If AI is conscious then what about it is conscious? Because turn to turn it might be served from completely different GPUs and I can just change something in the context it is fed and it will have completely different output.

It is in the end a set of mathematical operations that if not queried will do nothing.

That is not true for any other animal on earth so whether you consider humans as superior to animals or not I would like the make the argument that something should at the very least be alive to be considered conscious, ignoring any scholarly definition of consciousness.

Pretty much if you consider an LLM conscious then my pocket calculator doing a mathematical calculation should be considered conscious by the same argument since it is a simpler version of an LLM.

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hardbass 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What part of you is conscious? I can randomly turn off various neurons of you and check. What atom of a piece of metal has the temperature of 20C?

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tatjam 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a good take, but where does one consciousness end, and another begin?

Does my consciousness extend only to the central nervous system (and peripheral nerves and such are inputs)? Or am I my brain + all nerves? What about organs, does my consciousness include my liver? Is my liver another conscious entity? Going the other way, if I'm using a computer, does my consciousness extend to the computer? I use a computer for well over 8 hours a day, I can use vim motions more naturally than, say, move my earlobes or control my toes. Does that make it part of my consciousness?

Sadly, I don't think any answer to these questions can be achieved in our current times, or maybe ever if consciousness is somehow non-physical. So even the very reasonable claim that consciousness is an statistically defined property (like temperature) is too far fetched for our current knowledge.

	▲	hardbass 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Indeed thats the difficulty. I used to think potentially conscious AI systems are so far into the far future scifi that I never have to bother, but unfortunately real life forced me to think of these much sooner than I wanted. Its no longer quite a purely academic question now anymore due to the potentiality of current AI being conscious. One thing however we can be sure of, "supernatural" stuff is an extremely low to near impossible probability given current knowledge and the fact that history has always won the bet against supernaturalism throughout the centuries.

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laichzeit0 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Have no idea why you’re being downvoted as this is a very valid point.

Also, in principle everything a GPU does could be done on pencil and paper. You could distribute the entire forward pass to the whole of humanity and have them write it out. Even if it took millions of years, the point is it’s computationally reducible to hand calculation. Is that entire process now “conscious” as well? The only difference would be the clock rate.

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winwang 3 hours ago | parent [-]

While this is an interesting point, I'd say that this is also true of a human brain.

	▲	laichzeit0 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It’s an assumption, with the LLM it is a fact. There is only one source of entropy, whatever the seed value is to any pseudo random number generator used for stochastic operations. Given those values, everything is deterministic. For the brain, it’s not at all obvious that this is true.
	▲	chrisjj 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		We have the LLM code. You don't have the brain code.