I'm in the same boat with you.

It's entirely too much to put in a Hacker News comment, but if I had to phrase my beliefs as precisely as possible, it would be something like:

  > "Phenomenal consciousness arises when a self-organizing system with survival-contingent valence runs recurrent predictive models over its own sensory and interoceptive states, and those models are grounded in a first-person causal self-tag that distinguishes self-generated state changes from externally caused ones."

Valence isn't attached to representations -- representations are constructed from valence. IE you don't first see red and then decide it's threatening. The threat-relevance is the prior, and "red" is a learned compression of a particular pattern of valence signals across sensory channels.

Humans are constantly generating predictions about sensory input, comparing those predictions to actual input, and updating internal models based on prediction errors. Our moment-to-moment conscious experience is our brain's best guess about what's causing its sensory input, while constrained by that input.

This might sound ridiculous, but consider what happens when consuming psychedelics:

As you increase dose, predictive processing falters and bottom-up errors increase, so the raw sensory input goes through increasing less model-fitting filters. At the extreme, the "self" vanishes and raw valence is all that is left.

Do you think there are "scales" of consciousness? As in, is there some quality that makes killing a frog worse than killing an ant, and killing a human worse than killing a frog? If so, do the llm models exist across this scale, or are gpt-3 and gpt-2 conscious at the same "scale" as gpt-4?

I ask because if your view of consciousness is mechanistic, this is fairly cut and dry: gpt-2 has 4 orders of magnitude less parameters/complexity than gpt-4. But both gpt-2 and gpt-4 are very fluent at a language level (both moreso than a human 6 year old for example), so in your view they might both be roughly equally conscious, just expressed differently?

I'm not sure what evidence would convince me, but I don't think the way LLMs act is convincing enough. The kinds of errors they make and the fact they operate in very clear discrete chunks makes it seem hard to me to attribute them subjective experience.

> You would not argue that the human part of that system isn’t conscious.

Sure I would. The human part is not being inferenced, the data is. LLM output in this circumstance is no more conscious than a book that you read by flipping to random pages.

> You might just as well assume everyone and everything else is a philosophical zombie.

I don't assume anything about everyone or everything's intelligence. I have a healthy distrust of all claims.