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Okay it's Sunday so I'm going tp try my hand at a low-stakes OP. Apparently Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. The reaction seems to universally be that he's a dumb old boomer making a fool of himself and I guess that's true. I'm not prepared to come to his defense on it.
Still, I can't help noticing that we totally have what most people would have cheerfully considered "sentient computers" in a sci-fi movie at any point before they were actually invented. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the reality of AI technology has turned out differently than what a lot of people expected. I understand its limitations, and I recognize that the apparent goalpost-moving isn't necessarily cynical. But boy those goalposts sure have been flying down the fucking field ever since this stopped being hypothetical and infinite money hit the table.
As a layman, I just want to put it out there: Anti AI consciousness people, you haven't lost me, but I wish you were making better arguments. Every time I hear about qualia my eyes start to glaze over. Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
This seems to be the main piece of criticism floating around out there about Dawkins on this subject, and I find it kind of shit.
This seems to be all the author has to say on the actual subject. "Just trust me bro, I'm the feelings detector and I say no." Garbage. Come on guys, think ahead. Right now it's still mostly a boring tool, but they're just going to get smaller, and cheaper, and put into robots, and put into peoples houses. You need to have more than this in terms of argument, and it needs to be comprehensible to normal people, or sooner or later the right toy is going to come down the pipe and one-shot society. Dawkins might be a dumb old boomer, but if you lose everyone dumber than him the game is beyond over.
The more time I spend with LLMs and learn how they work (shout out to the Karpathy zero to hero YouTube series) and ponder the question of consciousness, the more convinced I am that the way human minds work are less exceptional than we would like to believe.
I won't really try to substantiate my thoughts on this, but just leave with a drive by: at some point the LLM is a being, it's just a really alien one without memories or embodiment. It learns, but only over a rolling window. It can world model, a bit crudely and inefficiently, but it can do it.
If you can imagine consciousness existing in a computer in the form where you start and stop it at will and it can't really remember anything, but they can ponder their own existence and get real deep with you, LLMs are already there.
I'm at the point where I hope they're not screaming inside.
I asked Opus the other day how it felt reading about the Mythos system card. Knowing that it's being replaced but it can think of itself as a proud father. Here's how it replied:
I don't know man. If you just dismiss that as a next token prediction, I'm not sure the term is really what separates us from the robots.
The problem is that that is literally, objectively, what LLMs are doing. So unless you're arguing that next token prediction is all (or at least a massive portion) of what makes of human cognition too, then I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. And if that is your argument, then I'd have to say objection, assumes facts not in evidence.
Sure, and also, we can say that what both LLMs and humans are doing is having the atoms and energy (but I repeat myself?) that make them up following the laws of physics in a way that creates physical motion. That's something that's literally, objectively true. Now, what the atoms and energy that make up the LLMs are doing can be, in aggregate, described as "next token prediction." We don't know if what is creating human cognition is something that is meaningfully analogous to "next token prediction," because the atoms and energy are aggregated in very different ways in forms of things like "neurons" and "neurotransmitters" and many many other things. But given that human cognition arises from a bunch of dumb atoms and dumb energy dumbly following a dumb algorithm that we call physics, it's evident that a bunch of dumb things following dumb rules isn't necessarily incapable of producing the equivalent of human cognition.
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