| ▲ | PaulDavisThe1st 3 hours ago | |||||||
Well that's too bad, since Rorty completely misses the point on consciousness. Consciousness, the interesting part anyway, is qualia, or the "it is like something to be me" as Nagel put it. Intention, as Dennett used it in his book "The Intentional Stance" is the "are you one of us" angle, and is distinct from consciousness because as the book title suggests, it is a stance taken with respect to some other system (person, cat, dog, turtle, LLM) rather than a description of subjective experience. So I think it is your (and Rorty's) positions that are bunk. It is very, very far from clear that LLM's are in any basic sense "aware" let alone "sapient". They are extraordinarily able to manipulate language in a way that leads to text generation that has traditionally been assumed to indicate consciousness and/or intelligence. But we have no way of knowing if it is like anything to be an LLM, even though most of us are busy taking the Intentional Stance towards them. | ||||||||
| ▲ | RGS1811 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
I guess I'd say that your qualia aren't a something, but they're not a nothing either. We can't say what they are. They're not publicly describable, and therefore not publicly attributable. As Wittgenstein would say, "They cancel out." And as I think Dennett himself would say, qualia are just Sellars's Given rearing its ugly head again. | ||||||||
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