Unfortunately, consciousness is deceptively hard to define, and so any benchmark to measure or quantify it can be endlessly debated.
You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down.
The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness.
I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)
Wait, why does the Turing test invalidate the mechanistic argument against LLMs? Isn’t it possible the Turing test isn’t sufficient to measure intelligence?
You can argue that it's a property that all living beings have in common - and even among *unconscious* beings there's a form of consciousness and self-awareness that's ever present, but definitions are elusive and vague and tough to pin down.
The mechanistic argument against LLMs - that they're just matrix multiplications - breaks down because they can clearly pass the Turing Test which was the gold standard for what intelligent behavior really meant, thus breaking the old notion that intelligence has to have some form of biological basis. Yet its clear that there are forms of intelligence that rats have which the frontier LLMs don't possess (is that consciousness? or a different kind of intelligence), and its hard to pinpoint what exactly that is, so we probably need the philosophy departments of major universities to come up with newer definitions of intelligence and consciousness.
I personally believe that intelligence and consciousness are 2 separate forms of emergence from simple automata that may occur together (such as in humans) or not (such as consciousness in plants and intelligence in LLMs)