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.
You can hook computer randomness up to truly random* quantum processes with fairly simple specialized chips. Building your argument on such an easily avoided technical detail isn’t wise, because the question can very easily just be asked for a computer that does have access to a source of true randomness. Then it can be nondeterministic-- so what does that have to do with its consciousness or lack thereof?
* unless the entire universe is secretly deterministic, I guess.
I know.
I’m not building my argument solely on this, but maybe I’m being unclear, so I apologize.
Let’s do exactly what you propose; now we pass a seed to the LLM generated from a true hardware-based random number generator. That doesn’t change anything about the LLM itself: it’s still deterministic. I don’t think it’s reasonable to claim that a deterministic algorithm can be conscious, and I think there are other factors as well (the fact that it doesn’t exist continuously, it exists for brief periods simultaneously in thousands/millions of instances at once, the fact that it is static and unchanging unless re-trained, etc) which all paint a pretty clear picture that it cannot have consciousness.
I think I covered this pretty well in my other response, so I’ll leave that as the main thread and I don’t expect a separate response here. But for anyone else reading this thread, tl;dr: You could construct a system using an LLM as its core that has most of these properties, and don’t think you can point to the individual components of that system (like the core deterministic LLM) not meeting some set of requirements for consciousness and conclude that the overall system is not conscious. In humans it seems that either consciousness spontaneously arises from non-conscious sub-components (neurons and other stuff), or that each sub-component has some aspect of consciousness which combine to form the whole one which we know of. You can poke holes in that argument-- it doesn’t prove that LLMs themselves are conscious, just implies that it may not be impossible to use one to build a conscious system, and it’s much less well-integrated than a human brain would be. But I think the core of the argument is worth thinking about.