This is a really good question but far above Lemmy’s pay-grade man. Neuroscientists are very actively researching and doing debates on this topic (consciousness in AI)
The main problem is that we don’t even have a consensus, fool-proof theory of consciousness… We can barely tell whether a lot of living creatures are conscious or not (think octopus with their distributed intelligence, plants with their chemical signaling, …), and if so, when in their development stage does consciousness arise. Machines are one step removed from even that; even if we give AI models the benefit of the doubt and say they can develop consciousness, how in the world are we supposed to measure it
I found this highly-cited Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper (Seth, A.K., Bayne, T. Theories of consciousness. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 439–452 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4) (try Internet Archive if you can’t access it) that might be of interest… If you follow the citation trails, there are a ton of new articles on debating consciousness in AI. Like this arxiv article on consciousness in AI
This is a really good question but far above Lemmy’s pay-grade man. Neuroscientists are very actively researching and doing debates on this topic (consciousness in AI)
The main problem is that we don’t even have a consensus, fool-proof theory of consciousness… We can barely tell whether a lot of living creatures are conscious or not (think octopus with their distributed intelligence, plants with their chemical signaling, …), and if so, when in their development stage does consciousness arise. Machines are one step removed from even that; even if we give AI models the benefit of the doubt and say they can develop consciousness, how in the world are we supposed to measure it
I found this highly-cited Nature Reviews Neuroscience paper (Seth, A.K., Bayne, T. Theories of consciousness. Nat Rev Neurosci 23, 439–452 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00587-4) (try Internet Archive if you can’t access it) that might be of interest… If you follow the citation trails, there are a ton of new articles on debating consciousness in AI. Like this arxiv article on consciousness in AI
If AI (LLM) have a consciousness, would that not mean that they only think when they receive input, because they are not computing otherwise?