> This is like saying "We understand practically everything about airplanes, except how they stay in the air."
Even that is a sufficient level of understanding to correctly determine that a motorcycle is not an airplane.
While we might not have a complete picture of what consciousness entails, we can at least list some necessary conditions for it to arise. Any system that lacks those conditions can at least be proven to not be conscious.
With LLMs specifically, I think there is a very strong argument that they are not and cannot be conscious at all, regardless of how big of a corpus you throw at it or how many parameters it has. Emily Bender explains it well here:
> Even that is a sufficient level of understanding to correctly determine that a motorcycle is not an airplane.
But are we talking about airplanes, or are we talking about "flying"? Airplanes fly, motorcycles don't. Do hot air balloons fly? Or is floating not flying?
Neuroscience tells us about human and similar consciousness. Maybe Ll biological consciousness, but maybe not even that. Are we sure we're not exploring a subset of consciousness though, and other variations exist that were unaware of and will catch us off guard because we haven't encountered them (or recognized when we have)?
I think that's the important question here, and it goes beyond LLMs, because whether they can or can not achieve consciousness doesn't mean something else will follow the same path.
> Are we sure we're not exploring a subset of consciousness though, and other variations exist that were unaware of and will catch us off guard because we haven't encountered them (or recognized when we have)?
I don't know of any general principle one could use to determine if system X has or doesn't have property Y if you don't at least have some definition of Y.
Even that is a sufficient level of understanding to correctly determine that a motorcycle is not an airplane.
While we might not have a complete picture of what consciousness entails, we can at least list some necessary conditions for it to arise. Any system that lacks those conditions can at least be proven to not be conscious.
With LLMs specifically, I think there is a very strong argument that they are not and cannot be conscious at all, regardless of how big of a corpus you throw at it or how many parameters it has. Emily Bender explains it well here:
https://medium.com/@emilymenonbender/thought-experiment-in-t...