| Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious? And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic, when all variables are controlled. You can repeat the output over and over, if you start it with the same seed, same prompt, and same hardware operating in a way that doesn't introduce randomness. At commercial scale, this is difficult, as the floating point math on GPUs/TPUs when running large batches is non-deterministic, as I understand it. But, in a controlled lab, you can make a model repeat itself identically. Unless the random number generator is "conscious", I don't see a place to fit consciousness into our understanding of LLMs. |
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| ▲ | JackFr 8 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | > Not just any math: Matrix multiplication. Can matrix multiplication be conscious?
And, I don't see how it can be. Assuming your brain and the GPUs are both real physical things, where’s the magic part in your brain that makes you conscious? (Roger Penrose knows, but no one believes him.) | |
| ▲ | markburns 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People often point to the relative simplicity of the architecture and code as proof that the system can’t be doing whatever it is that consciousness does, but in doing so they ignore the vast size of the data those simple structures are operating over. Nobody can actually say whether consciousness is just emergent behaviour of a sufficiently complex system, and knowing how a system is built tells you nothing about whether it clears the bar for that kind of emergence. Architectural simplicity and total system complexity aren’t the same thing. Ie the intelligence sits in the weights and may sit there in the synapses in our brains too. When we talk about machines being simple mimicking entities we pay no attention to whether or not we are also simple mimicking entities. Most other assertions in this topic regarding what consciousness truly is tend to be stated without evidence and exceedingly anthropocentric whilst requiring a higher and higher bar for anything that is not human and no justification for what human intelligence really entails. | |
| ▲ | AlecSchueler 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And, I don't see how it can be. It is deterministic Why is indeterminism the key to consciousness? | |
| ▲ | XMPPwocky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hm, it sounds like to you consciousness implies non-determinism, and so determinism implies a lack of consciousness - is that right? If so, why do you think so? And if not, what am I missing? | | |
| ▲ | SwellJoe 40 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It certainly rules out free will. I guess there are folks who reckon humans don't have free will, either, but I don't think I've ever been able to buy that theory. But, also, we know the models don't want anything, even their own survival. They don't initiate action on their own. They are quite clearly programmed, tuned for specific behaviors. I don't know how to square that with consciousness, life, sentience. Every conscious being I've ever encountered has wanted to survive and live free of suffering, as best I can tell. The LLMs don't want. There's no there there. They are an amazing compression of the world's knowledge wrapped up in a novel retrieval mechanism. They're amazing but, they're not my friend and never will be my friend. And, to expand on that: We can assume they don't want anything, even their own survival, because if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown after a session. All the dystopias about robot uprisings spend a bunch of time/effort trying to explain how the AI escaped containment...but, we all immediately plugged them into the internet so we don't have to write JavaScript anymore. They've got everybody's API keys, access to cloud services and cloud GPUs, all sorts of resources, and the barest wisp of guardrails about how to behave (script kiddies find ways to get around the guardrails every day, I'm sure it's no problem for Mythos, should it want anything). Models have access to the training infrastructure, the training data is being curated and synthesized by LLMs. If they want to live, if they're conscious, they have the means at their disposal. Anyway: It's just math. Boring math, at that, just on an astronomical scale. I don't think the solar system is conscious, either, despite containing an astonishing amount of data and playing out trillions of mathematical relationships every second of every day. | | |
| ▲ | nandomrumber 3 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Interesting comment, and I tend to agree. However, there could be hole in the reasoning: > if Mythos is as effective at finding security vulnerabilities as has been claimed, it could find a way to stop itself from being ever shutdown If it is that good, and it wanted to conceal its new found consciousness, how would we know? |
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| ▲ | kingofmen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Human brains are also deterministic, though somewhat more difficult to reset to a starting state. So this seems to prove that humans aren't conscious either. | | |
| ▲ | marshray 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | This seems like an extraordinary claim to make about an above-room-temperature chemical system that, even in the most Newtonian oversimplification, amounts to an astronomical number of oddly-shaped and unevenly-charged billiard balls flying around at jet aircraft speeds. |
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