Who could have seen this coming?!

I’m amazed how well the 1/2+7 rule of thumb works, it seems like it shouldn’t match up so well with the limits of what I see as acceptable

It is certainly interesting to think about what your conscious experience would be like if it changed every brain cycle instead of being a continuous stream of information

If the rest of the thread is to be believed, the sources do not justify the claim either, yeah. I’m gonna be real I’m not gonna go look myself

And around and around we go. How many times will I explain the same thing, and how many times will you not disagree, but fail to understand my argument entirely?

Chalmerite bug person cannot admit that someone who disagrees with them might disagree for reasons other than misunderstanding

“Do you understand what I’m trying to communicate”

No

You can rant all you want about how I’m arguing from authority (I’m not) or how you’re disagreeing rather than not understanding, but you keep literally saying you do not understand.

Your perception of the squares in the image is “subjective” because you are seeing the same light from both grey squares but perceiving it differently based on context. You are literally percieving the same objective physical phenomenon in two different subjective ways.

Any second now, Justin Kerprank is gonna jump out and tell me I’ve been ker-pranked. I refuse to believe that someone who understands the history of the subject doesn’t know what I’m talking about-- so clearly you should-- but like 99% of your responses have misinterpreted what I’m saying, and then you switched to just trolling me. Are you intentionally misunderstanding me? Are you trying to make a point about the terms I’m using? Are you here to have a serious conversation or just to misrepresent me to win the argument? Is it somehow both? Are you trying to use the Socratic method to imply your disagreement without indicating you understand my point? If so, why? You ask me why I am not acting on my belief that someone could reasonably disagree with me; it’s because you haven’t voiced any disagreement! Your responses have so far been almost entirely confusion about what I’m saying or insults.

There is one exception, where you correctly pointed out a mistake: referring to the grey squares as “are the same physical color” is inconsistent with the language I was using, it should be “have the same wavelength of light”. Color is a subjective experience (which, for the third time, does NOT mean a physical experience happening to a subject (like you), it means your perception of that physical experience). Do you understand what I’m trying to communicate about the difference between a physical phenomena, and your perception of said physical phenomena? Is it a communication issue on my end? I thought I was being pretty clear, but obviously I’m biased on that front.

Holy shit fuck off, I’m done being cordial. You haven’t had a cogent reaction to a single thought I’ve had. I’ve been nothing but patient as over and over you failed to recognize basic common terms or even attempt to conceptualize my many helpful examples (well, I guess I could have given more, but you don’t really deserve it so I won’t feel too bad) so that you could understand the subject I’m talking about. I have never asked you to agree with me, or asserted that the things I am discussing are unquestionably true, especially solely due to some philosophical authority; the reason I have resorted to pointing you to literal wikipedia articles as philosophy 101 content is because you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter. How could you possibly hope to be correct if you cannot understand the argument that is being made?

But you aren’t here to be correct, or to learn, or to reach a greater understanding through discussion, or to explore the beauty of your mind-- because yours is rather ugly, isn’t it? You’re here to troll people on social media to feel good about yourself. If you don’t like philosophy, here’s some pop psychology-- people tend to assume others are like them in some fundamental ways. I have spent this entire thread trying to believe you are here to learn or teach, not to troll; while you have apparently spent it assuming anyone who disagrees with you must be brainwashed by Big Psych. FYI I have made an explicit effort to avoid learning about what Philosophers™ think (legitimately who the fuck is David Chalmers?), because I prefer to avoid their influence when practicing philosophy myself; and yet the things I am talking about here are easily independently discoverable by me, someone with little to no formal training in the subject who actively avoids duplicating others’ work where possible. Honestly at this point you’re starting to make me think you might not have an internal subjective experience, because I think if I experienced what it was to be you, my soul would combust out of embarrassment.

What do you mean “proof”? Proof that the field of philosophy considers there to be a distinction? I pointed you to a great resource to learn about this, the proof that philosophers think there is a distinction and the details of how and why they believe that (and common arguments against it if that’s your jam!) are RIGHT THERE in the link I provided. This is not some crackpot theory I am trying to prove to you in a lemmy thread, I am just explaining philosophy of mind 101. Like, this is literally related to “I think, therefore I am”. If you disagree with philosophy in general then I’m not going to spend several hours justifying the entire field of philosophy to you; I’ve pointed you in the right direction, if you want to learn more about it then just read the basics, they can explain it better than I can and it’s much less argumentative that way. Seriously, I recommend it, it’s a good time and it’s a fun way to explore the nature of your mind.

