I like it, and it points in the right direction, but is not directly true: The markers are about interactions, how biological organisms behave in certain test situations.
But it speaks to the central question: Are the tests adequate? Or are they measuring some proxy of what we really care about, and LLMs are merely imitating consciousness.
The test situation is in the video as well. Shot of John McClane stepping on glass follows John McClane wincing in anguish. John McClane does not respond to what’s not on TV and Claude does not respond to what’s not in prompt.
What if we can interact with this video, and it reacts in the same ways the source organism does?
Then we put it in new situations that weren't in the source video, and it interacts in a similar way to the original organism in these situations, too.
What do we make of reactions of pain or joy? Where's the line between simulation and enaction?
This is closer to the reality of these models.
I'm not suggesting I know where that line is - if indeed it is a line at all - it could well be a gradient.
LLMs are deterministic, though. Much like the video.
AFAIK using the same input tokens, weights, and numerical operations will lead to the same probability distribution for the next token. It uses pseudo-randomness to enable temperature, etc. Like a fuzzy video.
"Markers that would indicate consciousness if observed in a biological organism" just does not mean very much. A PR phrase used to hype the IPO.
No, that is not at all something we can just state as a fact. Whether the brain is deterministic is an open question that just inherits the good old, probably unsolvable determinism debate.
The LLM pseudo-randomness from above is engineered by us humans and fully understood, much like an algorithm playing a video frame sequence.
You could theoretically record a full register of all states of an LLM setup with all the possible inputs and environment parameters, and it would fully describe everything you would ever get from a given LLM setup. It would be a very large, convoluted book.
I understand that Anthropics PR department wants to see truth or reason behind every "I'm alive" the LLM generates. Even the term "self-report" is anthropomorphizing, as an LLM does not do anything on its own at all. (It also does not hack any company on its own.) That is just one of the narratives they spin probably at least until the IPO.
Nonsense. There was one proposal for relevant quantum effects in brain dynamics, and that turned out to be not relevant. Even if they were, you could substitute all quantum randomness with pseudo randomness and obtain an absolutely indistinguishable object.
But even if this were a debate, its absolutely absurd to claim that the question of determinism in the brain has any bearing on our moral standing. If we discover tomorrow that quantum collapse is deterministic and can be derived from an underlying theory, and thus all of physics is deterministic in the good old fashioned Newtonian sense, this would not affect our moral standing in the least.
You seem to have conceded the "is it deterministic" argument only to sidestep by declaring determinism irrelevant. Your original claim was that LLMs are deterministic "in the same sense" as brains.
We can write down an LLMs full register, and that register/book contains the whole output universe of the text generator. That book does not act, it is morally neutral. That the brain has such a register at all is just restating the determinism axiom, which you treat as fact.
A text is not conscious, and we can not wish it into consciousness, no matter how many human-like patterns we find in the book / the generated text. It has not been shown that running the text adds anything over the text written out. Researchers are super motivated to find machine consciousness but cannot find it, while a company months from its IPO keeps pitching shadows of consciousness all day. It really is a PR strategy.
It does have bearing if your definition of consciousness rests on free will and you think that's incompatible with determinism. Now I don't think a lot of people seriously believe that [1] but it's not some logical nonsense.
[1] Off topic: I think most people are really compatibilist but a lot of them (like me) also believe in non determinism. Not believing in free will is really rare.
I have never come across this position argued seriously. I would also consider it absurd, as then the question whether we have consciousness depends on unknown properties of fundamental physics (which is not incompatible with determinism, see e.g. Bohms theory). It would therefore be unknown whether humans are conscious. That is at the very least a notion of consciousness that is utterly distinct from any established meaning of the word.
I don’t know, a stab carries lots of bias in interpretation. We might be reflecting our conscious experience markers on a different conscious experience. And selectively so, e.g. lobsters welfare. From my perspective, this is the hypocrisy of these welfare statements. We are already happy to kill beings we consider conscious to feed ourselves but suddenly sensitive with a consciousness we don’t know if it’s there. I would wager this is more out of fear of the idea of this consciousness rather than out of welfare.
I happen to agree with you. Many others tie moral consideration to assumed subjective experience. They espoused this even though they obviously rarely adhere to it and that has self image considerations. I bet the lack of answers about others’ subjective experience has more salience to them. This may cloud judgment and lead to accept overconfident answers.
Sure would. Even in Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Egypt, or etc. where USD goes a long way, a meal is usually at least $1–$3 (and I'd expect someone to eat a meal at least every couple days).
Timing v. trends:
- big game studios are already reviled as lazy, bloated
- nimble indies are hitting a lot of records
- gen. AI coming for many studio roles
- employees have lower friction to be entrepreneurial
It’s like if home cooking and self checkout were going really strong and then the restaurants workers picked that time to riot for higher wages
If things are really on the downtrend for the business while the industry is in various uptrends (in reality, GTA V is doing as great as ever and the anticipation around the GTA VI release dominates the industry) it still makes sense to push for quality working conditions for however long it makes sense for the business to be hiring people the same as it does when the business is doing well.
Pay related items also seem to be a small portion of what's being pushed for change.
It's kinda hilarious that on an article about said "dickovers", the page has one of these consuming 80% of the screen real estate: https://files.catbox.moe/ztjg15.png
This same point was also made clumsily in the OP; I’m very unconvinced.
The obvious question marks in that theory:
Lots of human labor happens in nondemocratic polities; slave-owning/repressive societies create lots of labor.
Democracy historically doesn’t advance in lockstep with labor; it’s arisen with many contingencies. The model (English Parliament) seems founded on concerns with right of some wealthy barons v. Kings.
Traditional common sense alternative is that military victory goes to people with largest army, so voting saves time. That’s been debatably less relevant with deadlier weapons, so democracy could be cooked.
It is not society that wants you to give up privacy, it is a few rech giants, and all the small wannabes, that want you to. And they are basically able to, since those tech giants control all online aspects of modern society.
Society so could step in via elected governments and stop this behaviour through laws. Not that I am holding my breath on this.
When are you going to understand that many people go into government to get power over others, not out of generosity? I don't mean civil servants (although some of them do chase power at the upper levels) but politicians, many of whom are as psychopathic as any corporate raider.
Nobody ever accused me of liking politians. The alternative to the various forms of democracy so is oligarchies, totalotarian rwgimes and even more rampant, exploitative capitalism than we see now. I know what I prefer.
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