Ah yes, because you used the magical pixie dust that makes experiences "real" therefore you're actually seeing and hearing while a multimodal LLM doesn't really experience what it sees and hears "for real". We can be certain of this because, despite not being able to quantify or even rigorously define the phenomenon we intentionally deprive the LLMs of access to said magical pixie dust.
I agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness?
Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot?
If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?
People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that.
I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
Okay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it?
For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.
I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable).
Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.
No, you have not answered. I asked you what you believe the difference is between the two phenomena in concrete terms. What you've done is beg the question.
There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of
On what basis could you possibly make this claim? What does it mean to hear? You're taking in information and decoding it, right? So what magical pixie dust could your eardrum possibly be applying that specially privileges that particular mode of input?
How is an LLM "reading" pixel data fundamentally different from your eyes transforming it into an analog signal?
"Although I have acquired a thorough theoretical knowledge of the physics of colours and the physiology of the colour receptor mechanisms, nothing of this can help me to understand the true nature of colours. From the history of art I have also learned about the meanings often attributed to colours and how colours have been used at different times, but this too does not give me an understanding of the essential character or quality of colours."
Knut Nordby was in the same position as an LLM as far as colours are concerned. He learned all he could but words didn't give him any idea of *what it's like to see them". LLMs have access to everything that's written about colours, but that didn't help Nordby.
Nordby's no longer around to ask about image files, but how do you think reading thems would help? He might then have been able to say, e.g. "This pixel is orange," but he still wouldn't have known what it's like to see orange. The same applies to a multimodal LLM.
I'm not claiming that any particular disabled person has managed to achieve it. I'm asking on what basis you claim it to be categorically impossible.
You've claimed that black swans are impossible, I've asked how you arrived at that conclusion, and your answer is that you looked and don't see any.
You're here claiming that what submarines do is somehow fundamentally different than swimming and that we know this because they don't have legs. You need legs to swim. And I'm questioning the soundness of your reasoning and you're pointing to cripples without legs who can't swim as evidence. It doesn't make any sense.
He might then have been able to say, e.g. "This pixel is orange," but he still wouldn't have known what it's like to see orange. The same applies to a multimodal LLM.
How is a multimodal LLM taking in RGB data fundamentally different than what your eyes are doing? That is the core question that you keep dodging.
I'm asking on what basis you claim it to be categorically impossible.
Because the neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't exist in their brain. I've even looked into what happens if someone, blind from birth, takes LSD. There aren't any large scale studies as it's very difficult to get approval for them, but the short answer appears to be that they don't see things: https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-b...
How is a multimodal LLM taking in RGB data fundamentally different than what your eyes are doing?
The multimodal LLM is a program run as a process on a computer, which isn't aware of what it's running: it's just blindly, repeatedly, executing whatever instruction is at its program counter. The LLM itself isn't doing anything. It's just sitting somewhere in memory being executed by the computer. Brains, on the other hand, don't run programs. Each part of the brain has a special purpose, and somewhere in it there are neurons which correlate with what is being experienced whenever something is looked at.
Because the neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't exist in their brain.
And what are those in concrete terms? Why can't a computer program have those? You have yet to articulate what special property is giving rise to this.
somewhere in it there are neurons which correlate with what is being experienced whenever something is looked at.
And what exactly is special about the neuron that the biological hardware can do this but the inorganic can't? Is your claim that current silicon doesn't do this (but future might be able to) or that no silicon construction could _ever_ do this?
You have yet to clearly articulate what this magical pixie dust of consciousness is supposed to be.
Because it isn't a physical object capable of sensing the physical environment, the way the brain is via the sense organs. I don't rule out the possibility that a robot, equipped with with a camera and microphone and processing the information it receives from them might be conscious of sight and sound, but not a program. If I read and execute a computer program in my head, I'm conscious of my thoughts while doing that, but are those thoughts themselves conscious?? I don't think so. What would they be conscious of, anyway?
You have yet to clearly articulate what this magical pixie dust of consciousness is supposed to be.
Nobody has an explanation of consciousness, so the magical pixie dust remains a mystery. I think it's fundamental. Nobody has proven the opposite: that it arises from things (e.g. information processing) happening in matter.
I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?
Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests.
There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally accepted. For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. At the very minimum, I think to be conscious of anything (other than nothing) requires the ability to sense the physical environment.
For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter.
requires the ability to sense the physical environment
Aren't those two statements at odds? Your synapses are made of matter, so sensing the physical environment is being done by matter. You are fundamentally matter (AFAIK). To suggest otherwise the only thing that comes to mind is substance dualism.
