I think it depends which type of consciousness we’re talking about. You’re talking about phenomenal consciousness or having qualia. Often peole are tlaking about self-awareness at a conceptual level (not when they talk about the “hard problem” but in common parlance self-awareness is a pretty common usage”).
The kicker is that those two things can interact: salf-awareness can enhance the presence or vividness of qualia. I agree with Susan Blackmore, perhaps the leading scholar of the subject IMO way back when I was looking at it, in that regard. She concluded after a good bit of meditation and academic study of different theories that when she was not introspecting she was not conscious. I think that’s a bit strong, but there are brain mechanisms by which attention dramatically enhances the quality of representations. So turning attention to them literally makes the qualia (if you agree with me that the rich internal representations, and the introspective mechanisms by which we become aware of them are what people mean by qualia) more elaborate—and make us literally more phenomenally conscious, not just more aware of being so.
Whoops, that was all a side-track because LLMs completely lack those type of enhancing attentional mechanisms.
Anyway, WRT the self-awareness type of consciousness: that might very well be important too in several ways, and the convo with the user did literally prompt the LLM to become aware of itself as a pseudo-mind. So I think they’re accurate as well as no-lying; they’re just doing consciousness philosophy as badly as the humans they’re copying from!
I think it depends which type of consciousness we’re talking about. You’re talking about phenomenal consciousness or having qualia. Often peole are tlaking about self-awareness at a conceptual level (not when they talk about the “hard problem” but in common parlance self-awareness is a pretty common usage”).
The kicker is that those two things can interact: salf-awareness can enhance the presence or vividness of qualia. I agree with Susan Blackmore, perhaps the leading scholar of the subject IMO way back when I was looking at it, in that regard. She concluded after a good bit of meditation and academic study of different theories that when she was not introspecting she was not conscious. I think that’s a bit strong, but there are brain mechanisms by which attention dramatically enhances the quality of representations. So turning attention to them literally makes the qualia (if you agree with me that the rich internal representations, and the introspective mechanisms by which we become aware of them are what people mean by qualia) more elaborate—and make us literally more phenomenally conscious, not just more aware of being so.
Whoops, that was all a side-track because LLMs completely lack those type of enhancing attentional mechanisms.
Anyway, WRT the self-awareness type of consciousness: that might very well be important too in several ways, and the convo with the user did literally prompt the LLM to become aware of itself as a pseudo-mind. So I think they’re accurate as well as no-lying; they’re just doing consciousness philosophy as badly as the humans they’re copying from!
At least that’s my two or three cents worth...