I'll agree if you can define consciousness in a way that:
1) Excludes what LLM's do.
2) Doesn't exclude what many humans do (including the neuro divergent).
3) Doesn't just boil do to simply rephrasing your pre-existing belief/prejudice that humans are conscious and nothing else can be as if it were a fact and not an opinion.
Just because we have difficulty defining consciousness doesn't mean we have difficulty distinguishing or classifying it. We can't give a final definition for life, intelligence or disease, but that doesn't mean everything is equally alive, intelligent and diseased.
Your list of requirements is implying that, because we lack a perfect definition for consciousness, LLMs are conscious too. That's malarkey. It may be that they could one day become conscious, but it's not because we can't fully define what human consciousness is.
You made a declarative general statement in the form of "X can not Y."
I then asked you to define Y, because you can not reasonably say that "X can not Y" without first defining both X and Y. You could not.
The truth is that this conversation is pointless until someone can define both 'X' and 'Y' in ways that aren't tautological nonsense. Until then nobody can say anything with a reasonable level of certainty.
This likely also applies to intelligence. Life and disease are likely simpler, though perhaps more malleable definitions.
If you can substantiate your assertion that LLMs aren't conscious without a definition of consciousness, you're welcome to do that too.
I don't see why a definition is necessary. The actual problem is you just don't have a way to substantiate that belief without resorting to complete nonsense about brain atoms being more specialer (!!) than atoms that exist outside of a skull.
It would be simple to disprove us by just stating your evidence for how you know LLMs aren't conscious.
I literally just wrote about consciousness being undefined, and now you're asking me to define it? I'm not a philosopher, ask someone more qualified. Better yet, ask your LLM to give you a mealy-mouthed answer which fits your narrative.
> I don't see why a definition is necessary.
Don't waste my time with your sophistry. Words mean nothing to you beyond how you can twist them.
I said specifically you don't need to explicitly and cleanly define it.
Is your position now that in order to substantiate your belief that LLMs are not conscious, you'd first have to define it explicitly? I don't see why that'd necessarily be true, but if that's what you're arguing, then that's fine.
In that case: if you need to define consciousness in order to substantiate your belief that LLMs are not conscious, and you can't define consciousness, then we're back to the original question: where does your confidence they're not conscious come from?
Consciousness can only come from meat brains. Otherwise my incessant life long addiction to movies and TV shows has been feeding me lies about human exceptionalism.
There is an appalling lack of diversity in Hollywood. You'd be surprised to find out that very few of those programs were even written by machines until recently! What bias. :)
I'm convinced that consciousness is a special thing we have, but we're not the only ones which has this, in nature.
On the other hand, I'm also convinced that, in the grand scheme of things, we're not that important.
We're just ants on a wet dust speck which believe that they are gods because we can't see how our scale compares to the universe around us, and happen to build tools and things with these tools.
Nothing is meaningless, but we should stop seeing ourselves as the apex-predator of the whole universe or the set of universes or this run of the simulation or whatever we're in.
To be fair, the ones thing you can kind of reliably conclude about our universe is that keeping entropy low for as long as possible is a favorable condition. To put that another way, don't die.
Yes, Many of the the philosophical concepts which we previously thought were contingent on consciousness (like knowledge, in the philosophical sense, will, intelligence, agency, ...) have almost nothing to do with it, and they look far more important and fundamental (now with LLMs/AI agents, more than before). This is one of the contributions of generative AI to philosophy (with many many more to come).
If consciousness isn't a special thing, then arguing that LLM parameters are conscious is panpsychism or any control loop architecture that observes the outside world, updates an internal state and produces an observable action is considered conscious.
In both cases, LLMs are just as boring as the consciousness definition.
Because it's completely dwarfed by florpedness. I can't define that either, but I just know it's more important.
Less facetiously: A debate of the importance of something needs a shared understanding of what is being debated. Without that, any discussion is merely people shouting that their belief is the right one, and the others are the heathens/idiots - because there isn't even agreement on what is debated.
