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> POC is fully conscious according to any test I can think of, we have full AGI

There are no tests for consciousness. Consciousness resides fully as a first person perspective and can't be inspected or detected from the outside (at least not in any way currently known to science or philosophy). What they mean when they say that is "my brain is interpreting this thing as conscious, so I am accepting that".

Maybe LLMs are conscious in some abstract way we don't understand. I doubt it, but there's no way to tell. And an AI claiming that it IS or is NOT conscious is not evidence of either conclusion.

If there is some level of consciousness, it's in a weird way that only becomes instantiated in the brief period while the model is predicting tokens, and would be highly different from human consciousness.

discuss

throw310822|4 days ago

> in a weird way that only becomes instantiated in the brief period while the model is predicting tokens

Makes sense, but at the same time: subjectively, an LLM is always predicting tokens. Otherwise it's just frozen.

Trasmatta|4 days ago

Yeah, a sci-fi analogy might be one where you keep getting cloned with all of your memories intact and then vaporized shortly after. Each instantiation of "you" feels a continuous existence, but it's an illusion.

(Some might argue that's basically the human experience anyway, in the Buddhist non self perspective - you're constantly changing and being reified in each moment, it's not actually continuous)

catigula|4 days ago

How do you know that I am conscious?

ASalazarMX|4 days ago

No one can prove that you're conscious, or non-conscious with perfect replication of consciousness, but we can be reasonably sure your are.

- I know I am conscious.

- It's likely that as a random human, I am in the belly of the bell curve.

- It's likely that you're also a random human, and share my characteristics.

- Then, it's very likely that you know you're conscious too.

I can't be absolutely certain, but I'd bet a million dollars on you being conscious vs an automaton.

Trasmatta|4 days ago

I don't.