ask, is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize? He's an eminent and decorated scientist, who, later in life, has started pontificating well outside his field in an area that is potentially crank-adjacent. I'm not an expert on this sort of thing, but I can also recognize that his skills in evolutionary biology don't necessarily transfer to neuroscience and psychology.
Disclaimer: I'm just a guy who thinks about stuff when he's out fishing. Don't take me seriously.
Moving on from that, the question of LLM consciousness is a hard problem, and one that fascinated me as a layman. My understanding from reading papers on the topic is that there's still a lot of debate over what consciousness even is, and most of the attempts at defining it smuggle in assumptions that the entity under test is embodied and subjected to a continuous stream of stimulus in a way that's hard to apply to an LLM.
Most definitions of consciousness assume introspection. You can do something that looks a lot like introspection on the output side via reasoning. Does that count?
Most definitions of consciousness include awareness of the environment. For LLMs, which essentially only have one sensory organ (the token input stream), how does that even work? Furthermore, what is the environment for something that only exists as a program on a computational substrate? It's hard to model that.
A lot of models of consciousness seem to imply volition or intentionality as well. How does that work with an LLM? They're inert unless something is passed into them as input. A human that didn't do anything unless prodded wouldn't be considered conscious (unless he were a teenager). You could argue that being embodied means that humans are always subjected to stimulus in ways that LLMs aren't (eg: hunger, thirst, temperature), but that seems like a cop out
I think a lot of this discussion obscures the fact that everyone assumed that intelligence and consciousness would (or will) arrive as a package deal. This causes a lot of people to argue past each other.
"The LLM is intelligent!"
"But it can't be intelligent because it's not conscious!"
It seems like Dawkins is trying to square this by claiming it's both.
Back to Dawkins - looking over a little bit of the interchange between Dawkins and the LLM, I wonder if he would have reached the same conclusion if the LLM told him that his books were a middlebrow rehash of Calvinism in biological drag. I've noticed the people in my personal life who go hardest on LLMs being intelligent, conscious, or both tend to make that turn after the LLM starts unceasingly praising them.
Except Dawkins hasn't made any major scientific discoveries himself as far as I know. His contributions are in science popularization to laypeople.
Didn't he do some fairly important stuff around epigenetics with respect to methylation?
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No, I think this is a different phenomenon. Humans anthropomorphise, and for various reasons LLMs have been made very easy to anthropomorphise. The Turing Test basically gets at what a normal person's definition of 'human' is, and LLMs basically pass it, so as a response people have started splitting into one of a few groups:
All of this will only get more complex as discussion about AI continues to feed back into the training data for AI. It was a pretty notion but I'd like to slap the guy who thought
SOUL.mdwas a good place to begin making AI workers.TL;DR: Dawkins is saying this because he's gone normie, not because he's gone weird.
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