Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
As others have pointed out we do not even agree on what consciousness is. There are three competing camps:
If you are in camp 1 the conversation about consciousness is getting more complicated as AI passes more tests. If you are in camp 2 AI can never be conscious. If you are in camp 3 AI and everything else is conscious including rocks and rivers and the stars in the sky.
I think arguments like this are misleading when discussing the question of AI possessing consciousness. Materialism, dualism, panpsychism, idealism, etc are all philosophical concepts; they attempt to answer “what is the nature of consciousness and how does it arise from the body?” from a philosophical standpoint. All of the various options have pros and cons and there is no clear “winner.”
However, there are decent scientific definitions for consciousness. These attempt to answer the question of “what do we mean when we say something is conscious?” from a scientific standpoint. There are criteria that neuroscientists, doctors, etc generally agree on.
So it’s not really correct to say “no one knows what consciousness is” when evaluating whether something is conscious. And I think it’s quite clear that current LLM algorithms could never be conscious, using the current accepted scientific criteria.
(I’m not a philosopher or a neuroscientist, but I do have a degree in computer science and have a solid understanding of how LLMs work.)
Ok, I’ll ask. What are these decent scientific definitions for consciousness and how can we use them to construct a test for consciousness?
You are free to search the web, there’s lots of information out there. You might start with the Wikipedia article on consciousness.
Oh, I thought you might have something new to say. If you’re just using the normal definition and not bringing any sort of testability (which imo is impossible) or new arguments, how exactly does the common definition prove anything must be non-conscious? That seems like the main claim of your comment, yet it seems like an unsupported assertion; if the common definition of consciousness could easily prove things not to be conscious as you seem to imply, this discussion would not be happening at all.
From Wikipedia:
The Cambridge English Dictionary defines consciousness as “the state of being awake, thinking, and knowing what is happening around you”, as well as “the state of understanding and realizing something”.
Most of these are trivially easy to test (not sure why you think that’s impossible). And LLMs have none of those properties.
Later:
“The having of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings; awareness.”
Again, LLMs have none of these things. They simply generate a probable natural-language response based on their training, deterministically.
Feel free to do further research on your own if you’re interested.
Philosophy is one of my hobbies and consciousness one of my fascinations. Respectfully, doing “research” by skimming the wikipedia article would be a waste of our time; as would responding to any particular definition and arguing over the individual words people have used in summaries of the topic. So I’ll skip that phase of the convo.
The fundamental problem with measuring consciousness is that it’s an internal state (a “qualia”*). It is fundamentally an experience, something that exists only as a concept in your mind. This makes it immeasurable.
That’s quite the claim, so I’ll provide a smaller concrete example: color. Obviously you can measure the frequency of a photon and say “ah yes, 700nm, that photon is red”. But strictly speaking, the photon isn’t red, it just causes you to percieve “red”; it has a wavelength which triggers your eyes and brain to produce the subjective experience of the color red. That subjective experience of color is a qualia, and it is not directly measurable; at best you can measure the phenomenon that causes that qualia in you, and assume that that phenomenon would cause the same qualia in someone else when they percieve that photon. Technically, you can’t be sure that this assumption is true-- this leads to the “Inverted Spectrum” thought experiment (another great wiki page if you prefer their explanations to mine), where someone’s subjective experience of color as it relates to the frequency of light could be entirely different to your own.
Anyways, you cannot prove the existence of nonexistence of such an internal experience, and consciousness belongs to this category of qualia. You know that you are conscious because you experience being conscious, not because you can prove it by looking at what you do. You can’t even be sure that I’m conscious, even if you met me in real life; you can’t prove that I am actually thinking, feeling, understanding, knowing, or realizing anything, because you cannot be me. You can only assume that I am doing those things because you observe me doing stuff in physical reality that’s consistent with the way the only entity you can be sure is conscious (you) is acting, and assuming that since I’m made of the same stuff as you and I act kind of like you do that I am probably conscious.
If you could actually prove that it is impossible for a machine to be conscious without that same argument applying to humans, then the philosophy community of the last several millenia would praise you as their messiah. I am interested to see what your argument would be if you want to give it a shot though-- no harm in trying.
