>There is no way for such a collective pretence to get started. (This is the refutation of p-zombies.)
It could have originally had coordination utility for the units, and thus been transmitted in the manner of culture and language.
One test might then be if feral children or dirt digger tribesman asserted their own individual consciousness (though I wonder if a language with “I” built into it could force one to backfill something in the space during on the spot instance that patterns involving the word “I” are used, which also could be happening with the LLMs).
There is no problem with “I”—it makes sense to refer to the human speaking as “I”. The problem is with ascribing non-physical irreducible causality. Blame and responsibility are (comparatively) effective coordination mechanisms, that’s why societies that had it outcompeted those that didn’t. It doesn’t matter that the explanation is non-physical.
It might be that we know a language that originally didn’t have personal pronouns: Pirahã. And a culture with a high value on no-coercion, which means that expectations of conforming are absent. There is an aspect of consciousness—the awareness of the difference between expected and actual behaviors—that might just not develop in such a context.
>There is no way for such a collective pretence to get started. (This is the refutation of p-zombies.)
It could have originally had coordination utility for the units, and thus been transmitted in the manner of culture and language.
One test might then be if feral children or dirt digger tribesman asserted their own individual consciousness (though I wonder if a language with “I” built into it could force one to backfill something in the space during on the spot instance that patterns involving the word “I” are used, which also could be happening with the LLMs).
There is no problem with “I”—it makes sense to refer to the human speaking as “I”. The problem is with ascribing non-physical irreducible causality. Blame and responsibility are (comparatively) effective coordination mechanisms, that’s why societies that had it outcompeted those that didn’t. It doesn’t matter that the explanation is non-physical.
It might be that we know a language that originally didn’t have personal pronouns: Pirahã. And a culture with a high value on no-coercion, which means that expectations of conforming are absent. There is an aspect of consciousness—the awareness of the difference between expected and actual behaviors—that might just not develop in such a context.