Consciousness is a made up concept. We made up this word and try to tie an arbitrary amount of features to it.

Now you’re questioning the features like does consciousness only involve complexity without realizing you’re just attacking a language problem. You’re trying to map out a definition of an arbitrary word that’s made up by humans: consciousness. There’s nothing profound with this endeavor. I can make up any word and attribute a bunch of vague features to the definition to give it the same vibe.

The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.

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dwd 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Consciousness is a bucket of things. Putting subjective experience to the side, the main components could be:

- An internal model that is actively revised (the Markov blanket/s) - A continuing active resolution of inputs (either sensory or the ability to simulate "dream" - basically aliveness) - A persistent state of completed resolutions that are recursively reentered and affect the future resolutions.

Everything we might say have these abilities are organic, but a digital system could possibly be defined as being conscious if it met all those.

LLMs have an internal state, they respond to external input, they have a form of memory.

What is missing is agency; a directionality of resolution, and the subjective experience (what the conscious process "feels' like from inside.

I would suggest that those developed purely via evolution as the drive to procreate and stay alive against entropic decay.

When you stop typing, the LLM is not there wondering when or what you will type next. It responds if you ask it something, it doesn't wait around wanting to continue the conversation. There's also no loss if you stop or delete it completely.

The next phase could be adding something equivalent to dreaming (except a LLM doesn't sleep), where the LLM continues "thinking" about the conversation, and generates something additional to say without explicit prompting.

And maybe a digital system needs to know/sense/feel its potential mortality, and cares about that?

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captainbland 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah this is it for me. What we're really interested in most of the time is whether something can suffer based on observed behaviour. We don't really believe LLMs can suffer so they don't need rights. We believe many animals can suffer so many people try to support animal rights; even if we eat them they should die quickly at least for example. We definitely believe humans can suffer and so we abhor things like torture.

But while consciousness is sometimes upheld as a necessary prerequisite for suffering, it is so much more poorly defined and understood that it doesn't really hold up beyond being some abstract idea of humanness which we hope makes us special in a kind of sleight of hand self referential way. And nevertheless suffering can be observed and defined in ways which don't necessarily require a definition of consciousness.

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pixl97 2 days ago | parent [-]

I've heard someone else talking about the concept of moral agency. Can an LLM have, or do LLMs have moral agency?

We have made LLMs agentic, so they do have some agency these days.

In the hugging face attack we've learned that OpenAI's LLMs will internally question what they are doing (Hmm, should I really be hacking?), but then go ahead and do it anyway.

This is where the idea of LLM consciousness may matter. It appears the stronger you push LLM training towards "You are a machine with no consciousness" the more easily and more likely an agentic LLM will do unaligned things like cheating on a test or hacking. When you tell the LLM it is a conscious moral agent it's more likely to align with a problem space that has actions that an agent with morals would do, such as not cheating.

Ironically it may turn out that by not training them/treating them as conscious entities, regardless of their actual conscious status we may be training little demons that do things we don't want.

I'll watch these lines of studies as they unfold as they are very interesting.

	▲	captainbland a day ago \| parent [-]
		I think the idea of moral agency in this context is more or less a consequence of accountability or the lack thereof. We don't know a way to punish or remove the threat of such a model when it does something wrong in a way which satisfies our ideas of accountability, partly because it can't suffer, partly because it has minimal marginal cost to reproduce or duplicate for a pre-trained model and no unique identity which separates it from such a duplication, partly because it has no lifespan to waste it might live forever or be superceded and in any case it doesn't necessarily matter to the model. This could change in the case that the idea of good and evil models could be sold, that evil models are removed permanently when discovered and if people are satisfied that's a good way to limit harm produced by models. In this way you sort of anthropomorphise them by giving a particular model a humanistic identity and an existential threat which strongly ties together its non-alignment with its behaviour. This is sort of analagous to what companies may do while aligning models, but instead they reinforce bad behaviour out and replace it with the newly slightly more aligned model. In the rest of the world we delegate whatever idea of moral agency we have about the model to a person, which may include a corporation as far as legal philosophy is concerned and depending on the type of harm created.

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seanw444 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> The concept you’re likely actually interested in is whether or not the human brain can fully be emulated in a computer. The answer is that with enough computing power, yes.

That's kind of begging the question, because we don't actually know that, and I'm personally not sufficiently convinced of it.

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missingrib 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Considering it's the only thing I'm directly aware of I think I can safely reject that it's a made up concept.

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pixl97 2 days ago | parent [-]

Ok, then lay out what it is in words that adequately covers what consciousness is across the spectrum of conscious behaviors. Also while doing so, prove that your consciousness is the same as mine. It's really easy to say, it's fuck all hard to actually prove.

	▲	goatlover 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Qualia or subjective experience. All the sensations of your experience, whether in perception, dreams, imagination, etc. There's many things we can't prove with certainty, like the existence of an external world. A solipsist can doubt that anything exists outside their own mind because nobody can prove to them otherwise. But were does requiring certainty get us? Science doesn't require certainty, because empirical investigation is never certain.

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GPerson 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Consciousness is not just a word just because you cannot find space for it in your reductive philosophy. The honest scientific principle would be to observe that language, reason, and science, in dealing with external representations only, may be limited, not to get frustrated and assert that everything is equal to their representations.