The author also claims that a function (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c is dramatically different to the human experience of consciousness. Yet the author's text I am reading, and any information they can communicate to me, exists entirely in (R^n)^c.
The author also claims that a function (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c is dramatically different to the human experience of consciousness. Yet the author's text I am reading, and any information they can communicate to me, exists entirely in (R^n)^c.
If you're willing to ascribe the possibility of consciousness to any complex-enough computation of a recurrence equation (and hence to something like ... "earth"), I'm willing to agree that under that definition LLMs might be conscious. :)
Under my model, these systems you have described are conscious, but not in a way that they can communicate or experience time or memory the way human beings do.
My general list of questions for those presenting a model of consciousness are: 1) Are you conscious? (hopefully you say yes or our friend Descartes would like a word with you!) 2) Am I conscious? How do you know? 3) Is a dog conscious? 4) Is a worm conscious? 5) Is a bacterium conscious? 6) Is a human embryo / baby consious? And if so, was there a point that it was not conscious, and what does it mean for that switch to occur?
What is your view of consciousness?
The intuitive one looks like 100% chance > P(#2 is conscious) > P(#6) > P(#3) > P(#4) > P(#5) > 0% chance, but the problem is solipsism is a real motherfucker and it's entirely possible qualia is meted out based on some wacko distance metric that couldn't possibly feel intuitive. There are many more such metrics out there than there are intuitive ones, so a prior of indifference doesn't help us much. Any ordering is theoretically possible to be ontologically privileged, we simply have no way of knowing.
Assuming we escape the null space of solipsism, and can reason about anything at all, we can think about what a model might look like that generates some ordering of P(#). Of course, without a hypothetical consciousness detector (one might believe or not believe that this could exist) P(#) cannot be measured, and therefore will fall outside of the realm of a scientific hypothesis deduction model. This is often a point of contention for rationality-pilled science-cels.
Some of these models might be incoherent - a model that denies P(#1) doesn't seem very good. A model that denies P(#2) but accepts P(#3) is a bit strange. We can't verify these, but we do need to operate under one (or in your suggestion, operate under a probability distribution of these models) if we want to make coherent statements about what is and isn't conscious.
I don't think it's incoherent to make probabilistic claims like this. It might be incoherent to make deeper claims about what laws given the distribution itself. Either way, what I think is interesting is that, if we also think there is such a thing as an amount of consciousness a thing can have, as in the panpsychic view, these two things create an inverse-square law of moral consideration that matches the shape of most people's intuitions oddly well.
For example: Let's say rock is probably not conscious, P(rock) < 1%. Even if it is, it doesn't seem like it would be very conscious. A low percentage of a low amount multiplies to a very low expected value, and that matches our intuitions about how much value to give rocks.
By incoherent I was referring to the internal inconsistencies of a model, not the probabilistic claims. Ie a model that denies your own consciousness but accepts the consciousness of others is a difficult one to defend. I agree with your statement here.
Thanks for your comment I enjoyed thinking about this. I learned the estimating distributions approach from the rationalist/betting/LessWrong folks and think it works really well, but I've never thought much about how it applies to something unfalsifiable.