The problem is that current AI has nothing in common with consciousness as found in (say) cats and dogs, whatever that might be - no robot is even close to being as conscious as a cockroach - yet human consciousness seems to have great overlap with consciousness in nonhuman animals. The tiny fragment of human consciousness that appears to overlap with LLMs should be called something else, maybe “virtual sapience” as exhibited in LLMs. (The overarching difficulty here is we don’t know enough about consciousness/sentience/sapience to define them precisely.)
> The problem is that current AI has nothing in common with consciousness as found in (say) cats and dogs, whatever that might be - no robot is even close to being as conscious as a cockroach - yet human consciousness seems to have great overlap with consciousness in nonhuman animals.
Given we don't know what consciousness is — worse, there's around 40 different definitions, and I've seen people use "is a living biological organism" as one of them here on HN — we not only absolutely cannot say if the parts of our minds that give rise to it are, or are not, functionally equivalent to what LLMs do with attention.
We also definitely cannot put them on a graph with cockroaches, which, like LLMs, may or may not have any at all.
It's like we've got this word "weather", and some people are saying that only their own country really experiences "weather" because what they mean by the word is the most characteristic part of their local climate (windy moistness for Britain, sunny for the Sahara, snow for Siberia, rain for the Amazon etc.), and then we made a telescope and looked at Mars and are now arguing that Mars can't have real weather because there's no water there.
And then someone else pipes in and is talking about "weather" to mean "daytime", because nobody ever says "what nice weather we're having" at night…
This is common in arguments about AI. One person says why couldn't future AI be conscious, the next replies the problem is current LLMs aren't conscious. Future AI and current LLMs are not the same thing.
Future AI no doubt will be able to be conscious for practical purposes.
