I generally don’t think LLMs today are conscious, as far as i can tell neither does Sam Altman, but there is some disagreement. They could acquire some characteristics that could be considered conscious as scale increases. However merely having “qualia” and being conscious is not the same thing as being functionally equivalent a new human, let alone a specific human. The term “upload” as commonly understood is a creation of a software construct functionally and qualia-equivalent to a specific human.
a human brain in a vat wouldn’t be so far from the experience of language models.
Please don’t try to generalize over all human minds based on your experience. Human experience is more than just reading and writing language. Some people have a differing level of identification with their “language center,” for some it might seem like the “seat of the self,” for others it is just another module, some people have next to no internal dialogue at all. I suspect that these differences + cultural differences around “self-identification with linguistic experience” are actually quite large.
I personally want to maintain my human form as a whole but expect to drastically upgrade the micro-substrate beyond biology at some point
I suspect a lot of the problems described in this post also occur on the microscale level with that strategy as well.
I generally don’t think LLMs today are conscious, as far as i can tell neither does Sam Altman, but there is some disagreement. They could acquire some characteristics that could be considered conscious as scale increases. However merely having “qualia” and being conscious is not the same thing as being functionally equivalent a new human, let alone a specific human. The term “upload” as commonly understood is a creation of a software construct functionally and qualia-equivalent to a specific human.
a human brain in a vat wouldn’t be so far from the experience of language models.
Please don’t try to generalize over all human minds based on your experience. Human experience is more than just reading and writing language. Some people have a differing level of identification with their “language center,” for some it might seem like the “seat of the self,” for others it is just another module, some people have next to no internal dialogue at all. I suspect that these differences + cultural differences around “self-identification with linguistic experience” are actually quite large.
I personally want to maintain my human form as a whole but expect to drastically upgrade the micro-substrate beyond biology at some point
I suspect a lot of the problems described in this post also occur on the microscale level with that strategy as well.