> despite these contradiction, hasn't become marginal in the fashion of the aether or the theory of the flat earth. I think this because people indeed need it to bridge the biological world and the world of ethics and legality.

Sometimes the replies in these threads leave me wondering if p-zombies are real. It isn't that there are contradictions, it's that we literally do not know how to define the thing. And it has not fallen out of fashion because it is self evidently real - we all experience it.

We don't need it in order to bridge anything. Legality and ethics are largely game theory, however there are some aspects of both that only exist due to it. So it isn't some abstract concept used to bridge other concepts but rather a concrete thing that influences our way of doing things.

> Confused definitions of consciousness can give really confused ideas about ethical behavior regards "intelligent" computer programs.

Is that what's going on? If these things were conscious, then their creators wouldn't be responsible for their actions? That's the crux of the disagreement?

That's super interesting. Thank you.

Legal doctrine that boils down to "trust me bro" isn't even bad doctrine (it's not proper doctrine at all), but I think the comparison is still valid here, because both sentience/non-sentience and art/porn may just be fundamental category errors.

Perhaps we can't define a "partitioning" rule because no valid partition exists.

For consciousness/sentience, that's an incredibly tough a pill for most to swallow; it would mean calling into question more hundreds of years' worth (probably more) of philosophical thinking, all of which was constructed on the axiom that "sentience" is a single indivisible trait: you either have it or you don't.

If we find that "root dependency" was little more than wishful thinking all along, a whole slew of Enlightenment-era philosophy (and all the modern legal principles derived therefrom) suddenly fall apart unless we find some other suitable criterion that would shore them up (or we just collectively avert our attention and pretend the conflict doesn't exist, which is the route I expect many would prefer to take).

it's self evident isn't it - such a consciousness has never existed, one existing would be by the fact of existing be weird

Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing.

I don't think it's defensible to say

1) that a transistor isn't conscious,

2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to

3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious.

Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.]

It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.

The randomness is something we add on purpose; you can set an LLM's "temperature" to 0 to get deterministic output. This tends to make the quality of its responses worse for reasons I don't think anyone really understands, but it's still functional.

I don't think the state of the art LLM providers let you do this anymore (?), but they certainly could if they wanted to, and you can do it yourself with a local model.

By default they are matrix multiplications. Temperature is added in as forced PRNG because testing found that correlated with better outputs.

Given the same prompts and the same weights, one can get the same answer each time.

In practice, there are a number of optimizations that makes the results dependent upon thing we give up control of to increase performance, meaning the results end up being effectively non-deterministic. But, if you are willing to run it in a slower mode so we don't do some steps out of order to speed things up and don't batch results (or if you consider the determinism of a given batch of requests rather than individual requests), then the same input gets the same output.

Naw - computers are really deterministic. It's hard to get them to behave otherwise.

As I understand it, if you turn down the temperature to 0 you get repeatable behavior - EXCEPT - on large servers with lots of users - the GPU can sometimes produce slightly different results based on batch size.

Same weights, same seed, same input tokens, same algorithm, same output tokens, probabilistic or not. Quantum effects have been de-noised, but I guess there are still random gamma rays.

You know, the one really interesting dynamic domain is chaotic, which is a subdomain of the deterministic! I figure free will is a chaotic phenomenon.

Groundhog day is your intuition pump here. Go back in time and most assume that the day will go mostly the same, except for the butterfly effect if you change something. Given exactly the same conditions (we went back in time, so that's pretty exact), people will make the same decisions.

Most people don't assume that the day will be completely different the next time loop. The town won't suddenly spontaneously all start breakdancing or standing on their heads.

(Edit: The murderer is the one who -given the same/similar conditions- will murder again. I'd politely suggest maybe we put them behind bars as a precaution against that; until/unless they learn to act differently. )

(Edit 2: Throw in stochasticity and this actually tends to smooth out chaotic systems. This is counter-intuitive! People's brains break on Evolution in the same way. Meanwhile somehow folks intuit birdshot without difficulty; which is weird!)

I think this debate is rooted in our instinctual beliefs about fairness. An organism in a social group needs to decide how to react to the brutish behavior of its peers. And so Mother Nature has encoded a good strategy in our brains. (For example, dogs seem to understand fairness.)

But this only means the strategy is practical - it doesn't mean it's consistent. I think "responsibility" falls into this category. So we have strong intuitions about it that don't quite logically work. And this is where free will and determinism and choice and punishment all crash together.