Post

Are LLMs conscious? Some people are loudly insisting that the correct response is "They might be! We don't know." I think it's better to say: We have no evidence that they are.

We have evidence that humans are conscious. We have each experienced it! We know what it's like to be conscious, and that being unconscious is different. This is where the whole idea of consciousness comes from.

Famously, each of us only has this kind of direct evidence of our own consciousness. This is known in philosophy as the problem of other minds. But that doesn't mean we have no evidence that other people are conscious.

What is that evidence? Well, we know that other people are like ourselves in many ways. And when I speak about my own consciousness, I do so from experience, as a way of trying to describe that experience. It is reasonable to think other humans are doing the same.

So other people's claims about their own conscious experience are evidence of their consciousness. It's not certain, but it's reasonable to believe that their conscious experience is similar to mine, just as many other things about them are similar to me.

It's even reasonable to infer that some nonhuman animals might have conscious experience. They're less like me, but not totally dissimilar. We have shared ancestry. Consciousness must have evolved — maybe before us. They can't talk about their experiences, but they may well have them!

However, even if this is evidence, it can be undermined by other evidence. Suppose, for example, that a tape recorder emits sounds that, for all anyone can tell, are exactly like a human saying "I am conscious!" Should we think that it is? Obviously not.

The reason for this is that a tape recorder is nothing like anything that we know to be conscious. More importantly, we can explain precisely how it came to emit these sounds, and the mechanism has nothing to do with anyone's experience of consciousness.

LLMs are like this. The mechanism by which they function is maybe less perfectly understood (by most people), but it is well-understood enough that we can confidently explain how an LLM would come to claim to be conscious without having any experience of such.