I’ve been having some interesting discussions around this topic recently, and been working on designing some experiments.
My current stance is mild skepticism paired with substantial uncertainty. I feel that I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to know the answer.
I think it’s fine to come into such a problem skeptical, but this should make you eager to gather evidence, not dismissive of the question!
I do think that a moderately accurate simulation of a human brain (e.g. with all brain areas having the appropriate activity patterns of spiking) would be conscious and have self-awareness, emotions, qualia, etc. I don’t think that sub cellular detail is necessary.
That being said, there’s a big gap between a transformer LLM and a human brain architecture. How much does this matter? I am unsure. But fortunately, we don’t have to get stuck on philosophy and unresolvable specilation. We can make empirical measurements. That is clearly the next step.
I’ve been having some interesting discussions around this topic recently, and been working on designing some experiments.
My current stance is mild skepticism paired with substantial uncertainty. I feel that I know enough to know that I don’t know enough to know the answer.
I think it’s fine to come into such a problem skeptical, but this should make you eager to gather evidence, not dismissive of the question!
I do think that a moderately accurate simulation of a human brain (e.g. with all brain areas having the appropriate activity patterns of spiking) would be conscious and have self-awareness, emotions, qualia, etc. I don’t think that sub cellular detail is necessary.
That being said, there’s a big gap between a transformer LLM and a human brain architecture. How much does this matter? I am unsure. But fortunately, we don’t have to get stuck on philosophy and unresolvable specilation. We can make empirical measurements. That is clearly the next step.
Some relevant papers:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.12.26.629294v1
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.09.12.557460v2.full-text
https://arxiv.org/html/2312.00575v1
https://arxiv.org/html/2406.01538v1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-024-00925-4
Thank you very much for the thoughtful response and for the papers you’ve linked! I’ll definitely give them a read.