Investor Ramez Naam says the scenario probes human cognitive priors.
Excellent question that gets at our priors.
If LLMs were built on biological hardware, like we somehow wired neurons together to run the exact algorithms that make up LLMs, and you could have the exact same conversations with them that you do now, would you assume they had some conscious experience?
Many users are excited by the thought experiment on consciousness in biologically implemented LLMs because it suggests biological matter might enable awareness, whereas one user called the outcome depressing and the architecture wrong.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
@AndyMasley The Anti-Chinese Room
@AndyMasley Yes. This then brings into question whether this is unethical or not but that's a whole different topic entirely
@ndril "What if the room were a guy?"
@AndyMasley the only difference between a biological and digital consciousness is the regulation of hormonal impulses.
@AndyMasley you might want to have an option for signaling that we already think they have conscious experience as they are now
@AndyMasley I wouldn't *assume* it. I'd think there's a good chance that they'd have conscious experience - but I would not expect that that consciousness had anything to do with the words they were programmed to say.
@AndyMasley Would be cool if cortical labs tried it 😊
@AndyMasley Because every time you go away and come back, it's forgotten everything you said. Although I guess someone with Alzheimer's is still conscious.
@AndyMasley No. This sounds like an exact description of my current manager. There appears to be no conscious experience.
@AndyMasley The results here look kind of nuts to me, but we really need the four way version of the poll
Initially no, but if I could see that the neural substrate was continuously adapting and physically changing to the input it was receiving then I'd consider it a possibility.
Biological matter has a plasticity that facilitates evolution, which could potentially evolve into consciousness, that silicone computers as they exist now can't replicate.
@VoidNulled @AndyMasley 50 billion to implement estrogen receptors on NVIDIA GPUs NOW!
@AndyMasley I want the four-answer version of this poll, where the other dimension is "do you think they're conscious now?"
@VoidNulled @AndyMasley Pretty sure that isn't the only difference lmao
@AndyMasley There are parts of the human brain that are "subconscious" in some sense, and maybe that's even most of it. (I don't know the quantities.) So I don't think neurons-wired-together is enough to _assume_ conscious experience.
@AndyMasley I also advocate for a version of this poll that doesn't read like "if a Leprechaun told you COVID originated at a wet market, would you believe that?". The answer is "it seems more likely than not but the Leprechaun doesn't have anything to do with it"
@6ixpool @AndyMasley It's also Deez nutz
But to be clear LLMs are not even built on silicon hardware. Indeed, they are not built at all as they are physical things. They are coded instructions executed by silicon that is spatially distributed and unrepeated in a given run. So what precise thing are we imagining to be conscious in this case.
@AndyMasley Love this question.
@AndyMasley Yes. It changes the matter. I have a feeling conciousness comes somehow from how biological matter is affected by the universe(or something else). Maybe not todays "small" models, but I believe tomorows huge models, if run on biological compute, could gain real conciousness.