Granting that LLMs in inference mode experience qualia, and even granting that they correspond to human qualia in any meaningful way:
I find both arguments invalid. Either conclusion could be correct, or neither, or the question might not even be well formed. At the very least, the situation is a great deal more complicated than just having two arguments to decide between!
For example in scenario (A), what does it mean for an LLM to answer a question “eagerly”? My first impression is that it’s presupposing the answer to the question, since the main meaning of “eagerly” is approximately “in the manner of having interest, desire, and/or enjoyment”. That sounds a great deal like positive qualia to me!
Maybe it just means the lesser sense of apparently showing such emotions, in which case it may mean no more than an author writing such expressions for a character. The author may actually be feeling frustration that the scene isn’t flowing as well as they would like and they’re not sure that the character’s behaviour is really in keeping with their emotions from recent in-story events. Nonetheless, the words written are apparently showing eagerness.
The “training loss” argument seems totally ill-founded regardless. That doesn’t mean that its conclusion in this hypothetical instance is false, just that the reasoning provided is not sufficient justification for believing it.
So in the end, I don’t see this as a dilemma at all. It’s just two possible bad arguments out of an enormously vast space of bad arguments.
Granting that LLMs in inference mode experience qualia, and even granting that they correspond to human qualia in any meaningful way:
I find both arguments invalid. Either conclusion could be correct, or neither, or the question might not even be well formed. At the very least, the situation is a great deal more complicated than just having two arguments to decide between!
For example in scenario (A), what does it mean for an LLM to answer a question “eagerly”? My first impression is that it’s presupposing the answer to the question, since the main meaning of “eagerly” is approximately “in the manner of having interest, desire, and/or enjoyment”. That sounds a great deal like positive qualia to me!
Maybe it just means the lesser sense of apparently showing such emotions, in which case it may mean no more than an author writing such expressions for a character. The author may actually be feeling frustration that the scene isn’t flowing as well as they would like and they’re not sure that the character’s behaviour is really in keeping with their emotions from recent in-story events. Nonetheless, the words written are apparently showing eagerness.
The “training loss” argument seems totally ill-founded regardless. That doesn’t mean that its conclusion in this hypothetical instance is false, just that the reasoning provided is not sufficient justification for believing it.
So in the end, I don’t see this as a dilemma at all. It’s just two possible bad arguments out of an enormously vast space of bad arguments.