One thing I haven't seen brought up much is that LLMs are basically stateless. To be conscious requires the ability for internal state to change. The weights dont change at all, but the rng seed and input/output text do. We're not seriously arguing that the text itself is the conscious part are we?
If software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program.
Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.
One thing I haven't seen brought up much is that LLMs are basically stateless. To be conscious requires the ability for internal state to change. The weights dont change at all, but the rng seed and input/output text do. We're not seriously arguing that the text itself is the conscious part are we?
If software can be "conscious" then we need a new word to describe what it is that a person has that makes me care about them in a way I never would care about the output of a program.
Fighting about semantics is not as interesting as the question of whether we should care about and give rights to a program running in memory like we do the owner of a human brain.
Discussions (35 points, 4 days ago, 71 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47988880
(75 points, 4 days ago, 124 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47991340
(17 points, yesterday, 17 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025969
Yet just another human fooled by LLM ...