Comment by 542354234235

I am not saying that LLMs are conscious. What I am saying is that since we don’t really understand what gives rise to our subjective feeling of consciousness, evaluating a non-organic mind is difficult.

For instance, say we had a Westworld type robot that perceived pain, pleasure, happiness, sadness, and reacted accordingly. But that we understood the underlying program, would we say it wasn’t conscious? If we understood our own underlying programing, would we not be “really conscious”?

We say we have LLMs “fake” empathy or feelings but at some point, digital minds will be faking it in a complex way that involves inner “thoughts”, motivations that they “perceive” internally as positive and negative, and various other subjective experiences. It gets very squishy trying to understand how our consciousness isn’t just a fake abstraction on top of the unconscious program, and a digital mind’s abstractions are fake.