Ask HN: Any philosophical books that discuss Consciousness related with LLMs era

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48411896

by cx42net • 2 months ago

1 5 2 months ago

news.ycombinator.com

Following the article from Ted Chiang from TheAtlantic - Artificial intelligence is not conscious, I was wondering if you could suggest me some philosophical books that treat the subject of language, what is consciousness and ideally has some link to what we face today with LLms.

These philosphical books could be hundreds of years old but still be on-point with the current discussion, as I'm more interested to think about the philosophical aspect ("what is consciousness") rather than a deep discussion about what an LLM is (which is, in my view, too soon to be able to grasp in its entirety).

Thank you in advance.

dabadabad002• 2 months ago

There is absolutely nothing related to what you seek.

Prior generations of discourse on consciousness have been limited in the obvious ways.

LLMs have nothing to do with consciousness, they are automated statistical models guided by selective training materials.

Consciousness is not awareness is not that which is conscious. Awareness is the tip of consciousness, and conscious means “awake.” We are of consciousness whether we are conscious or aware, and one can attest they can be either aware or unaware as both conscious or unconscious.

Many wish for the “redness of red” and other perceptual aspects to be included in the discussion of consciousness, they call this “phenomenology”, however I believe this out of place. I assert that consciousness is “the inflection of the potential of existential being”, and that the quantum domain acts as a holographic sieve which our neurons may access through mass entanglement.

Our present technology or scientific understanding does not encompass either how our neurons interact with the quantum domain or how it behaves as a holographic sieve, or we would not be talking about qubits, which are merely spin disposition and not the information density of holographic memory.

We aren’t there yet and the discussion of consciousness is stuck on “the redness of red” which is merely a multidimensional property of the hologram and perceptual biotechnology of the observer as stored in this “holographic sieve of the mass entangled quantum domain.”

Many think that is bull datum until science can explain otherwise.

cx42net2• 2 months ago

Thank you for your reply.

At first, I thought I had wrongly explained myself, so I checked what I wrote. Maybe it wasn't clear but I'm not looking for consciousness in the LLM era, but more about the philosophical research on what defines consciousness and the parallels that can be done with the LLMs era (parallels not in the sense of similitude, but in the sense of things that would appear similar but are not).

In a more generic and simple example, LLMs are good at producing language that resonates with us, and because of that, could be believed they have thoughts (they can write things like "I think you should .."), even thought they are not capable of thoughts, and are only producing the next logical word one after the other.

In the same sense, it would be interesting to read about philosophers that tried to define what consciousness is (or is not) and their age isn't relevant to today's LLM era. The connection can be done by the reader on what consciousness is, and what LLM is not, in the same vein as what thought and language is between our species and LLMs.

I'm not sure this more clear ^

dabadabad002• 1 month ago

I have studied philosophy and human history for decades. While there is much to be said, you will not find a more relevant summary than I have provided.

Like discussions of “atoms” or “electricity” before modernity, there is nothing that can even articulate the concerns beyond those obvious things everyone “wonders” about.

There is nothing.

You might as well read poetry or love stories.

__patchbit__• 2 months ago

Michael Levin argues strongly for pancognitivism (https://x.com/drmichaellevin/status/2062862619480871365?s=20) and he could write a book but would enough people read it to justify the effort? Lee Smart observes that LLMs don't appear to have full self sustaining closure (https://x.com/VFD_org/status/2058207487254204680?s=20). Jürgen Schmidhuber gave a talk some decades ago and the audio went mute for a minute when he spoke of Plato and how ancients thought of thinking or consciousness (https://x.com/SchmidhuberAI), maybe track down his bibliorefs.

cx42net2• 2 months ago

Thank you for these links. Reading about pancognitivism and self sustaining closure is showing how complex the notion of consciousness can be, how its definition can vary from person to person. It also show how easy it can be for LLMs to give the illusion of consciousness when this is not clearly defined.

Ask HN: Any philosophical books that discuss Consciousness related with LLMs era

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