Awareness of oneself as a distinct entity from the rest of the world.
Technically speaking, sentience is kind of a mistake. Thinking of ourselves as individuals is very useful, but the boundaries of such are artificial and can lead to a “me vs them” mentality and selfish behaviour. I suspect that the next big cognitive leap forward will be discarding sentience. Doing so may be a prerequisite to forming an advanced society.
what proof do we have that llms are truly self aware and not merely returning text that mimics the self awareness of the humans who made the materials they were trained on?
Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.
I’m not saying the record is a musician, I’m saying it can play music. And I’m not saying LLMs are sapient people, I’m saying they have a sense of self. An LLM is adept enough at adapting its copied idea of selfhood to its situation that it has a sense of self. It’s not as complex a sense a self as a human’s is, but it’s more complex than a magpie’s, and magpies pass the red dot mirror test of sentience. An LLM can adapt its copied ideas of self-awareness to the situation better than a magpie can.
define sentience
Awareness of oneself as a distinct entity from the rest of the world.
Technically speaking, sentience is kind of a mistake. Thinking of ourselves as individuals is very useful, but the boundaries of such are artificial and can lead to a “me vs them” mentality and selfish behaviour. I suspect that the next big cognitive leap forward will be discarding sentience. Doing so may be a prerequisite to forming an advanced society.
what proof do we have that llms are truly self aware and not merely returning text that mimics the self awareness of the humans who made the materials they were trained on?
Any sufficiently adaptive mimicry of a thought is that thought.
Thoughts are like music. There’s no such thing as fake music. You can’t pretend to play music by mimicking the sounds. If it sounds like music, it’s music.
“sufficiently adaptive” is doing a lot of work there. i can “mimic” a thought by copying and pasting text that someone else wrote. it wouldn’t mean that I understood it, could reason from it, connect with it on an emotional level, or incorporate it into a worldview
your music simile misses the point in a similar way. a record player can play music just as well as the artist who recorded the record, but we don’t say the record is the same as the musician.
I’m not saying the record is a musician, I’m saying it can play music. And I’m not saying LLMs are sapient people, I’m saying they have a sense of self. An LLM is adept enough at adapting its copied idea of selfhood to its situation that it has a sense of self. It’s not as complex a sense a self as a human’s is, but it’s more complex than a magpie’s, and magpies pass the red dot mirror test of sentience. An LLM can adapt its copied ideas of self-awareness to the situation better than a magpie can.