| ▲ | bwfan123 2 days ago | |
> At some point mimicking a thing becomes the thing. You can have a long conversation with AI about pain and suffering, but you have felt it and AI hasnt. The difference is that, for us humans, words are grounded by something other than other-words, words are grounded by experience. Meaning for us is operational in the real world in the form of perception, feeling and emotions, and movement, and words symbolize said meaning. Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it. | ||
| ▲ | mindcrime 2 days ago | parent [-] | |
> Meaning for LLMs is something in the concept-space that is detached from any worlds. I suspect there should be a test which can tease apart the ungroundedness of the LLMs just from having a conversation with it. But that isn't the question being asked. Nobody said "Could LLM's become conscious"... the ask was "Could AI's become conscious?" And before one protests "but everybody knows that today when we say 'AI' we mean 'LLM'", check this quote from TFA: The pace and reach of research—which includes not just more sophisticated LLMs but innovations such as brain cells mounted on chips—suggest that this new world is closer than most people realise. So no, they aren't only talking about LLM's. The question is about AI in the general sense. And for my part, I have yet to see any compelling argument for why AI's cannot, in principle, become conscious. Heck, as far as that goes, if you allow thinking rooted in ideas like panpsychism[1], there's not necessarily even a good argument that today's AI's (LLM based or otherwise) aren't already conscious to some degree. And to go one step further... "The marquee sign says 'Artificial'" to paraphrase a great man. So if we're talking about 'Artificial' Intelligence, why not allow 'Artificial' Consciousness as well? Maybe we're engaging in biological chauvinism if we insist that "to be conscious" means "being conscious the same way humans are". | ||