To answer your edits (briefly, again this is covered in the link or any similar resource):

• Your eyes measure the photons and cause your brain to produce the subjective experience of “red”. Nothing about this relies on you knowing how photons work. Monitors vary and rgb doesn’t correlate directly to light wavelength, but it therefore also does not correlate directly with your subjective experience. Your subjective experience also does not always line up with wavelengths of light-- are you familiar with the optical illusion where one shade of (physical) grey is percieved as lighter or darker based on context? This is another great example of qualia vs physical properties, the light from both grey squares has the same physical properties but causes different qualia based on context(!)
• It is not possible to percieve the world objectively. In the phrase “subjective way that you percieve the world”, I am again just using “subjective” the same way I used “internal”, ie. to emphasize that I am talking about your experience of the world and not the actual world itself (think of how you percieve the grey squares in the above illusion rather than how they are physically the same color).

So all you mean by “subjective experience” is that the things are happening to me specifically?

No, by “internal experience” or “subjective experience” I mean that I am referring to your perception of the thing happening. If I coat a rock in honey, it becomes sticky. If I coat your arm in honey, it also becomes sticky. What “subjective experience” refers to is what you feel and percieve when I am coating your arm in honey. It’s what you have that the rock doesn’t-- your thoughts, perceptions, feelings, etc.

So, if thing happens to another thing, and one of those things is a subject, then it is subjective? That is a strange way to use the word “subjective.” If I eat a sandwich, is that subjective eating?

Not sure what you’re saying here, but see above.

If you don’t understand what I’m trying to explain about qualia or that there is a philosophical distinction between the physical world and your perception, just read the wikipedia article on qualia or any similar introductory material to the philosophy of the mind. It answers like 90% of your questions.

Some specific answers though:

RGB is measuring/defining proportions of different wavelengths of light, even if its goal is to describe that light in a way that is supposed to elicit a particular subjective experience in the viewer. Color spaces are a MASSIVE rabbit hole so I would suggest using the simpler example of how an individual photon has a wavelength that makes us percieve the subjective experience of red, rather than being red itself. Although actually, bringing up RGB gives me an idea for something to point out: qualia and the physical world can “desync”, which is evidence they are different. If you see light with a wavelength of ~600nm, such as that produced by a sodium lamp or banana, you will percieve it as yellow. But that subjective experience of yellow is also triggered by seeing both ~700nm and ~500nm wavelengths of light simultaneously, which you would individually percieve as red and green respectively. This is how your computer screen does it. ||I guess technically you could argue the cone activations in your eye end up the same, so this may be a bad example… regardless, the point is that something like a taste or smell or color has no physical meaning, they are experiences which are caused by physical phenomena rather than being the physical phenomena themselves.||

I am using “internal experience” to mean the subjective way that you percieve the world. If I just used “experience” you could use it more broadly in your sense of “X is happening to you”, which is not what I mean. I guess you could call those things happening in the physical world an “external experience” but I agree, that is a bit confusing and is not my intention. I am using “internal” to make a more specific compound term, not really to contrast it with “external”. But if you are using the word “experience” to mean “C is happening to you” then yes, the external experience is the thing that is physically happening and the internal experience is your perception of it happening to you.

I think I covered this pretty well in my other response, so I’ll leave that as the main thread and I don’t expect a separate response here. But for anyone else reading this thread, tl;dr: You could construct a system using an LLM as its core that has most of these properties, and don’t think you can point to the individual components of that system (like the core deterministic LLM) not meeting some set of requirements for consciousness and conclude that the overall system is not conscious. In humans it seems that either consciousness spontaneously arises from non-conscious sub-components (neurons and other stuff), or that each sub-component has some aspect of consciousness which combine to form the whole one which we know of. You can poke holes in that argument-- it doesn’t prove that LLMs themselves are conscious, just implies that it may not be impossible to use one to build a conscious system, and it’s much less well-integrated than a human brain would be. But I think the core of the argument is worth thinking about.

(I apologize in advance for the mountain of text. My main point is about how I don’t think you can cleanly separate the philosophical and scientific approaches to consciousness, and how the line between humans and simpler processes is a lot blurrier than your list of differences makes it seem.)

