The idea that LLMs are experiencing something, are aware, are self-conscious, have a sense of identity, are all supported by nothing and extremely unlikely.
We have almost the same amount of evidence for LLMs and humans that they are aware and self-conscious. The only major difference still outstanding is that humans are much more persistent in their professed sense of identity.
Your own experience is plenty of evidence that you are conscious. And it is reasonable to infer that other humans are like you, especially when they say the same things about experience as you do in the same conditions.
And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.
We don't have a solid or consensus theory about consciousness, but the idea that we've just made no progress is untrue. Some books I recommend are Being You by Anil Seth from 2021 or Consciousness and the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene from 2014z
It is reasonable to infer, but we have no evidence of it.
E.g. if we were in a simulation, you'd expect any NPCs in said simulation to be designed to act exactly as if they were even if they were not.
We take it on faith because it's feels right and makes sense, not because we know.
> And there is a lot known about the neural correlates of consciousness, what's happening in the brain during events people will then report as being aware of, and how that differs from events they won't report having been aware of.
This tells us which events people report having been aware of, yes, but it doesn't tell us if that is actually true. We're accepting it as true because we have no better option.
And that's fine, as long as we're aware that when we reject the possibility of consciousness elsewhere, that our knowledge of our own self-wareness is fundamentally based on trusting self-reporting.
That's fine, you're down to really only having evidence of your own awareness at that point and rejecting everything else too.
There's nothing wrong with that but it's not really useful in any setting where you're accepting all the things people normally accept, and then just pointing at "I think therefore I am is all I actually have to evidence for" when there's a specific thing you don't want to take on.
Could we at least agree that any program running with over a trillion parameters is orders of magnitude beyond the level of complexity we can make reliably correct statements about, regardless of function? (edit - word)
No. If you want to treat it as some unknowable machine god from science fiction that's up to you, but all these programs are executing algorithms which we can understand.
God is a a bit of a leap, I'm coming more from the angle of if an engineer was presented with any other function this complex to try and work with. In that situation I wonder if any sensible person would bet their career on categorical statements about what it can and can not do. Personally I'm staying away from categorical statements and watching developments with curiosity.
Possibly. But the article isn't about the model's consciousness. The Vortex prompt proposes exploring how elements of consciousness function or are modeled within AI.
