alt text
Crudely drawn drawing of a person telling a computer “say ‘i am in pain’”. The computer replies with “> I AM IN PAIN”. The person then says “oh my god.”
Crudely drawn drawing of a person telling a computer “say ‘i am in pain’”. The computer replies with “> I AM IN PAIN”. The person then says “oh my god.”
The moment you define human experience or human consciousness through language is the moment you open the door to emergent properties for that very experience or consciousness. Learning through science that we think or that we act a certain way deterministically is also giving us the means to self-correct or condition ourselves to act or to have a different viewpoint. This is the difference between us and machines: we collectively defined the perimeters of our experiences (phenomenologically or through a science-based approach) and therefore anything that changes that perimeter also changes the context of the human experience in an infinitely recursive way.
We also use language in ways that make us able to collectively conceptualize the world and its phenomenas, although we individually interpret words differently, idiosyncratically from our individual experience and value systems. This is something else that differentiate us from machines: we don’t need the outputs and inputs to be mathematically the same to minimally understand each other. Our way to communicate, although imperfect and imprecise, has made us able to cooperate on a higher level than any other species (as of known) despite those epistemological hurdles.
I would posit that LLMs have no such emergent capabilities, as they’re bound by their training datasets and limited by their model’s parameters. The burden of proof for those emergent properties are on the data scientists, and as of yet I have seen no such proof.
Language has nothing to do with qualia. I’m perfectly capable of having experiences without putting them into language. I don’t need the word “pain” to know that touching a hot stove feels bad. Animals have qualia too. I don’t give a shit whether an AI can talk, I don’t think that has anything to do with qualia.
I think qualia may arise from the structure of the animal brain as a system of neurons correlating information together into larger patterns. This structure and process is present in all forms of ANN technology, including both LLMs (chatbots) and LDMs (image generators). We need to halt all corporate AI use until the role of neuron structures in producing qualia is well-understood.