> I never suggested this means anything at all about whether the system is conscious or not, GP did, and it’s a position I’m arguing against.
That's certainly not how I perceived anything you said. Let me get this straight.
u:yannyu's original comment (ironically, clearly LLM-generated) supposes that the barrier to LLM consciousness is the absence of environmental coherence. In other words, their stance is that LLMs are not currently conscious.
u:estearum, that is, you, reply:
> The consistency and coherence of LLM outputs, assembled from an imperfectly coherent mess of symbols is an empirical proof that the mess of symbols is in fact quite coherent.
> The physical world is largely incoherent to human consciousnesses too, and we emerged just fine.
In reply to a comment about world incoherence as a barrier to consciousness, you suggest that humans became conscious despite incoherence, which by extension implies that you do not think incoherence is a barrier to LLM consciousness either.
u:yannyu replies to you with another probably LLM-generated comment pointing out the difference between textual coherence and environmental coherence.
u:estearum, that is, you, make a reply including:
> They [LLMs] sometimes get it wrong, just like all other conscious entities sometimes get their predictions wrong.
"All other conscious entities" is your choice of wording here. "All other" is definitionally inclusive of the thing being other-ed. There is no possible way to correctly interpret this sentence other than suggesting that LLMs are included as a conscious entity. If you did not mean that, you misspoke, but from my perspective the only conclusion I can come to from the words you wrote is that clearly you believe in LLM consciousness and were actively arguing in favor of it, not against it.
Incidentally, LLM output is not uniformly random, but rather purely probabilistic. It operates on the exact same premise as the toy script I posted, only with a massive dataset and significantly more advanced math and programming techniques. That anybody even entertains the idea of LLM consciousness is completely ridiculous to me. Regardless of whatever philosophical debates you'd like to have about whether a machine can reach consciousness, the idea that LLMs are a mechanism by which that's possible is fundamentally preposterous.