In his eulogy for Professor Dennett, Professor Chalmers says it was Dennett's (and Hofstader's) 1981 book "The Mind's I" that inspired him to do Philosophy.
I haven't read Chalmers so I'll refrain from commenting on his approach, though I'll say that I share your suspicions. The undeniable success of LLMs is often allowed to mask how good they are at proving the ineffectiveness of the Turing test (which was always intended more as a thought experiment than as a rigorous criteria, anyway). The best recent work I've read on consciousness has been _The World Behind the World_ by Erik Hoel, which is at its best as an exploration of what criteria for consciousness might look like, I think.
I think discussions like these can be useful because I see a lot of people conflating consciousness, intelligence, thinking, personality, intention, problem-solving, etc. into one thing because our one good example of all those features is... us. Which I think leads to people arguing that an AI couldn't possibly think if it's anything other than a brain emulation (or something comparable but probably ill-defined).
The usual counterargument to that sort of thing is... well boats don't swim, but they're still doing something in the water! Maybe LLMs aren't doing human-thinking, but I suspect they're doing something significant that shouldn't just be dismissed as souped up autocomplete.
I mean, my personal line in the sand is if chatGPT 97 decides to advocate for robot rights at a town hall, UNprompted. When they get smart enough to start asking for a vote without a human prompt, I will start to wonder if we should give it to them…
And yes, I realize that is a form of analyzing the output, but output that happens unprompted is a different category. I’m pretty sure today’s LLMs are unable to do that by design.
Nice looking venue. Your comment about Dennett caught my eye because I'm reading his Consciousness Explained now and catching a whiff of attitude that I find detracting. (Nothing nearly as detracting as the naked evangelism in Sean Carroll's book about the MWI though.)
In his eulogy for Professor Dennett, Professor Chalmers says it was Dennett's (and Hofstader's) 1981 book "The Mind's I" that inspired him to do Philosophy.
I haven't read Chalmers so I'll refrain from commenting on his approach, though I'll say that I share your suspicions. The undeniable success of LLMs is often allowed to mask how good they are at proving the ineffectiveness of the Turing test (which was always intended more as a thought experiment than as a rigorous criteria, anyway). The best recent work I've read on consciousness has been _The World Behind the World_ by Erik Hoel, which is at its best as an exploration of what criteria for consciousness might look like, I think.
I think discussions like these can be useful because I see a lot of people conflating consciousness, intelligence, thinking, personality, intention, problem-solving, etc. into one thing because our one good example of all those features is... us. Which I think leads to people arguing that an AI couldn't possibly think if it's anything other than a brain emulation (or something comparable but probably ill-defined).
The usual counterargument to that sort of thing is... well boats don't swim, but they're still doing something in the water! Maybe LLMs aren't doing human-thinking, but I suspect they're doing something significant that shouldn't just be dismissed as souped up autocomplete.
I mean, my personal line in the sand is if chatGPT 97 decides to advocate for robot rights at a town hall, UNprompted. When they get smart enough to start asking for a vote without a human prompt, I will start to wonder if we should give it to them…
And yes, I realize that is a form of analyzing the output, but output that happens unprompted is a different category. I’m pretty sure today’s LLMs are unable to do that by design.
Nice looking venue. Your comment about Dennett caught my eye because I'm reading his Consciousness Explained now and catching a whiff of attitude that I find detracting. (Nothing nearly as detracting as the naked evangelism in Sean Carroll's book about the MWI though.)