asudoxBcachefs creator claims his custom LLM is 'fully conscious'
Lembot_0006Kent Overstreet
Another proof that L.Torvalds is an excellent man for his position. He managed to throw out Overstreet before he went completely crazy.
Did he throw him out? Last I knew, he basically gave Kent a blanket “no,” forcing him to go his own way.
Not arguing, just asking.
Overstreet’s FS was in the mainstream kernel. Not anymore. So “throw out”.
Bcschefs was removed from the kernel, but it qas because Kent doesn’t play well with others, and not because of the technical side. BCachefs had a lot of potential, but it serves noone to end up in another Resier situation.
Kent had a habit of pushing for wider kernel changes to support the FS, without working with the community, which will always break things. He is also very ego driven, and self-obsessed, which is not always a bad thing.
Linus’ person-to-persin issues always started from a technical perspective, so it is different.
Sentient Loomfully conscious according to any test I can think of
There’s no such thing as an actual test for consciousness in machines. We can do tests on animals to see if their sensory experience includes self-awareness, but we’re already operating on the assumption that they have feelings and sensory experience because they have a brain and nervous system like us, and they’re all directly related to us (as all organisms are). But that’s totally different from designing a machine which mimics (or predicts/auto-completes) our observable behavior and then assuming that it “doesn’t like” something or does anything “for fun.”
What sucks is that some idiots are going to start falling for this. And eventually software will be given human rights, which actually means that the software’s owners will have extra rights compared to the rest of us.
Yeah, that’s as far as I’ve been able to go, thinking about this. To me, it’s clear that non-human animals are conscious. But, we treat them like raw materials, for reasons which fall apart immediatly in debate. AI might not be conscious the way a pig or a duck is. But it seems more conscious than a cup of sand or a box of crayons.
But it seems more conscious than a cup of sand or a box of crayons.
That would mean it feels like something to be an LLM. I don’t see any reason to think that. I’m not going to claim it absolutely is not because I couldn’t possibly know but I’m about as sure of that than I’m sure that it is like something to be my pet gerbil.
We have precedent for dealing with things within our own imaginations that seem to have autonomy. Authors commonly talk about their characters seeming to take on a life of their own over time. Dream characters can honestly surprise the dreamer. The esoteric traditions of invocation/evocation can be viewed as an intentional applications of this feature in semantic/latent space.
But if the idea is that LLMs are a kind of external imagination, the question isn’t really whether or not the characters roleplayed during inference are conscious. They’re no more aware than the people in our dreams. The question is, as you say, what is it like to be those layers of software neurons in between the word generations. Can you have an imagination without an imaginer? In other words, is there a dreamer?
If the answer is no, case closed, relatively tidy. If the answer is yes, it’s a truly alien kind of consciousness. Embodiment comes with a bunch of stuff that an LLM has absolutely no access to. Generally speaking, we find it difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of other humans, much less animals, plants/fungii. And they’re embodied! LLMs are nothing like us, and they’re certainly not gendered.
I’ve honestly never considered before whether it could be like something to be a character in my dream - if it’s part of the same consciousness. Doesn’t seem obvious that it couldn’t be.
And my personal view is that the answer is definitely no. There’s no dreamer. The dream is appearing in the consciousness of a biological being with my genes, history, and memories that’s currently in a state of sleep.
This comes with other ramifications too. There’s also no decision-maker - it’s an illusion.
Even if it was conscious there would be no way to know. Consciousness is entirely subjective experience - it cannot be measured.
ProdigalFrogand now my life has been reduced from being perhaps the best engineer in the world
Yeah… I think we dodged a bullet when Linus didn’t let his filesystem in.
Was thinking you know its bad when Linus thinks you’re too toxic…
Which Linus are you referring to, exactly?
Some guy on YouTube.
Torvalds literally had to take a hiatus because of how toxic he’d gotten. Luckily he didn’t deny it when it was brought to his attention and he’s gotten better now.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for enlightening me instead of just down voting.
Does it do anything that isn’t in response to a human’s prompting? No? Then it can’t be conscious. Consciousness requires having a sense of self, which implies having needs and desires that one acts to fulfill without needing prompting. Even a bacterium is more conscious than these things.
bleistift2Nowhere in your unquoted definition do you state that the ‘sense of self’ must be present at all times. Humans can switch between conscious and unconscious states. When they’re unconscious they don’t have needs and desires.
whalerossOh boy. I was wondering the other day how Bcachefs is progressing but a casual search didn’t hit anything in the nerd news. A quick browse on the dev page didn’t really inspire looking further either. I guess this is why and that this is the end of Bcachefs then.
The one where a wife was killed was really progressive, though. It’s a shame it’s dead.
Ge also has megalomania.