My position is that we don't know. I know I'm conscious. I assume other humans are simply because they're approximately the same as me and were produced by the same process. The farther you get from humans the less certain I am. Many insects resemble biological automatons if you examine them closely. Certainly single celled organisms don't seem likely to have anything going on.
If you figure that a clod of dirt can't possibly be conscious but a mouse is, what's the relevant physical difference? Electricity? Computers have that. Complexity? Information density? Both of those as well.
Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.
So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.
Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it.
Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence?
Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior?
Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.
So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.
I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..."
So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step ...
I should have said, "The conscious experience (of qualia) is an extra step, and if consciousness is fundamental then that's a kind of substance dualism.
Thanks for pointing these out - I should have proof-read my reply before posting.
You still haven't answered the question. You think ... why? Based on what?
If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior? Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?
If it's not fundamental then what precludes a computer program from exhibiting it?
If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior?
If I understand you correctly, it might not be exerting influence over our behaviour.
By influence, are you referring to free will rather than just the illusion of it? That's precluded by classical physics, and quantum mechanics just adds randomness. You can make a measurement, but there's no evidence you can influence the result you get.
Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?
Comments
Ah yes, because you used the magical pixie dust that makes experiences "real" therefore you're actually seeing and hearing while a multimodal LLM doesn't really experience what it sees and hears "for real". We can be certain of this because, despite not being able to quantify or even rigorously define the phenomenon we intentionally deprive the LLMs of access to said magical pixie dust.
I agree. To further ask, why is your training data objectively real and qualifies you for consciousness?
Is a deaf or blind person not conscious because they don't share your training data? If a deaf person reads about sounds, their experience of them is moot?
If an alien with a greater array of senses then us exists, are we therefore not conscious?
People aren't just consciousness, they're conscious of things. Of course a deaf or blind person is conscious, even if they've been deaf or blind since birth. But they aren't conscious of hearing or seeing things, and if you ask them they'll tell you that.
I'm not conscious of magnetic fields, or ultraviolet light, but other animals are, and no amount of study will overcome that deficit.
Okay, but there are multi-modal models. So do those experience qualia of sound and images? Do the text based ones experience the qualia of reading, or of finally comprehending a difficult concept after struggling with it?
For that matter, what exactly is the difference between "seeing" that a car is red versus an LLM reading an array of pixel data? Your eyes "just" translate photons into analog signals after all.
I've already answered this. There's no way someone deaf from birth could know what it's like to hear sounds, by looking at the pixels in a sound recording they know the format of, and if you don't believe me you can ask them. Or by looking at a speech spectrogram (which, with practice, are more easily readable).
Or you can ask yourself what ultraviolet looks like, or what it's like to sense a magnetic field. Lots of animals can do these, and would know what it's like, but people can't.
No, you have not answered. I asked you what you believe the difference is between the two phenomena in concrete terms. What you've done is beg the question.
On what basis could you possibly make this claim? What does it mean to hear? You're taking in information and decoding it, right? So what magical pixie dust could your eardrum possibly be applying that specially privileges that particular mode of input?
How is an LLM "reading" pixel data fundamentally different from your eyes transforming it into an analog signal?
Please be specific about the mechanism.
People with absent qualia have been asked, e.g. Knut Nordby: https://www.consc.net/misc/achromat.html
"Although I have acquired a thorough theoretical knowledge of the physics of colours and the physiology of the colour receptor mechanisms, nothing of this can help me to understand the true nature of colours. From the history of art I have also learned about the meanings often attributed to colours and how colours have been used at different times, but this too does not give me an understanding of the essential character or quality of colours."
Knut Nordby was in the same position as an LLM as far as colours are concerned. He learned all he could but words didn't give him any idea of *what it's like to see them". LLMs have access to everything that's written about colours, but that didn't help Nordby.
Nordby's no longer around to ask about image files, but how do you think reading thems would help? He might then have been able to say, e.g. "This pixel is orange," but he still wouldn't have known what it's like to see orange. The same applies to a multimodal LLM.
I'm not claiming that any particular disabled person has managed to achieve it. I'm asking on what basis you claim it to be categorically impossible.
You've claimed that black swans are impossible, I've asked how you arrived at that conclusion, and your answer is that you looked and don't see any.
You're here claiming that what submarines do is somehow fundamentally different than swimming and that we know this because they don't have legs. You need legs to swim. And I'm questioning the soundness of your reasoning and you're pointing to cripples without legs who can't swim as evidence. It doesn't make any sense.
