Electricity definitely does hold a lot of personal information and cost of electricity very much changes my household behavior. For that matter, so does trash and recycling.

Please read the article. It contradicts you, and argues that LLMs aren’t consciousness cause they can think of, count em, 3 niche theories that the authors like which are impossible for anything not made of meat to qualify for.

(book? The linked article is like 4 pages. References are somewhat larger, but nothing over 60 afaict?)

They claim that silicon is essentially incapable of doing what is needed; if you disagree with this, then computationally everything you can build with a circuit board + SSD + RAM you can build with an LLM with a deep layer or 7. In particular, you can do online learning of a sort.

I note that wasps and some beetles don’t seem to have memory whatsoever, and plasticity seems awfully low. The authors, and I think most people, would say they are probably a little conscious.

I’ll give them mildly more credit; they cite sources for 2 and 3. The sources just don’t seem convincing at all imo.

(I admit to using the very royal we, as in ‘humanity knows how to do this, more or less’ and ‘given we mine the asteroid belt for a big enough computer’.)

emulation is a better word; adopted.

Sure, but you also let us tape wires to the rock. With enough wires and code and maybe a little quantum computer, I’m pretty sure I could simulate the atoms in a small brain.

Linear algebra + sigmoids are enough to approximate any function from R to R; in particular, a small set of a few layers of LLM neurons can connect and interact in pretty novel ways. There are some things they can’t do, and those things aren’t computable. If our brains can do non-computable things, then our brains are super-turing (and this, given the evidence, seems pretty unlikely right?).

(LLMs aren’t markovian; they need the whole history, or at least their whole context. Said context is quite large, certainly more than most people can usefully remember. Part of what makes them so good at literature search.)

I thought the chain-of-thought essentially qualifies; it responds to its own text for awhile before responding to you?

This is strictly false, generalization in LLMs is well documented.

It’s also not relevant. Read the first point in the article: intelligence != consciousness. Individual ants, bats, and fish do not do anything very creative (certainly less creative than gpt-2), yet they are probably all conscious.

DNA made a bunch of random proteins alive, and DNA is just 4 letters!

I really don’t think the neuron is all that complicated, at least as far as we use them for thinking.

Thank you! Tho perhaps to the spirit of my point: nobody is seriously claiming we can’t simulate this with a quantum computer someday, right?

They cite sources; but I find them more of the same.

(Also now true of fruit flies! So feel free to kill them all, they have no experiences.)

And point 3, as far as I can tell from this argument, isn’t serious. It merely asserts that there are some models of consciousness that would prevent us from using the term for AI. But the models aren’t ‘popular’, ‘widespread’, or justified at all afaict. It’s just that the author has a pet causal mechanism they made up. It’s also pretty abelist by my read.

integrated information theory (IIT), starts from the essential properties of consciousness — those that are true of every experience we can have. For instance, we experience every visual scene as a single, integrated whole: its left and right side, colours and shapes are bound together to make the experience what it is.

In other words, if you’ve got any sort of trouble integrating a visual scene, then you aren’t conscious. Sure.

Point 1 is surely true, but also not helpful. The most persuasive example inside is the classic:

Similar to an LLM, AlphaFold is a powerful neural network running on silicon hardware. Yet almost nobody worries that it might be conscious. That’s because AlphaFold predicts protein structures, whereas LLMs ‘talk’ to us.

You can read this both ways…

These are, to be frank, really weak. They say on point 2:

Computational functionalism … is popular among some scientists and philosophers, too, but we think it is fatally flawed because brains are not — or at least not just — computers that are made of meat.

One main reason is that it is impossible to separate what biological brains do — their functional organization — from what they are — their material substrate. In other words, there is no distinct separation between the mind and living tissue in the human brain, as there is between software and hardware in a digital computer.

Restating clearly: Ghosts are real. The mitochondria is not only the powerhouse of the cell, it also gives you mystic powers.

Really? The source they site for this point features the lovely assumption “consciousness is unique to biological life”. From this axiom, I see how the conclusion follows, but I don’t see why we should believe this axiom. We can do physics emulation of every atom in a fruit fly on a computer…

Reasons given:

• Intelligence is not consciousness
• Silicon brains are not made of meat
• Consciousness requires meat (and/or a particular winding of neurons)