Stop for one second and ask yourself a simple question. Where do your words come from? When you speak, what comes first, the idea or the word? Do you first feel a thought inside you, and only after that go searching for the right word to wrap around it? I think we all do. The word is never the start. The word is just the skin. The idea, the consciousness, is the thing sitting under it.
  • morto@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    We don’t know this. In some respects there is an idea sitting underneath, because the model has a metric fuckton of latent space state that changes as it processes text. We don’t know how thoughts or consciousness arise, so for all we know it is entirely possible that there’s flickers of consciousness happening in the matrix that makes up an LLM every time the model iterates.

    So, if someone made all calculations by hand, using pen and paper, to produce the llm output, would that make sense to think about some form of consciousness arising somewhere? Perhaps in the paper? In the pen? In the person’s brain, as a hosted virtual conscience?

    • turdas@suppo.fi
      1·
      1 month ago

      Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible that thoughts or consciousness have some minimum processing rate before they emerge. It’s possible the computing substrate matters. We don’t know.

      However, in your example I think it would be safe to say that it could at least not be a hosted virtual consciousness because no human is capable of holding the entire state of the neural network in their mind.

      Highly abstract thought experiments like this aren’t terribly useful here, because we’re dealing with some kind of (possibly emergent) property of the universe rather than an abstract concept that can be cleanly defined using logic. Physics has shown that the universe is quite messy and not easily described using logic and maths. Thought experiments of classical philosophy fare remarkably poorly when they encounter physics.