Thursday, October 12, 2023

Consciousness and AI

Here are three interesting intuitions (or maybe evan data points) worth chewing on:

  1. Large language models are smarter than squirrels.

  2. Large language models are not conscious.

  3. Squirrels are conscious.

I feel—without having formulate a rigorous argument—that these three data points rather nicely support Ben Page’s thesis that computation-without-consciousness is what we would expect non-theistic evolution to yield.

2 comments:

  1. #1 isn't true if smartness requires consciousness (a la the chinese room argument).

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  2. True. I am thinking of smartness as a behavioral and computational sophistication kind of thing.

    ReplyDelete