I find this intuitively reasonable and in alignment with my own perceptions. A pet peeve of mine has long been that people say “sentient” instead of “sapient”—at minimum since I first read The Color of Magic and really thought about the difference. We’ve never collectively had to consider minds that were more clearly sapient than sentient, and our word-categories aren’t up to it.
I think it’s going to be very difficult to disentangle the degree to which LLMs experience vs imitate the more felt aspects/definitions of consciousness. Not least because even humans sometimes get mixed up about this within ourselves.
In the right person, a gradual-onset mix of physicalized depression symptoms, anhedonia, and alexithymia can go a long way towards making you, in some sense, not fully conscious in a way that is invisible to almost everyone around you. Ask me how I know: There’s a near decade-long period of my life where, when I reminisce about it, I sometimes say things like, “Yeah, I wish I’d been there.”
I find this intuitively reasonable and in alignment with my own perceptions. A pet peeve of mine has long been that people say “sentient” instead of “sapient”—at minimum since I first read The Color of Magic and really thought about the difference. We’ve never collectively had to consider minds that were more clearly sapient than sentient, and our word-categories aren’t up to it.
I think it’s going to be very difficult to disentangle the degree to which LLMs experience vs imitate the more felt aspects/definitions of consciousness. Not least because even humans sometimes get mixed up about this within ourselves.
In the right person, a gradual-onset mix of physicalized depression symptoms, anhedonia, and alexithymia can go a long way towards making you, in some sense, not fully conscious in a way that is invisible to almost everyone around you. Ask me how I know: There’s a near decade-long period of my life where, when I reminisce about it, I sometimes say things like, “Yeah, I wish I’d been there.”