How is a multimodal LLM taking in RGB data fundamentally different than what your eyes are doing? That is the core question that you keep dodging.
Because the neural correlates of consciousness wouldn't exist in their brain. I've even looked into what happens if someone, blind from birth, takes LSD. There aren't any large scale studies as it's very difficult to get approval for them, but the short answer appears to be that they don't see things: https://www.livescience.com/62343-psychedelics-lsd-effects-b...
The multimodal LLM is a program run as a process on a computer, which isn't aware of what it's running: it's just blindly, repeatedly, executing whatever instruction is at its program counter. The LLM itself isn't doing anything. It's just sitting somewhere in memory being executed by the computer. Brains, on the other hand, don't run programs. Each part of the brain has a special purpose, and somewhere in it there are neurons which correlate with what is being experienced whenever something is looked at.
And what are those in concrete terms? Why can't a computer program have those? You have yet to articulate what special property is giving rise to this.
And what exactly is special about the neuron that the biological hardware can do this but the inorganic can't? Is your claim that current silicon doesn't do this (but future might be able to) or that no silicon construction could _ever_ do this?
You have yet to clearly articulate what this magical pixie dust of consciousness is supposed to be.
Because it isn't a physical object capable of sensing the physical environment, the way the brain is via the sense organs. I don't rule out the possibility that a robot, equipped with with a camera and microphone and processing the information it receives from them might be conscious of sight and sound, but not a program. If I read and execute a computer program in my head, I'm conscious of my thoughts while doing that, but are those thoughts themselves conscious?? I don't think so. What would they be conscious of, anyway?
Nobody has an explanation of consciousness, so the magical pixie dust remains a mystery. I think it's fundamental. Nobody has proven the opposite: that it arises from things (e.g. information processing) happening in matter.
But you can't experience the qualia of tokens coming in and LLMs can.
I just explained this. If someone looks at the contents of an image file without displaying it, they don't experience the colours either. So how can LLMs experience them?
Right. Because your eyes ... imbue the magical pixie dust ... no wait, is it your visual cortex that does it? Hmm ...
Less facetiously, I'm unclear where you believe this magic "qualia" thing to be happening and what you believe the (meta?)physical mechanism to be.
Quite a lot has been published about neural correlates of consciousness, so I'll go with whatever the evidence suggests.
There are literally hundreds of attempted explanations of phenomenal consciousness, none of which is generally accepted. For what it's worth, I think it's fundamental, i.e. not an emergent property of matter. At the very minimum, I think to be conscious of anything (other than nothing) requires the ability to sense the physical environment.
What's your position?
Aren't those two statements at odds? Your synapses are made of matter, so sensing the physical environment is being done by matter. You are fundamentally matter (AFAIK). To suggest otherwise the only thing that comes to mind is substance dualism.
My position is that we don't know. I know I'm conscious. I assume other humans are simply because they're approximately the same as me and were produced by the same process. The farther you get from humans the less certain I am. Many insects resemble biological automatons if you examine them closely. Certainly single celled organisms don't seem likely to have anything going on.
If you figure that a clod of dirt can't possibly be conscious but a mouse is, what's the relevant physical difference? Electricity? Computers have that. Complexity? Information density? Both of those as well.
What do you think it means to sense?
Sensing (i.e. picking up information about its environment through sense organs) is a physical phenomenon and is reasonably well-understood. Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it. Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.
So what's conscious? People and other animals with sense organs and nervous systems. It's even possible that anything which senses its environment could be conscious: https://organism.earth/library/document/what-is-it-like-to-b... . That might include a robot connected to a camera and other sensory apparatus. Now you could argue that a computer running an LLM can pick up what its user types, and might therefore be conscious of which keys are being pressed. But not of the colours, sounds, smells, and other things described by human authors in its training set.
Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence?
Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior?
So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.
I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..."
I should have said, "The conscious experience (of qualia) is an extra step, and if consciousness is fundamental then that's a kind of substance dualism.
Thanks for pointing these out - I should have proof-read my reply before posting.
You still haven't answered the question. You think ... why? Based on what?
If consciousness is fundamental (ie substance dualism) then how is it exerting influence over our behavior? Isn't it the equivalent of watching a movie at that point?
If it's not fundamental then what precludes a computer program from exhibiting it?
Sorry for the late reply.
If I understand you correctly, it might not be exerting influence over our behaviour.
By influence, are you referring to free will rather than just the illusion of it? That's precluded by classical physics, and quantum mechanics just adds randomness. You can make a measurement, but there's no evidence you can influence the result you get.
Yes.