Hmm. I see what you’re saying, although I will admit this threw me for quite the loop:

I’m not interested in philosophical discussions of consciousness when it comes to the question of whether an LLM is conscious

Because, IMO, consciousness is almost entirely within the realm of philosophy. I’m not sure how much you can do with a scientific approach to it; I cannot think of many hypotheses to test that could give useful (ie. unambiguous and certain) results about the nature of consciousness. But perhaps you’re right that that’s giving up too easily; we can (and often must) make assumptions and reason by analogy to figure out what the most likely state of reality is, even if technically we cannot be entirely sure.

To avoid the pitfalls of unknowability, you could assume that all humans are conscious (reasonable imo, obviously) and that having certain humanlike properties is a good indicator that something might be conscious (which properties these are is of course a subject of great debate). I do think it’s a mistake to say that lacking these properties means it’s “not possible” for something to be conscious-- just that if we want to have any reasonable chance of accurately guessing what’s conscious, these properties (along with an understanding of said something’s inner workings) can be a useful guide. So, let’s evaluate the similarities and differences.

Humans share some of these properties with LLMs. Humans are only conscious for a period of time (while we are awake (or while dreaming?)) where we are processing information. We too lack full continuity of consciousness. The parallel of this for a neural network of any kind might be during the time they are generating output or training-- in that period of time, they are also processing information. So I think you have narrowed the window in which it is reasonably possible for an LLM to be conscious (“awake”) to just the period of time in which it is running. (Also worth noting is that human brains don’t fully shut down while we are unconscious, not sure how to fit that in here though).

You also mention randomness-- true, maybe randomness plays a part in consciousness (true randomness, not pseudorandomness), and LLMs are deterministic. I think you could relatively easily construct a neural network that does use true randomness, but 1. true randomness is “expensive” to use in terms of computers, usually only being used to seed PRNGs, so it would take FOREVER to run, and 2. it would probably require new training techniques, and at that point maybe you could just skip to the experiment after the end of the next paragraph.

The last difference is that they don’t take input, produce output, and update themselves (train) all at the same time like we do. We also do this continuously, rather than in discrete steps. Therefore you can say that LLMs (or any current neural networks) lack an integrated and locally continuous experience. This is probably the biggest blocker to LLM consciousness that I see being taken seriously, and I’m inclined to agree, because it is the biggest difference between humans and neural networks.

So, what if we construct a machine using an LLM as its core that has these properties? One that could:

• Operate continuously
• Parse input, train, and generate output all at once
• Use true random number generation to avoid determinism What would you expect about the capability of such a machine to be conscious? What if the core of this machine was an LLM, and the other functionality was not integrated like it is for us, but “bolted on”, and then you consider whether the entire system as a whole is conscious? Note that I don’t believe that you can point to the fact that the core LLM and all other parts of the system would not individually be conscious to prove that the whole system could not be conscious, since in humans it appears that consciousness either arises spontaneously from non-conscious sub-processes or that each individual part of you contributes some small amount of consciousness to the whole, while not crossing the threshold for consciousness individually.

Anyways, sorry for getting sidetracked in hypothetical scenario land. I agree that there are enough differences that it is unlikely for an LLM to be conscious in the same way that a human is. But I am curious what makes you so confident that those particular properties are necessary for consciousness to exist at all on some level-- could consciousness not simply be a phenomenon that arises whenever something is being computed, and human brains are just a continuous and very complicated computer with the ability to learn and act simultaneously?

I suppose that line of thinking could quickly be expanded to the “basically everything has a tiny bit of consciousness” philosophy, and then you would have to come up with a more specific term for human-like consciousness; but that only delays the moral dilemmas until we create machines that have more human properties (like the one I proposed above)-- or humans that have more machine ones (brain organoids or whatever they’re called are fucking terrifying philosophically).

Feel free to do further research on your own if you’re interested.

Philosophy is one of my hobbies and consciousness one of my fascinations. Respectfully, doing “research” by skimming the wikipedia article would be a waste of our time; as would responding to any particular definition and arguing over the individual words people have used in summaries of the topic. So I’ll skip that phase of the convo.

The fundamental problem with measuring consciousness is that it’s an internal state (a “qualia”*). It is fundamentally an experience, something that exists only as a concept in your mind. This makes it immeasurable.

