you’re making a token-predicting transformer out of a virtual system with a human emulation as a component.
Should it make a difference? Same iterative computation.
In the system, the words “what’s your earliest memory?” appearing on the paper are going to trigger all sorts of interesting (emulated) neural mechanisms that eventually lead to a verbal response, but the token predictor doesn’t necessarily need to emulate any of that.
Yes, I talked about optimizations a bit. I think you are missing a point of this example. The point is that if you are trying to conclude from the fact that this system is doing next token prediction then it’s definitely not conscious, you are wrong. And my example is an existence proof, kind of.
Should it make a difference? Same iterative computation.
Not necessarily, a lot of information is being discarded when you’re only looking at the paper/verbal output. As an extreme example, if the emulated brain had been instructed (or had the memory of being instructed) to say the number of characters written on the paper and nothing else, the computational properties of the system as a whole would be much simpler than of the emulation.
I might be missing the point. I agree with you that an architecture that predicts tokens isn’t necessarily non-conscious. I just don’t think the fact that a system predicts tokens generated by a conscious process is reason to suspect that the system itself is conscious without some other argument.
Should it make a difference? Same iterative computation.
Yes, I talked about optimizations a bit. I think you are missing a point of this example. The point is that if you are trying to conclude from the fact that this system is doing next token prediction then it’s definitely not conscious, you are wrong. And my example is an existence proof, kind of.
Not necessarily, a lot of information is being discarded when you’re only looking at the paper/verbal output. As an extreme example, if the emulated brain had been instructed (or had the memory of being instructed) to say the number of characters written on the paper and nothing else, the computational properties of the system as a whole would be much simpler than of the emulation.
I might be missing the point. I agree with you that an architecture that predicts tokens isn’t necessarily non-conscious. I just don’t think the fact that a system predicts tokens generated by a conscious process is reason to suspect that the system itself is conscious without some other argument.