"Even if you think it's obvious whether or not LLMs are conscious, a full explanation of why or why not ishard. It's hard because consciousness is already mysterious in the human case. We don't know what about a physical brain makes it conscious, or what consciousness does (or, even, if it does anything at all)."
Consciousness is presented as the most mysterious aspect of the mind because physical descriptions of brain states do not straightforwardly explain why those states correspond to particular experiences like tasting strawberry rather than sneezing. The question extends to why anything should feel like anything at all. Historically, it was believed that only conscious beings could generate spontaneous, grammatical prose. Large language models challenge this correlation by producing grammatical natural language while seeming unlike conscious creatures. Reactions range from viewing grammatical text as possible without consciousness to concluding that LLMs might be conscious. Even if consciousness status seems obvious, explaining it is difficult because consciousness itself is not well understood in humans.
#philosophy-of-mind #consciousness #language-models #hard-problem-of-consciousness #cognitive-science
Read at Defector
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]