Difficult_Review9741 t1_j95y49j wrote on February 19, 2023 at 2:37 PM

This won't be very popular, but there is a lot of truth.

Remember, "divine spark" doesn't have to be a religious term. Even if consciousness is just a result of our neurons firing in a specific pattern, we still have no clue what this pattern is, and if it can be replicated in machines.

Think about it another way: assume that we have a program that manually defines every possible language input, and every possible language output. From a black box perspective, this would seem every bit as intelligent and "conscious" as a LLM, but anyone understanding the implementation would immediately reject that that this system is intelligent in any way.

The point being, to determine if a system is conscious, we can't simply examine its output. We first have to understand what consciousness is, and we aren't even close to that. There is clearly a lot that separates modern day AI and humans. Yes, humans sometimes predict the statistically likely next token, but that is obviously not how our brain works in the general case.

As these systems become more advanced, it will be harder to assert with certainty that they are not conscious, but anyone trying to claim that they are right now is either being disingenuous or has no idea what they are talking about.

Lawjarp2 t1_j96qtad wrote on February 19, 2023 at 6:03 PM

You don't have to copy and know every atom before you agree something is like something else. That's just a bad faith argument. Don't look at just the differences look at the similarities, look at how it's able to get so far with such a basic design.

It's like the god of the gaps argument. People who constantly point out that we don't know this hence god, then if you do explain away the phenomenon it's something else. In that way their god is just the gap in our knowledge and is forever shrinking.