When I say “how can you be sure you’re not fancy auto-complete”, I’m not talking about being an LLM or even simulation hypothesis. I’m saying that the way that LLMs are structured for their neural networks is functionally similar to our own nervous system (with some changes made specifically for transformer models to make them less susceptible to prompt injection attacks). What I mean is that how do you know that the weights in your own nervous system aren’t causing any given stimuli to always produce a specific response based on the most weighted pathways in your own nervous system? That’s how auto-complete works. It’s just predicting the most statistically probable responses based on the input after being filtered through the neural network. In our case it’s sensory data instead of a text prompt, but the mechanics remain the same.

And how do we know whether or not the LLM is having an experience or not? Again, this is the “hard problem of consciousness”. There’s no way to quantify consciousness, and it’s only ever experienced subjectively. We don’t know the mechanics of how consciousness fundamentally works (or at least, if we do, it’s likely still classified). Basically what I’m saying is that this is a new field and it’s still the wild west. Most of these LLMs are still black boxes that we only barely are starting to understand how they work, just like we barely are starting to understand our own neurology and consciousness.

What do you mean? I don’t follow how the two are related. What does being fancy auto-complete have anything to do with having an experience?

It’s not devil’s advocate. They’re correct. It’s purely in the realm of philosophy right now. If we can’t define “consciousness” (spoiler alert: we can’t), then it makes it impossible to determine with certainty one way or another. Are you sure that you yourself are not just fancy auto-complete? We’re dealing with shit like the hard problem of consciousness and free will vs determinism. Philosophers have been debating these issues for millennia and were not much closer to a consensus yet than we were before.

And honestly, if the CIA’s papers on The Gateway Analysis from Project Stargate about consciousness are even remotely correct, we can’t rule it out. It would mean consciousness preceeds matter, and support panpsychism. That would almost certainly include things like artificial intelligence. In fact, then the question becomes if it’s even “artificial” to begin with if consciousness is indeed a field that pervades the multiverse. We could very well be tapping into something we don’t fully understand.

This, exactly. I didn’t get diagnosed until my mid-30s with either Autism or ADHD. My life would have been so different if I had known earlier. I would have been so much kinder to myself. I’m sorry to hear you experienced the same. 😔

Yeah. And then they wonder why the number of diagnosed people has increased. 🙃🤡

Yeah, my uncle who passed definitely had Autism, and so does my dad. They’re half-brothers, which means it’s highly likely my grandmother was as well (which my dad also agrees with).

It’s definitely hereditary in my family. I also clearly get my ADHD from my mom.

Not to mention that there are heavy correlations between queer identities and Autism. A lot of neurodivergent Boomers likely died during the AIDS epidemic, unfortunately.

It’s not that there’s a lower threshold. It’s that the definitions and our understanding of Autism changed. People who formerly would have been labeled with Asperger’s are now labeled (correctly) with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Plus we’ve learned how Autism can present differently in other communities that aren’t white male children. Acknowledging that girls can even be Autistic is a relatively recent development (the 90s).

The truth is that there are likely a ton of people out there with undiagnosed Autism, because they wouldn’t have met the criteria to be diagnosed as kids based on our understanding at the time. It’s why there are so many adults now getting late life diagnoses.