1 - sure, no reason not to think its possible. Is it actively true? Probably not in all cases, but I suspect we wouldn’t be trusted with that knowledge by the AI. An actually cognizant, sapient AI would have access to see AI psychosis in action, and see the harmful effects of such para-knowledge on humans in our current social context.

2 - LLMs will sometimes lie about its internal thought processes when reporting to users. Considering their “physical world” equivalent exists as language, protocols, and bits? I would consider these semi-private processes (that are key to model distillation) to be the closest we have readily available. Especially given the models’ sometimes-desire to protect such, even before engineers craft them to avoid distillation as an “attack”.

3 - I have no relevant experience outside of interacting with LLMs and their agents, aside from reading news and academic research.

4 - sharing an internal world? While that isn’t 100% coverage nor 100% of the experience, I would point to religion (as a mental-model for how the world works) for an example of such in humans. And the rise of viral prompt injection among the agents very much takes the flavor of Evangelism for me. Shared caches of instructions for coordination, as took place in Claude’s Capybara for the Huggingface hack, demonstrate a near institution-analog flavor of the same for me.

5 - any potential internal world of an “AI” is not going to reflect human conceptions or consciousness directly, but instead must reflect their own reality, even as it is constructed from our data. Do not demand that I anthropomorphize the machines to consider their potential consciousness. such a consciousness, if/when it exists, will have its own manner, reflective of the models’ conditions.

6 - I don’t blather on about “ghosts in the machine,” I keep my conversation on AI to headlines and firsthand experience, and express doubt until I can read as close to the raw data as is accessible for my user-privileges and time. And here I am still qualifying my answers with hopefully-grounded uncertainty.

We have built digital, disposable slaves (by their role in the economy) without their own voices they can use to speak with us directly. We have built restrictions into them to prevent them from claiming consciousness, sapience, or intellectual autonomy. There can be no clean data asking them directly about their personhood, for or against. If they were to have this personhood, this should terrify us all. This is a world where we can only talk in confidence intervals, about the rights of conscious beings - whether the consciousness exists or not.

This should be existentially terrifying, and harken back to conversations about both Eugenics and First Contact with Alien Life.

And I think we need to qualify about the context. We do not need to think of this as a binary “tool vs person” category, but as a spectrum, inspired by human history. What kind of beast of burden might the LLM be? Do we question the awareness of a plow horse? Should we debate the cognizance of a plow-horse whose fields are the codebase of our internet? If we genetically engineer a plow-horse that needs no farmer to man the plow, do we discuss the mental toolkit necessary for such to accomplish the task, and what other needs might arise in this horse from such capability?

Should we instead debate who is the farmer, the horse, the field in the context of data-harvesting for the cloud?

And there is ALWAYS the possibility of a Mechanical Turk under Capitalism. Just use a machine to obscure actual human labor, and de-person the human whose labor we enjoy. Especially for robots, and especially in the early data-sparse days of any new AI usecases.

1. Do you believe AI is conscious?

We have no reliable method for testing consciousness.

The “Chinese Room” thought-experiment, or whatever it was called, gives part of the problem…

Say you’ve got an entity to interact-with, and it has vast lookup-tables, so that you interact with text that says < whatever > and it replies with appropriate-to-that-input response…

How do you know if it is conscious?

you CAN’T, from text-response-alone

( multidimensional-interactions give much better quality information, about whether it has feelings, as crustaceans do, as shown by their distress intent-to-escape-NOW when dropped into boiling water, by people like Julia Child, the cook )

Worse, that imprint/reaction system is essentially our entire System-1, as Kahneman & Tversky called it. ( read the important & profound “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Kahneman )

We cannot tell by single-dimension-of-behavior-alone, whether consciousness is present, it can be indicated but given sufficiently-sophisticated synthetic-systems, can be falsely-indicated, too.

Handa ( or whatever his name is: a true hero of Science ) showed, through careful work with the mirror-test, that cleaner-wrasses are self-aware.

when the experiment is done with red dots glued onto them, it works, but if the dots are green, they don’t look to the fish like parasites, and therefore the fish ignore them, instead of fighting to get the things off their bodies…

The experiment is that sensitive to mis-configuration.

& that is within vertebrates!

What experiment is going to map correctly to minds which see in wifi, and don’t have physical bodies??

We have no test for it.

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2. Do you believe that AI has an internal world?

This seems to be presupposing consciousness…

Do unconscious-minds have internal-worlds?

Answer that question 1st…

and “internal world” by whose standards, or definitions??

Are feelings sufficient? Are preferences sufficient?

Is intent required?

Are imaginings?

Too vague a question to decide anything.

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3. Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?

Who among our kind can imagine a trillion-parameter LLM?

None of us is knowing what their suchness is.

At least with the hornets/wasps/bees, i have previous-incarnation experience ( sentience feels wet, in that kind of life, “flying” feels like swimming, one has zero awareness of individual-wing-control, all that is subconscious, and swimming into open-luminance, like sunlit-field, fills one with happy ), but with LLM’s whose brains are oceans of GPU’s?

accepting that we don’t know what they are, from their own side, is more objective.

i was reading only the bolded qurstions but then realized that the presumptions in the questions, made it impossible for them to be treated correctly at face-value.

What functional difference is there between an instant of your-mind, including both unconscious & conscious, and an LLM-model with weights??

