If an LLM talks about qualia, either it has qualia or qualia somewhere else caused some texts to exist, and the LLM read those.
If the LLM describes “its experience” to you, and the experience matches your own subjective experience, you can be pretty sure there’s subjective experience somewhere in the causal structure behind the LLM’s outputs. If the LLM doesn’t have subjective experience but talks about it, that means someone had subjective experience, which made them write a text about it, which the LLM then read. You shouldn’t expect an LLM to talk about subjective experience if it was never trained by anything caused by subjective experience and doesn’t have subjective experience itself.
This means that the ability to talk about qualia is extremely strong evidence for having qualia or having learned about qualia as a result of something that has qualia talking.
I don’t think fish simulate qualia; I think they’re just automation, simply with nothing like experience and nothing resembling experience. They perform adaptations that include efficient reinforcement learning but don’t include experience of processed information.
How do you know whether you scream because of the subjective experience of pain or because of the mechanisms for the instinctive ways to avoid death- how do you know that the scream is caused by the outputs of the neural circuits running qualia and not just by the same stuff that causes the inputs to the circuits that you experience as extremely unpleasant?
It’s not about whether they can talk; parrots and LLMs can be trained to say words in reaction to stuff. If you can talk about having subjective experience, it is valid to assume there’s subjective experience somewhere down the line. If you can’t talk about subjective experience, other, indirect evidence is needed. Assuming you have subjective experience because you react to something external similarly to those with subjective experience is pattern-matching that works on humans for the above reasons, but invalid on everything else without valid evidence for qualia. Neural networks trained with RL would react to pain and whatever is the evolutionary reason for screaming on pain, if you provide similar incentives, RL agents would scream on pain; that doesn’t provide evidence for whether there’s also experience of anything in them.
I’m certain enough fish don’t have qualia to be ok with eating fish; if we solve more critical short-term problems, then, in the future, hopefully, we’ll figure out how subjective experience actually works and will know for sure.
Thanks for the comment!
As I mentioned in the post,
If the LLM describes “its experience” to you, and the experience matches your own subjective experience, you can be pretty sure there’s subjective experience somewhere in the causal structure behind the LLM’s outputs. If the LLM doesn’t have subjective experience but talks about it, that means someone had subjective experience, which made them write a text about it, which the LLM then read. You shouldn’t expect an LLM to talk about subjective experience if it was never trained by anything caused by subjective experience and doesn’t have subjective experience itself.
This means that the ability to talk about qualia is extremely strong evidence for having qualia or having learned about qualia as a result of something that has qualia talking.
I don’t think fish simulate qualia; I think they’re just automation, simply with nothing like experience and nothing resembling experience. They perform adaptations that include efficient reinforcement learning but don’t include experience of processed information.
How do you know whether you scream because of the subjective experience of pain or because of the mechanisms for the instinctive ways to avoid death- how do you know that the scream is caused by the outputs of the neural circuits running qualia and not just by the same stuff that causes the inputs to the circuits that you experience as extremely unpleasant?
It’s not about whether they can talk; parrots and LLMs can be trained to say words in reaction to stuff. If you can talk about having subjective experience, it is valid to assume there’s subjective experience somewhere down the line. If you can’t talk about subjective experience, other, indirect evidence is needed. Assuming you have subjective experience because you react to something external similarly to those with subjective experience is pattern-matching that works on humans for the above reasons, but invalid on everything else without valid evidence for qualia. Neural networks trained with RL would react to pain and whatever is the evolutionary reason for screaming on pain, if you provide similar incentives, RL agents would scream on pain; that doesn’t provide evidence for whether there’s also experience of anything in them.
I’m certain enough fish don’t have qualia to be ok with eating fish; if we solve more critical short-term problems, then, in the future, hopefully, we’ll figure out how subjective experience actually works and will know for sure.