nick

I don’t think LLMs are conscious and I doubt they are structurally capable of conscious experience. I’m partial to the idea that embodiment is a precondition of consciousness. But, full cards on the table, it is a little annoying the absolute *certainty* with which the anti-AI side (broadly, my side of these debates, I guess) proclaims this, given that we basically don’t understand what consciousness is, how it works, what gives rise to it, etc, in human or animal brains. Scientists can’t even agree if plants have subjective experience. Like, if you can’t empirically detect consciousness, explain its workings, understand what physical processes give rise to it, or even know which living things experience it, it seems to me you must have at least a *little bit* of epistemic humility about the whole thing. If we actually understood human/animal/plant(??) consciousness well, that would be one thing. But we don’t. We notoriously know almost nothing about it. Now, this would be annoying but basically trivial *if* we weren’t also ceding an opportunity to leverage the belief some people have in AI consciousness as part of mustering a broad political coalition to regulate AI. But it is really, really annoying that we are neglecting one possible avenue for mustering that support out of a totally irrational and empirically indefensible *certainty* about something which science and philosophy both fail to understand at minimum levels of adequacy (that something being human consciousness). Like, we’re throwing away a tool for reasons of pure ego, essentially. Again, I don’t think the machines are conscious. I strongly doubt LLMs are architecturally capable of *ever* being conscious. But I wouldn’t stake anything of serious value (like an organizing opportunity) on my belief here because that’s a waste, and *also* I really can’t claim certainty in my belief when I have no way of empirically evaluating whether something is conscious or not! Because none of us can!

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