Are Babies Conscious?(nytimes.com) |
Are Babies Conscious?(nytimes.com) |
The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.
If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
Once you have a neural network as sophisticated as a baby’s will it be immoral to turn it off?
Probably something to do with the way we tend not to retain memories from before about 2 y/o.
And yes, obviously absurd, one would think. Yet something that it’s important for modern medicine to have evidence of.
Say what? No. Killing them would be a problem because they're human. With that comes the capability to become conscious, whether or not they are at the time they are babies.
> It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
No, it's their DNA that makes them human.
Interesting. This increased my credence that newborns are conscious / sentient (which had been somewhat low).
People incorrectly think LLMs are conscious because they output language. Yet we question consciousness and intelligence and so on in dogs, cats and now babies.
It’s a ridiculous human bias. Nobody thinks an image generator is conscious. Nobody thinks a human image generated by an image generator is real. But LLMs generate text and so people mistakenly assume they are conscious. LLMs can deep fake personas and act like characters and people think that’s what they actually are. It’s all a deep fake. When you talk to an LLM you are “talking” to a deep fake of a person in the same manner as an image generator deep faking a human image.
An now a paper of record is questioning whether babies are conscious. Why? Just because they don’t use language or have access to memories we question this!? Ultimately that’s what it boils down to regardless of what this article says.
Plenty of arguments on HN that LLMs are conscious. They are, of course, wrong, but plenty of people seem to believe it-Lord know why.
You can’t say LLMs are missing the thing that causes consciousness, because we don’t know what that is.