> Claude is akin to a counterfeit person. Dawkins should never have glorified such a thing.
I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR you say "what LLMs are doing is a counterfeit" which suggests a real output produced through different means.
If I have a counterfeit Rolex, nobody denies that the watch can tell time. A counterfeit human isn't a human and it's not made by nature, but the implication is that it's effectively doing the same thing. That's a different thing than the author starts out saying.
I think it's important that when you talk about consciousness, you pin down exactly what you mean. Does it require the entity to have a mechanism for experiencing emotion? For exhibiting reasoning ability? For exhibiting characteristics of common sense? I don't think it's a useful definition to say, flatly, "does the things an adult human does through the same mechanisms".
I find this sentence to diminish the author's argument. I'm not going to claim an LLM is or is not conscious, but there's a shaky ground here where you either say "consciousness is a product of the kind of biology that humans have" and dismiss the lack of lived experience or internal states as mimicry (as the author does) OR you say "what LLMs are doing is a counterfeit" which suggests a real output produced through different means.
If I have a counterfeit Rolex, nobody denies that the watch can tell time. A counterfeit human isn't a human and it's not made by nature, but the implication is that it's effectively doing the same thing. That's a different thing than the author starts out saying.
I think it's important that when you talk about consciousness, you pin down exactly what you mean. Does it require the entity to have a mechanism for experiencing emotion? For exhibiting reasoning ability? For exhibiting characteristics of common sense? I don't think it's a useful definition to say, flatly, "does the things an adult human does through the same mechanisms".