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0 pointsHillRat3y ago0 comments

To be honest, I think your question is the other side of the conceptual coin here -- either the article is wrong and GPT3 isn't "sentient," or the article is right and we need to radically upend our concept of sentience, probably via an eliminativist materialism that ends in at least epiphenomenalism if not full-bore illusionism, removing either free will or consciousness itself from our worldview.

To be honest, I find that approach compelling if not comforting -- at a minimum, it implies that our consciousness is just along for the ride in a deterministic meat machine; at worst, it means that what we consider "sentience" is just an illusion of an illusion. It's entirely possible to me that eventually AI will reach a point where it'll falsify many of our assumptions about what "mind" is, even if I'm sure that LLMs don't, at a minimum, satisfy our folk conceptions of consciousness.

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naasking3y ago

> To be honest, I think your question is the other side of the conceptual coin here -- either the article is wrong and GPT3 isn't "sentient," or the article is right and we need to radically upend our concept of sentience

We don't really have a mechanistic understanding of sentience, so I'm not sure there's much to overturn. This is why I'm so annoyed every time some "expert" claims that LaMDA or GPT are not sentient or not conscious or what have you. These are all vague concepts that lack mechanistic definitions that would let us make such definitive claims.

That said, consciousness is almost certainly an illusion, and it will be a particular kind of information processing system with certain properties [1]. GPT and other LLMs may or may not qualify, time will tell.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119

NemoNobody3y ago

I've thought a lot about free will and have determined that because what we choose is still what becomes real, even if all choices are pre-determined, a simple 1 out of 3 choice scenario allows for a fair degree of free will, albeit within a framework.

It's like a game - all choices will almost always lead to the end of a story in a game, some games this feels very straightforward, others like we can do anything - none allow actual free will at all.

Reality allows us a lot of free will - as allowed by the rules of course. Choice is significant. We are Watcher Chooser at least - even if it's illusion, it's an evolving illusion dependent on choices we make. Out of all the possible " illusions" we determine what becomes the "real" illusion that is reality. What I didn't do is less real than what I did do .

Free will doesn't actually exist inside of Skyrim and yet there are things within Skyrim only 1% of Players do - reality is much greater than Skyrim.

to;dr: We don't have free will - not really, it's not likely possible but what we have might as well be free will. It's got to be treated that way, we are not just along for a ride, as our ilusory choices create our illusion of reality.

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