Raw LLM Responses

This is the rational, intellectually sincere position to take on this. I can see why OP would post this - there are many people popping up who believe they have discovered a ghost in the machine, like we’ve suddenly and accidentally given birth to some new kind of entity. It’s very likely a lot of people are seeing something more than what’s actually there. Other people react to this by saying firmly “NO, it’s not actual intelligence, it’s not consciousness, it’s just pattern-recognition, stop being crazy”. There’s some merit to it, but it’s packed with a lot of assumptions. We don’t know much about consciousness. Maybe humans just work so differently from computers that we really are making untenable comparisons. Or maybe a calculator is relatively more conscious than a rock, and maybe an LLM is relatively more conscious than a calculator, but less than a human. There’s enough we don’t understand that I wouldn’t be willing to definitively agree with anyone saying these claims are firmly true or false. We’re only going to make progress by being clear about what we understand, what we don’t understand, and what we think given that.