I linked to Brian Tomasik’s post to provide useful context, but I wanted to point to a more general argument: we do not understand sentience/​consciousness well enough to claim LLMs (or whatever) have null expected moral weight.
Ah, thanks! Well, even if it wasn’t appropriately directed at your claim, I appreciate the opportunity to rant about how panpsychism (and related views) don’t entail AI sentience :)
Unlike the version of panpsychism that has become fashionable in philosophy in recent years, my version of panpsychism is based on the fuzziness of the concept of consciousness. My view is involves attributing consciousness to all physical systems (including higher-level ones like organisms and AIs) to the degree they show various properties that we think are important for consciousness, such as perhaps a global workspace, higher-order reflection, learning and memory, intelligence, etc. I’m a panpsychist because I think at least some attributes of consciousness can be seen even in fundamental physics to a non-zero degree. However, I personally would attribute much more consciousness to an LLM than to a rock that has equal mass as the machines running the LLM. I think it’s less obvious whether an LLM is more sentient than a collection of computers doing an equal number of more banal computations, such as database queries or video-game graphics.
Hi Brian! Thanks for your reply. I think you’re quite right to distinguish between your flavor of panpsychism and the flavor I was saying doesn’t entail much about LLMs. I’m going to update my comment above to make that clearer, and sorry for running together your view with those others.
Thanks for the clarification!
I linked to Brian Tomasik’s post to provide useful context, but I wanted to point to a more general argument: we do not understand sentience/​consciousness well enough to claim LLMs (or whatever) have null expected moral weight.
Ah, thanks! Well, even if it wasn’t appropriately directed at your claim, I appreciate the opportunity to rant about how panpsychism (and related views) don’t entail AI sentience :)
Unlike the version of panpsychism that has become fashionable in philosophy in recent years, my version of panpsychism is based on the fuzziness of the concept of consciousness. My view is involves attributing consciousness to all physical systems (including higher-level ones like organisms and AIs) to the degree they show various properties that we think are important for consciousness, such as perhaps a global workspace, higher-order reflection, learning and memory, intelligence, etc. I’m a panpsychist because I think at least some attributes of consciousness can be seen even in fundamental physics to a non-zero degree. However, I personally would attribute much more consciousness to an LLM than to a rock that has equal mass as the machines running the LLM. I think it’s less obvious whether an LLM is more sentient than a collection of computers doing an equal number of more banal computations, such as database queries or video-game graphics.
Hi Brian! Thanks for your reply. I think you’re quite right to distinguish between your flavor of panpsychism and the flavor I was saying doesn’t entail much about LLMs. I’m going to update my comment above to make that clearer, and sorry for running together your view with those others.
No worries. :) The update looks good.