> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.

Well said.

I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.

Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.

Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.

I get the sense that he is misidentifying the potential locus of consciousness..

In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.

The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..

"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.

Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)

People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?

Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?

Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?

I think its obvious that a few billion neurons connected together are not conscious either.. Yet!

> misanthropic

Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.

> so obviously incorrect

It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then

> so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand

To be fair, that's the best thought terminating cliché, which saves you having to explain what you mean by consciousness.