I have no idea how you can assert what is necessary/sufficient for consciousness in this way. Your comment reads like you believe you understand consciousness far more than I believe anyone actually does.

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mrob 3 days ago | parent [-]

I believe consciousness needs some kind of mutable internal state because otherwise literally everything is conscious, which makes the concept useless. A rock "computes" a path to fall when you drop it but I don't believe rocks are conscious. Panpsychism is not a common belief.

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bloppe 3 days ago | parent [-]

I think Nagel put it best in 1974: https://www.philosopher.eu/others-writings/nagel-what-is-it-...

Essentially, something is conscious iff "there is something that it is like to be" that thing. Some people find that completely unsatisfying, some people think it's an insight of utter genius. I'm more in the latter camp.

Also, I think consciousness is non-binary. Something could be semi-conscious, or more or less conscious than something else.

Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

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lbrandy 3 days ago | parent [-]

> Anyway, I don't think that there's anything that it's like to be an LLM. I don't see how anybody who knows how they actually work could think that.

While I have almost zero belief that LLMs are conscious, I just don't think this is so trivially asserted.

The easy half of this is thinking that LLMs aren't conscious given what we know about how they work. The hard part (and very, very famously so) is explaining how _you_ are conscious given what we know about how you work. You can't ignore the second half of this problem when making statements like this... because many of the obvious ways to argue that clearly LLMs aren't conscious would also apply to you.

	▲	bloppe 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I wouldn't say that we actually know how our brains work. Based mainly on my neuroscience minor from 10 years ago I'd say that understanding feels hopelessly far away.