[ExI] LLMs cannot be conscious

[Darin Sunley]

If you ask ChatGPT to provide an "operational definition" it will hand you
one.

Are we now moving the goalposts on consciousness to where nothing that
isn't at least a virtual robot with sensors and manipulators embedded in a
3+1 dimensional space could possibly be conscious?

The inhabitants of Plato's Cave have entered the conversation (or at least,
they're blinking furiously).

On Mon, Mar 20, 2023 at 9:26 AM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> Dictionaries do not actually contain or know the meanings of words, and I
> see no reason to think LLMs are any different.-gts
>
> As John would say:  we have to have examples to really understand
> meaning,   But the words we are talking about are abstractions without any
> clear objective referent, so we and the AIs and the dictionary are reduced
> to synonyms for 'meaning' and 'understanding' etc.  In science we use
> operational definitions to try to solve this problem.  bill w
>
>
> On Sun, Mar 19, 2023 at 1:05 AM Gordon Swobe via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>> Consider that LLMs are like dictionaries. A complete dictionary can give
>> you the definition of any word, but that definition is in terms of other
>> words in the same dictionary. If you want to understand  *meaning* of any
>> word definition,  you must look up the definitions of each word in the
>> definition, and then look up each of the words in those definitions, which
>> leads to an infinite regress.
>>
>> Dictionaries do not actually contain or know the meanings of words, and I
>> see no reason to think LLMs are any different.
>>
>> -gts
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>  Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 3:39 AM Gordon Swobe <gordon.swobe at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I think those who think LLM  AIs like ChatGPT are becoming conscious or
>>> sentient like humans fail to understand a very important point: these
>>> software applications only predict language. They are very good at
>>> predicting which word should come next in a sentence or question, but they
>>> have no idea what the words mean. They do not and cannot understand what
>>> the words refer to. In linguistic terms, they lack referents.
>>>
>>> Maybe you all already understand this, or maybe you have some reasons
>>> why I am wrong.
>>>
>>> -gts
>>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> extropy-chat mailing list
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
>> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20230320/a4cee8d8/attachment.htm>