* Like “data”/“datum”, technically the singular form is “quale”, but I’m gonna be real, nobody ever says that. Anyways if you like reading wikipedia pages about philosophy, “qualia” is a good one!
How is red a subjective experience? We can all experience red things, at least, all of us with functioning eyes. What about that is subjective? How is color not directly measurable? Color is very easy to measure, we can even assign it values, like (r,g,b). If you see something red, you have already measured it to have the values (>0,0,0). I don’t know what the term “internal experience” even means. Experience is just something that happens to something else. A rock experiences erosion in the rain. I am experiencing tiredness right now. To say something experiences something is to just say X is happening to Y. I don’t see how it is meaningful to assign adjectives like “internal” or “external” to it. I mean, if the adjective was meaningful, then would it not imply that you are implicitly contrasting “internal experience” with “external experience”? What on earth would external experience be? If you cannot tell me what external experience is, then the adjective “internal” is contrasting it with nothing at all, so it is a useless adjective.
If you don’t understand what I’m trying to explain about qualia or that there is a philosophical distinction between the physical world and your perception, just read the wikipedia article on qualia or any similar introductory material to the philosophy of the mind. It answers like 90% of your questions.
Some specific answers though:
RGB is measuring/defining proportions of different wavelengths of light, even if its goal is to describe that light in a way that is supposed to elicit a particular subjective experience in the viewer. Color spaces are a MASSIVE rabbit hole so I would suggest using the simpler example of how an individual photon has a wavelength that makes us percieve the subjective experience of red, rather than being red itself. Although actually, bringing up RGB gives me an idea for something to point out: qualia and the physical world can “desync”, which is evidence they are different. If you see light with a wavelength of ~600nm, such as that produced by a sodium lamp or banana, you will percieve it as yellow. But that subjective experience of yellow is also triggered by seeing both ~700nm and ~500nm wavelengths of light simultaneously, which you would individually percieve as red and green respectively. This is how your computer screen does it. ||I guess technically you could argue the cone activations in your eye end up the same, so this may be a bad example… regardless, the point is that something like a taste or smell or color has no physical meaning, they are experiences which are caused by physical phenomena rather than being the physical phenomena themselves.||
I am using “internal experience” to mean the subjective way that you percieve the world. If I just used “experience” you could use it more broadly in your sense of “X is happening to you”, which is not what I mean. I guess you could call those things happening in the physical world an “external experience” but I agree, that is a bit confusing and is not my intention. I am using “internal” to make a more specific compound term, not really to contrast it with “external”. But if you are using the word “experience” to mean “C is happening to you” then yes, the external experience is the thing that is physically happening and the internal experience is your perception of it happening to you.
Almost none of this is relevant to the discussion here – I’m not interested in philosophical discussions of consciousness when it comes to the question of whether an LLM is conscious. Though I’m already aware of most of what you said here, and the philosophy of consciousness is interesting in general to me!
Quick nitpick: I never said it’s impossible for a machine to be conscious, I said it’s impossible for an LLM to be conscious. We may well invent something new in the future that qualifies as both “machine” and “conscious,” but an LLM is not that thing.
When people ask “is an LLM conscious?” I assume they’re asking from a practical, scientific perspective – does the LLM experience the world in a similar way to the way I (and presumably, others) do? If that is the question, the various definitions I already posted are what we should be using to answer. Since an LLM is a deterministic algorithm whose only purpose is to generate a plausible response to input based on its training data, it cannot possibly think, or have feelings. It does not even exist continuously in time, and it is fixed and unchanging, unable to incorporate any new information at all. We don’t actually need to measure or test anything here; that an LLM lacks all of these things demonstrates that it’s not possible for it to be conscious.
I’d probably fall into the mechanist category but I don’t think tests as I understand your description would be sufficient. A giant lookup table defining my responses for every situation in my life would pass all tests of input > output but not be conscious.
I would say it’s in all likelihood about the physical processes that occur during the process of input > output that would define it.
Of course, I have no idea what consciousness actually is, but I don’t see any compelling evidence that the current models are anywhere near there.
There are days where I don’t believe I even have it. The human brain is still a mystery.
Option 4: Orch-or theory. Conscoousness emerge from quantum mechanism. 🤘
Option 4: the bridge between materialism and panpsychism