Yeah, we're totally fucked, there is no scientific theory that can tell you what is and isn't conscious. For all we know, my laptop, not running any LLM is conscious and always has been. Or my chair. Or a proton. This consciousness thing is a nasty problem for the scientific worldview.

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codingdave 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

... which is exactly how we know that LLMs are not conscious. We can't really explain consciousness. We can absolutely explain LLMs. The math is heavy and massive, but explainable. We can explain it layer-by-layer until we show that at its most basic level, it is still just a series of 0s and 1s.

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fellowniusmonk 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Or not a problem at all.

People smuggle in so many assumptions when they use words like consciousness or thinking or soul or personhood, I've never met a lay person who could talk clearly about ai safety issues unless we switched to language like process.

Consciousness is an absolutely terrible term that's going to get us all killed by Ai. I know a huge swath of people who think its nbd to torture Ai because it doesnt have a soul, well I see a LOT of non-theists smuggling soul rhetoric and thinking in via consciousness and that's a problem.

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AntiDyatlov 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

AI safety is a completely separate question from the hard problem. Also a very tricky one, given these things are still black boxes.

	▲	fellowniusmonk 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In one sense they may be seperate, orthogonal even, but if our metrics are attention, decision making and accurately factoring risk they seem inseparable to many people. So, I agree with your point narrowly but I think broadly from an effort standpoint they interact quite a lot in the human mind.

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altruios 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I wouldn't torture a chair, and I would not associate anyone who gains pleasure from such. It is worse if the chair were to expressed displeasure. That indicates something deeply wrong.

Having such psychopaths revealed: use that information to alter your associations, is what I would suggest.

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fellowniusmonk 5 hours ago | parent [-]

These are real, shared, issues we are all effected by not one persons personal problem.

I'm not looking for advice on how to associate with people, hopefully you can understand the distinction.

	▲	altruios 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> These are real, shared, issues we are all effected by not one persons personal problem. Yes. I am not talking about just you. But of this (mal) mentality in general. As well as a proposed solution to deal with that mentality (shun it). My apologies that my advise was unwelcome to you, it was, however, not just for you.