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Funny how you began a thread with “I am not special” and ended it with “anyone who disagrees with me doesn’t matter.”
Maybe you don’t, but I have qualia. You can try to deny the reality of what I experience, but you will never convince me. And because you are the same thing as me, I assume you have the same experiences I do.
If it is only just LLMs that give you the sense that “Everything I’ve felt, everything I will ever feel, has been felt before,” and not the study of human history, let alone sharing a planet with billions of people just like you — well, that strikes me as quite a profound, and rather sad, disconnection from the human species.
You may consider your dogmas as true as I consider mine, but the one thing we both mustn’t do is pretend none of any moral or intellectual significance disagree.
I believe the argument isn't that you lack qualia, but rather that it is possible for artificial systems to experience them too.
Yeah, rereading, I made a mistake with that part, apologies.
The rest of my point still stands: this is a philosophical question, not an empirical one. We learn nothing about human consciousness from machine behavior -- certainly nothing we don't already know, even if the greatest dreams of AI boosters come true.
People who believe consciousness is a rote product of natural selection will still believe consciousness is a rote product of natural selection, and people who believe consciousness is special will still believe consciousness is special. Some may switch sides, based on inductive evidence, and some may find one more reasonable than the other. Who prevails in the judgment of history will be the side that appeals most to power, not truth, as with all changes in prevailing philosophies.
But nothing empirical is proof in the deductive sense; this still must be reasoned through, and assumptions must be made. Some will choose one assumption, one will choose the other. And like the other assumption, it is a dogma that must be chosen.
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I'd be interested in hearing that argument as applied to LLMs.
I can certainly conceive of an artificial lifeform experiencing qualia. But it seems very far-fetched for LLMs in anything like their current state.
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