[empyrrhicist]

> Yes, acknowledged, those actions originated from 'just' silicon following a prediction algorithm, in the same way that human perception and reasoning are 'just' a continual reconciliation of top-down predictions based on past data and bottom-up sensemaking based on current data.

I keep seeing this argument, but it really seems like a completely false equivalence. Just because a sufficiently powerful simulation would be expected to be indistinguishable from reality doesn't imply that there's any reason to take seriously the idea that we're dealing with something "sufficiently powerful".

Human brains do things like language and reasoning on top of a giant ball of evolutionary mud - as such they do it inefficiently, and with a whole bunch of other stuff going on in the background. LLMs work along entirely different principles, working through statistically efficient summaries of a large corpus of language itself - there's little reason to posit that anything analogously experiential is going on.

If we were simulating brains and getting this kind of output, that would be a completely different kind of thing.

I also don't discount that other modes of "consiousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.

[EnergyAmy]

Airplanes and bees are both structured entirely differently and yet they still both fly.

Just because LLMs don't work the same way the human brain does, doesn't mean they don't think.

[empyrrhicist]

Unless you're being sarcastic, this is exactly the kind of surface-level false equivalence illogic I'm talking about. From my post:

> I also don't discount that other modes of "consciousness" are possible, it just seems like people are reasoning incorrectly backward from the apparent output of the systems we have now in ways that are logically insufficient for conclusions that seem implausible.

[stavros]

Nobody is saying LLMs definitely think/reason/whatever. The GP is saying that we don't know they don't. Do you disagree?