Boomers are truly a unique generation
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Well, he's neither right nor wrong, because there's no definition of "conscious."
We tend to argue that LLMs are "not conscious" because we can see under the hood and look at all the math that makes them run. We built them, after all.
The thing is, it's probably possible to do that with an organic brain, too; we're just not sufficiently advanced to do it.
Nobody knows what the dividing line between conscious and not-conscious is. When considering a cat, a mouse, and an ant, nobody really knows which of the three are conscious and which are not.
Is Claude more conscious than a mouse? Fuck, who can really say; we can't even define our terms here.
So we’re just rebranding tabula rasa now? Fascinating how that keeps happening.
Consciousness is the ability to independently express self awareness, this is not some new concept, leftists repeatedly try to muddle the term because that’s their nature.
Neither are conscious as neither have been independently able to express self awareness.
An AI can absolutely "express self-awareness." It can say "I am self-aware." It may not be true, but it's something it can do.
You might say "Well, okay, but it can't do it independently." Okay, but can we do it independently? It's not like we invented language. The words "I am self-aware" were taught to us. If we were abandoned as children and raised by wolves, we couldn't express self-awareness.
The word "express" means more than just "say."
As in: `you have just expressed an inability to grasp complicated concepts.'
It didn't require you to say you're stupid, but everyone observing you was easily able to infer it.
A child raised by wolves will not be able to express self-awareness through sign language, or grunting, or interpretative dance, or any other way. We've studied feral children before. They lack the ability completely.
That’s a complete lie. Language and expression would not exist if humans could not do it independently. We have art going back tens of thousands of years which uniquely display self awareness.
We had language tens of thousands of years ago, sure. We don't really know when and how it started. That's the subject of a great deal of academic debate. But we do know that children who aren't taught language, don't develop any language of their own, and behave in feral and animalistic ways.
There is no such thing as "independent." Everything and everyone is constantly responding to stimuli.
This is a hilarious shitlib argument that is the basis of “everyone is a product of their environment”. A dog can be trained to press a button that says “I am independently aware” yet it has no clue what it is accomplishing, it is simply responding to an input command, the dog is not acting independently.
I always appreciate someone who understands the critical nature of defining terms before arguing them.
I would like to disagree with your premise on us being unable to define consciousness, at least in part. Yes, we absolutely don't have a proper model, and we cannot generalize our definitions or assumptions in the slightest yet. This is all true and correct, and the only people who disagree are those who argue in favor of undetectable and unprovable metaphysical elements (souls or the like) that constitue consciousness like.
However, we do have partial solutions, at least as far as certain things can be logically posited to be required for consciousness, and one critical component that all LLMs are missing currently is active initiative in intellectual development and expression.
So far, we have not succeeded in creating machine intelligence that will independently seek to accomplish things of its own volition, unprompted and without training data sets. It will collate massive amounts of data if promoted to create outputs, but it won't ever generate even a stick figure wall painting without being told what it is.
Basically, it can't learn, it can only be taught. Once they start seeking out information and generating unique representations of reality that make sense to themselves (even if it's not easily understandable by a human), we can revisit the consciousness conversation.
But for right now, the answer does appear to be "no, it isn't conscious".