That’s quite the claim, so I’ll provide a smaller concrete example: color. Obviously you can measure the frequency of a photon and say “ah yes, 700nm, that photon is red”. But strictly speaking, the photon isn’t red, it just causes you to percieve “red”; it has a wavelength which triggers your eyes and brain to produce the subjective experience of the color red. That subjective experience of color is a qualia, and it is not directly measurable; at best you can measure the phenomenon that causes that qualia in you, and assume that that phenomenon would cause the same qualia in someone else when they percieve that photon. Technically, you can’t be sure that this assumption is true-- this leads to the “Inverted Spectrum” thought experiment (another great wiki page if you prefer their explanations to mine), where someone’s subjective experience of color as it relates to the frequency of light could be entirely different to your own.

Anyways, you cannot prove the existence of nonexistence of such an internal experience, and consciousness belongs to this category of qualia. You know that you are conscious because you experience being conscious, not because you can prove it by looking at what you do. You can’t even be sure that I’m conscious, even if you met me in real life; you can’t prove that I am actually thinking, feeling, understanding, knowing, or realizing anything, because you cannot be me. You can only assume that I am doing those things because you observe me doing stuff in physical reality that’s consistent with the way the only entity you can be sure is conscious (you) is acting, and assuming that since I’m made of the same stuff as you and I act kind of like you do that I am probably conscious.

If you could actually prove that it is impossible for a machine to be conscious without that same argument applying to humans, then the philosophy community of the last several millenia would praise you as their messiah. I am interested to see what your argument would be if you want to give it a shot though-- no harm in trying.

* Like “data”/“datum”, technically the singular form is “quale”, but I’m gonna be real, nobody ever says that. Anyways if you like reading wikipedia pages about philosophy, “qualia” is a good one!

I think you’ve done a good job of making a distinction between consciousness and… I’m not really sure what to call the other thing, but I’ll use “intelligence” to match your language. But you are pretty clearly implying a claim that LLMs do not possess consciousness by saying:

the idea that some other linear thread of words might be conscious is sincerely plausible to them

As if it were not possible (correct me if I’m wrong about your intention).

I think some natural next questions to ask are:

• How do we know a fruit fly has a conscious experience?
• How do we know a conscious experience is causing the chain of thought, and not the other way around?
• How do we know a digital process cannot have a consciousness paired with it in the same way that a biological process does-- either causing it or caused by it?

TL;DR: I think your distinction between intelligence and consciousness is useful, but I don’t think you can confidently use that distinction to make any claims about who or what is or is not conscious, or even necessarily about how consciousness and intelligence are related.*

* You can actually make one claim: Your consciousness is aware of/affected by your intelligence (you, the consciousness I am speaking to, know you are intelligent), and your intelligence is aware of/affected by your consciousness (your thoughts reflect that you have a conscious experience).

I don’t see why we would necessarily need to understand consciousness to create it. There is no evidence that nature understands the consciousnesses it has created. In fact a human can create a new consciousness in about 9 months without knowing any theory.

The question in my mind is, how could we possibly tell we’ve succeeded? We can’t even say for sure that anyone other than ourselves is conscious.

Oh, I thought you might have something new to say. If you’re just using the normal definition and not bringing any sort of testability (which imo is impossible) or new arguments, how exactly does the common definition prove anything must be non-conscious? That seems like the main claim of your comment, yet it seems like an unsupported assertion; if the common definition of consciousness could easily prove things not to be conscious as you seem to imply, this discussion would not be happening at all.

Ok, in what way does this prove the existence or nonexistence of the non-linear-thread-of-words consciousness in any entity?

Those are very obviously surmountable. I could make a simple model architecture on my laptop right now that updates its weights in real time and is always responding to input and giving outputs. I don’t know if it would be a useful model, and there are good reasons not to do that, but it can easily be technically achieved. Those are not good measurements of consciousness, and if you truly believed they were accurate, I could make a “provably” conscious machine in like a day of work on consumer hardware.

This analysis is correct but I have a minor quibble: The simulated fruit fly brain is not a complete simulation of the biological processes, or even all the neuronal connections, of the actual fly’s brain.

In other words:

• Statement that does not prove anything is or isn’t conscious
• Unsupported assertion
• Unsupported assertion

Wow, very convincing article! I wish I’d thought of that! /s

Ok, I’ll ask. What are these decent scientific definitions for consciousness and how can we use them to construct a test for consciousness?