Raw LLM Responses

@SaulStephenFilms I said it is possible in a panpsychist sense but that is a non-statement because it would mean everything is conscious. That scenario aside, consider how a computer actually works. Like, put aside the computer as you know it altogether if the concept is too messy. Imagine instead you have millions of people each holding a sign that indicates 1 or 0. They receive an envelope from their boss that instructs them to keep their current sign indicating their present state or change it. And that is all. Usually they will just be waiting and doing nothing. They could be waiting thousands of years before they receive an instruction. Sometimes the envelope they receive will be for one boss, sometimes for another boss. They don’t know. Whoever is available really. But given enough time, their boss will get a sequence of 1’s and 0’s whose code matches a few letters. The boss can then feed that back into the system and wait and get another code that matches a few more letters. In the fullness of time, a message will emerge. Suppose it says something really shocking like “I’m so happy to speak with you today.”. Now where exactly was the consciousness that wrote that? Where exactly is the entity that felt happy to speak residing? Furthermore, you could run the experiment a million times on any substrate and get the same response. Are you instantiating that same consciousness every time? It is just an absurd idea that leaves no clear room for consciousness as we recognize it. Computers work like this. It’s just very small and basic circuits deterministically doing something very repetitive in a massively parallel and asynchronous way. You could map an LLM call to tens of thousands of computers or it could be on one H100 and the result would be the same. You could do it on an analog computer or if you had time, an abacus. The result would be the same. Google the Wikipedia article about pure functions and side effects in the context of functions in computer science. There will surely be articles for this topic as they are foundational in computer science. I realize I maybe veered a bit too technical there for a YT comment but this is a specific mathematical term referring to a function that takes an input and returns an output and does this and only this.