Does a spider desire to build a web? Maybe, maybe not, but it takes actions to try to build one. Is human desire a real thing, or is it an illusion? Some think that consciousness itself is an illusion. What is human sensation but the world sensing itself?
Does a country have desires? An economy? Do the millions of transactions and price changes and signals going between people and companies mean that an economy has thoughts, in some sense? When an economy reacts to a war in a foreign land like an ant flinching away from something hot, is it feeling pain in some very primitive sense?
Sure, it's entirely possible that there's no real sensation behind an LLM, or rather, it senses and reacts to text input like a bacterium reacting to chemical nutrient gradients or an ant reacting to food. But at what level of mental complexity does consciousness and true desire arise? I think it's a continuum, and to think that there's something special about biological intelligence vs machine intelligence is to believe in the supernatural. We wouldn't say that aliens don't have true desires because they have genetic material based on something other than DNA, or use something other than glucose for energy in their bodies.
I do think you're right that current LLMs proclaiming love likely don't understand what they're saying. But at some point we're going to build machine intelligences that do, and it may be hard to tell when we cross that line. People used to worry a lot more about the ethics of that.
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Does a spider desire to build a web? Maybe, maybe not, but it takes actions to try to build one. Is human desire a real thing, or is it an illusion? Some think that consciousness itself is an illusion. What is human sensation but the world sensing itself?
Does a country have desires? An economy? Do the millions of transactions and price changes and signals going between people and companies mean that an economy has thoughts, in some sense? When an economy reacts to a war in a foreign land like an ant flinching away from something hot, is it feeling pain in some very primitive sense?
Sure, it's entirely possible that there's no real sensation behind an LLM, or rather, it senses and reacts to text input like a bacterium reacting to chemical nutrient gradients or an ant reacting to food. But at what level of mental complexity does consciousness and true desire arise? I think it's a continuum, and to think that there's something special about biological intelligence vs machine intelligence is to believe in the supernatural. We wouldn't say that aliens don't have true desires because they have genetic material based on something other than DNA, or use something other than glucose for energy in their bodies.
I do think you're right that current LLMs proclaiming love likely don't understand what they're saying. But at some point we're going to build machine intelligences that do, and it may be hard to tell when we cross that line. People used to worry a lot more about the ethics of that.