LLMs and Theories of Consciousness

harlan@harris.name (Harlan Harris) — Sun, 03 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There’s been an immense amount of discussion about Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT over the last year, of course. Some of that discussion has been whether they are intelligent, conscious, or on the path to Artificial General Intelligence.

I’m particularly interested in the "consciousness" question, as it was an area of personal interest when I was working as a cognitive scientist, in a prior career. I never did research on the topic, but I read plenty of philosophers of mind and neuroscientists as they tried to pin down what, exactly (or even vaguely), consciousness might be. One of my favorite treatments of the topic is by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, most accessibly covered in his book The Feeling of What Happens. (I recently read a new collection of short essays by him, entitled Feeling & Knowing, but I wouldn’t recommend it. It feels more like footnotes or stray thoughts than a coherent presentation or a novel contribution.)

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LLMs and Theories of Consciousness