When Dawkins met Claude – Could this AI be conscious?

How can you know that? We haven't gotten sentience from the modeling we are doing at the moment so I am wondering why you are so confident that what we already know is sufficient to form an accurate model of brains as regards to consciousness.

> Who says we need to make a replica of humans to make it conscious?

Well what's the point of bringing up the modelling of a brain in conversation about mechanically replicating the brain via pen and paper? If a replica is not necessary and you have no idea if the macro model we have is sufficient, what's even the point of this thread?

My original point was that upthread poster said we can mechanically (i.e. without any thought, just repeating a process by hand) produce *exactly* what an LLM produces, while we cannot do the same for a brain (rat or human is not relevant).

I feel that even after all the content in this thread, that point remains true and factual - LLMs are not a blackbox to the extent that brains are.

Overall, I'd say that you seem to be leaning pretty heavily on your own definitions. I suspect that other definitions are available.

> Human consciousness is characterized by intentionality and aboutness. This aboutness has semantic content. We know LLMs lack semantic content, and we know this because computers are purely syntactic simulators.

So tell me how human brains create this "aboutness" and "semantic content"? How does this arise out of physical, neuronal activity? And why can't sufficiently complex logic operations achieve the same outcome?

Using brains to try to understand the emergent properties of brains seeme fraught with conceptual problems to me. Not least of which is a potential to over-estimate the centrality of how it subjectively feels to be a brain. In a way it's understandable as, in the end, that feeling is all we have. But imo that doesn't make it right.

Because we can model the neuron. We’ve done it. We can replicate the exact affects of a single neuron. By induction we know we can do it for a network of neurons and thus the human brain. The only reason why it’s not done yet is a scaling issue.

Also we don’t know if we done it with an LLM yet. The LLM uses neurons in a very different configuration then humans but we can’t know if that is conscious. The key is we don’t know but the output of the LLM is remarkably similar to what a conscious being would say so all evidence points to yes. It’s weak evidence… but it’s also the only evidence.

> Well what's the point of bringing up the modelling of a brain in conversation about mechanically replicating the brain via pen and paper? If a replica is not necessary and you have no idea if the macro model we have is sufficient, what's even the point of this thread?

Modeling the entire brain means you’ve modeled consciousness. But if consciousness is a subset of the brain then we don’t need to model the entire brain. A replica is not necessary but it is one path forward to modelling consciousness. If a replica was the only way we wouldn’t even be having a debate on whether an LLM was conscious because an LLM is obviously not a replica.

> My original point was that upthread poster said we can mechanically (i.e. without any thought, just repeating a process by hand) produce exactly what an LLM produces, while we cannot do the same for a brain (rat or human is not relevant).

Right and we don’t know whether what we reproduce by hand represents consciousness. We don’t know if what we emulated with the blue brain project of the rat brain represents consciousness. We don’t know if a rat is conscious either. The possibility is quite likely though because the output of both the LLM and the rat conform with our intuitive notion of what consciousness is.

> I feel that even after all the content in this thread, that point remains true and factual - LLMs are not a blackbox to the extent that brains are.

The blue brain project shows that the brain is not a black box as much as you think it is… it can be copied and stored and observed in a computer and we can emulate signaling traveling through the brain. Although we haven’t done this for the human brain we can logically infer this possibility because it’s been done for the rat brain and the human brain is just the rat brain scaled up and connected differently.

This is the same amount of understanding we have for the LLM. We can copy it and store it and observe it and send signals through it.

Both are black boxes in the sense that the sheer complexity of what is observable cannot be comprehended. Why do we need source code for a binary in order to modify it? Why do we not understand encrypted data even though we have it our hands and can observe every facet of it. Having and being able to manipulate the data raw does not mean we comprehend the data. The lack of comprehension IS the black box.

Something does not have to be a literal black box in order for us to use the term “black box”. In fact black box is a misnomer. Better to say we don’t understand how an LLM works anymore than we understand how the human brain works. The godfather of AI… the one who kick started the revolution of deep learning in the last decade has this to say about AI:

https://youtube.com/shorts/zKM-msksXq0?si=BJ5WQuAeJADddiA5

>It is hardly a given..

Ok, fair enough. So let us also seed the simulation with all the random events from our universe. That should cover it, right?

>A mathematical description of a fire does not burn anything..

This is the self evident dogma that we have to overcome to understand this idea.

You say that a mathematical description of a fire does not burn anything. But what if both the fire as well as the thing it is burning is described by the math? Have you seen those fractal animations? In them, there would be things that appear to be a spear piercing or pushing through things around it. There both the spear (or what appears to be) and the thing it is piercing/pushing is described by the fractal. And one thing did not cause the other.

So we are turning the idea of causality on its head. In this world one thing does not cause another. But both cause and effect are described by the mathematical structure that contain them. This also connects to the earlier idea that "computable consciousnesses are self sustaining". The brain did not cause consciousness. But both the brain and consciousness are described by the math.