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Sensory input is nothing but data.
That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".
Since the times GPT-2 was reimplemented inside Minecraft - its quite obvious LLMs are just math. Nothing else, by nature. Modern LLMs have the same math as in GPT-2 - just bigger and with extra stuff around - and math is the only area of human knowledge with perfect flawless reductionism, straight to the roots. It was build that way since the beginning, so philosophy have no say in this :) And because of that flawles…
Yup- the question is "can math be conscious?" (If you've engaged w/ the literature here, it's quite hard to give a confident "yes". it's also quite hard to give a confident "no"! so then what the heck do we do)
And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when running large batches is non-deterministic, as I understand it. But, in a controlled lab, you can make a model repeat itself identically. Unless the random number generator is "conscious", I don't see a place to fit consciousness into our understanding of LLMs.
There are a lot of people vulnerable to AI psychosis. As far as the ostensibly controversial topic of AI being conscious, it can be dismissed out of hand. There is no reason that it should be conscious, it was not designed to be, nor does it need to be in order to explain how it functions with respect to its design. It's also unclear how consciousness would even apply to something like an LLM which is a process, not…
If AI as presently designed and operated is conscious, this ends up being an argument for panpsychism. As you say it’s static, fixed, deterministic, and so on, and if you know how it works it’s more like a lossy compression model of knowledge than a mind. Ultimately it’s a lot of math. So if it’s conscious, a rock is conscious. A rock can process information in the form of energy flowing through it. It’s a fixed mode…
What makes the argument facile is that the singular focus on LLMs reveals an indulgence in the human tendency to anthropomorphize, rather than a reasoned perspective meant to classify the types of things in the universe which should be conscious and why LLMs should fall into that category.
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That's just reductive semantics. Anything can be described as "nothing but data".
Sensory data is a specific data set that corresponds to phenomena in the world. But to say that LLMs don’t have senses merely because they are linguistic or computational doesn’t follow when they can take in data from the world that similarly reflects something about the world.
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These LLMs don’t have senses, they have a token stream. They have no experience of the world outside of the language tokens they operate on. I’m not sure I believe that consciousness emerges from sensory experience, but if it does, LLMs won’t get it.
Neural networks can have senses. Hook an LLM up to a thermometer and it will respond to temperature changes.
Conflating senses with cognitive awareness of sensory input is a mistake.
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There is evidence that awareness is an emergent property from sensory experience. And consciousness is an emergent property of language that has grammatical meaning for self and other.
What you’re missing is a “self” to have the “experience”. LLMs do not have a self. This is like arguing that the algorithm responsible for converting ripped YouTube music videos to MP3s has a consciousness.
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By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and cle…
Indeed. We assume a lot, because we don't know. We don't have have settled, universal definitions of what consciousness means. But that also means that while we like to rule out consciousness in other things, we don't have a clear basis for doing so.
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How do I know you have this "self"? How do you know other humans do?
By the laws of physics, it's pretty clear we don't. The same chemical and electromagnetic interactions that drive everything around us are active in our brains, causing us to do things and feel things. We feel like we're in control of it, we feel like there's something there riding around inside. We grant that other people have the same magic, because I clearly do. But rocks, trees, LLMs, those are not people and cle…
https://archive.ph/6RdK9
Feels like watching and esteemed scientists falling in love with a bot that’s telling him what he wants to hear because the system prompt said “be helpful”
I would have assumed it would also require ignorance about how they work, but a few people who worked for AI companies have been canaries in the coalmine, falling prey to this kind of thing very early. I would have guessed they would have had enough understanding to know that there isn't a real girl in the computer, it's just matrix math and randomness. But, the first couple/few public bouts of AI psychosis were in nerds who work for AI companies.