> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".

You'll need to explain why.

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5eueuur an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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

	▲	qarl 36 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It doesn't seem self evident to me, no. I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
	▲	SkyBelow 22 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.

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pessimizer 44 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	qarl 34 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It sounds like you disagree with determinism. But that's a well worn argument and determinism has won, albeit in an odd sort of detente.