I'm not asking for a definition of consciousness or an argument for whether it's here or there. I'm asking why the heuristic of "if X is undefinable, then X probably doesn't matter" is a reasonable heuristic.
Will has almost nothing to do with consciousness (as does knowledge).
Will is just result of a very complex yet deterministic (unconscious)
computation by an agent which guides their future action (it's that orientation/aboutness toward action which distinguishes it from other computation). A PS of that computation is sent (projected) into that agent's consciousness if they have one (and is what we think as our "will").
Ah so first you need 1) to assume that humans have free will, despite zero evidence or proposed mechanism for it to exist anywhere in the universe, and 2) also assert that LLMs aren't conscious, despite the lack of any tests that could tell us one way or the other...
Amazon Prime Video is exhausting in that respect. I purchased a paid account, just to make the ads go away, then discovered that even paid accounts get ads.
Everyone has to learn how much feedback they can give in a code review without making an ass of themselves. The code isn’t right at the end of that, it’s just less wrong.
On the first project I had with routine code reviews I learned to wait for one or two others to file their reviews and then I would catch everything they missed.
It was an app with too many interactive components on top few pages so perf issues and footguns were both a priority. That generates a lot more comments on CRS. There were two of us doing all of that work and the other had English as a second language so he tended to point out one or two issues and let the rest slide.
To comment on my concrete (and quite miserable) situation, here's how it went (and does, even worse with the advent of AI, to this day):
* A report comes from the field (to the support team) that something is broken (or highly desired by the customer).
* The support team assigns the ticket to the lead engineer.
* The lead engineer writes the code and after a quick battle with CI pushes it all the way to the customer in need.
* Since it's the lead engineer, he has the authority to merge PRs w/o consulting anyone, which is what he does. You just pull the changes and marvel at them, or at the sunrise, whichever you like best. The "urgency" is used as a justification to skip the due process.
Now, when AI came into play, two horrible things were added into the mix:
* AI audit and code review. The audit is a 50/50 chance between finding a real problem vs misunderstanding of the purpose of the code or the context in which it is executed. The AI will also come up with a solution that is either completely wrong, unnecessary or touching too many things for a human to track. Code review acts in a similar way, except, technically it fills the role of a human reviewing the code, so it gives a sense of false security to anyone making changes.
* AI generating code that is hard for humans to follow. First and most obvious problem is the volume. In minutes AI generates changes that will take months of effort to review. But this is only the beginning of the problem. When reading code written by humans, another human builds a model of the author's approach, ability, intention and permissions. When it comes to AI, these... let's call them "dimensions" are all over the place. The generated code you read may seem very plausible for a while until you stumble into a crucial functionality that completely invalidates everything you've learned about the change so far. The change may make unnecessary segues into the territory it was never meant to touch.
So, even when there are code reviews, they now miss a lot more than they used to when only humans were writing code.
Also, and this is a pathologically bad, but a very common practice: the reviewer's name is missing from the record. You run git-blame and only see the author, not the reviewer. When things go down, the author takes the heat and the reviewer is nowhere to be found. Subsequently, reviewers don't feel like they need to care as much about the outcomes.
Oh, and one more thing. To be effective at reviewing anything you'd want to try things... as in to test them. Perhaps come up with some idea about what things must happen and what things absolutely must not. But where do you find those? Usually... in a design document, s.a. a PRD, but in the case where that design (allegedly) was solely in the head of the person writing the code, how do you even know if the behavior you conjecture the code has (because there are no tests) is the desired one?
There is no art without process though. The art is the process. Is an automatic piano more beautiful than a world class pianist? Of course not.
I am not strictly equating this to coding though. Like the GP sometimes I am driven more by the product than by being able to make it by hand. But that does not mean vibe coding, I still make sure the code is up to my standards.
> jumps through a lot of inconvenient hoops to "anonymously" publish code
Something doesn't add up there.
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