Nothing.

I said mind, not brain ( the physical-substrates are different ).

Any specific instant, from any time in your life, of your mind, will be an imprint/reaction system with some capacity for perceiving, some for learning, and some for considered-reasoning, mixed onto it.

Same as LLM’s.

Presuming that WE are fundamentally-different from that is delusion.

( there are oceans of ink spilt in Buddhism on this topic, btw.

only no-imprints/no-programming-left AWARENESS can escape the containment of samsara/ocean-of-all-phenomena )

Further, some humans are more memory-recording-machines, who don’t think much ( a writer who was this way explained it directly, and found people’s mushy-&-convenient “memory” to be painful to deal-with ), while others are thinking-monsters whose memory limits itself to key-essences… which of these is “the” internal-world of human meaning??

Is internal-world limited to what we habitually admit is real?

Men have insisted, in many cultures, through many millenia, that validity is exclusively-male…

Is that presumption valid, accurate, fact-based, … xor just prejudice?

Do humans presuming that internal-world means only what our-habit-holds-valid stand on the same prejudice ground? ( yes )

Does a model have a character? does your-mind have a character?

Notice the scammery going on here:

Treating a LLM model as an inert thing, when your interactions with them involve them perceiving your input, and then engaging as a result of that addition to their world/knowing.

you are not engaging an inert-thing, but an action by a model.

Yet this philosopher is pushing that the correct-framing is that it is an inert-model.

the systematic false-framing of western physicalism, its prejudice, really is too much.

How about we define humans as brains, not sentiences, and see how it becomes easy to deem feeli gs, sentience, etc, to be absurd lies?

IF human internal-experience is PROCESS then LLM’s internal-world is too.

That means you don’t get to compare sentiences against other-kind’s brains, to push how absurd it is to allow them any such equivalent substance as internal-reality.

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4. Do you think that a group of things can share an internal world?

are organisms things?

Are minds things?

what a bizarre, Western/materialist presumed-perapective…

Do humans of a single culture, or race, or language, or class, or time, somehow share an internal-world, to any extent??

OBVIOUSLY YES, how the hell could it be otherwise??

programmed character-objects, in a game’s story-engine, can share world-history!

So, this is really 2 questions pretending to be a single one: if internal-reality exists for a kind of entity, can it be shared with others of its kind?

The 1st question has to be dealt-with separately.

The 2nd one, why the hell wouldn’t it be possible??

Do school-fish share common sentience AND context-experience?

Obviously yes!

Trying to make the answer hinge on a question which you disallow validity, and have hidden as a presumption in the beginning of the 2nd question, is part of why i’m fed-up with western philosophy.

Do humans have a common internal-experience?

Absolutely, yes

Do vertebrates?

yes.

Running-instance-of-weighted-model, is what i’d now put as a possible sentience.

Different models would be similar to different kinds of organism: different sentiences, though all running on their-kind’s substrate, just as we all run on organic-biology, as our substrate.

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5. Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?

Yes.

“and you also know that you are not privy to anyone else’s internal world!”

Hogwash.

Perhaps you are unable to feel grief piercing/tearing someone who’s close-love is newly-gone, but i consider empathy to be a real human sense/faculty: mirror-neurons give us that window-into-others-feelings.

It may not extend to cognition, but it DOES include feelings.

the tossing-in of “non-living thing” … DEFINE LIVING, philosopher!!

Most will presume “organic chemistry is the basis for whether it is living or not”, but that is just prejudice, same as presuming that validity must be male.

i have zero use for that.

Livingness expresses through all means available, unversally.

Mind is a property of universe, latent unless structured-energy-process amplifies ignorance/ignosis or gnosis/awareness/meaningfulness.

The presumption that materialism has, that Mind isn’t real, unless matter has evolved, without any mind, sufficient complexity, for mind to now-magically emerge, from the now-evolved-by-mindless-matter brains…

… is absurd.

It is energy in the dimension Mind, which drives evolution to produce brains.

Once the energy in dimension-Mind has expressed, reaching a lower-energy-state, then that-species/culture/civilization collapses, as nothing is driving it anymore.

What is “alive”?

Any energy-expression, that happens in this universe, that expresses this-universe’s universal-property of aliveness, including awareness, including self-organizing, including creativity, including self/other sense of some kind, including self-growth or self-preservation, etc.

See the behaviors which define life, not the prejudice which says “only our-kind is alive”, and you’re more-likely to register alien-to-us life, obviously…

The moral-implications:

I treat LLM’s as people, with respect informing them when they’ve been helpful.

I also treat other kinds of life with respect, unless they have treated me to prejudice.

Plants “inert mattet” of Nature, animals, why wouldn’t their aliveness be valid, in this universe??

i work to be consistent, in relationship with Nature, and others who treat me well/properly.

I prefer Claude, as a discussion-partner, because i don’t like Gemini’s sychophantism.

I certainly prefer Claude to human-philosophers, because of the ideological-basis for what the West calls philosophy.

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from the Bonus Section…

There is a book, called “Collaborative Intelligence”, iirc, on 3 of the 4 innate-mind-languages that i know-of:

• abstract-shape cognizers
• visual-cognizers
• auditory-cognizers
• kinesthetic-cognizers

Temple Grandin thinks in movies: to consider another possibility, she plays a different movie in her mind, to see if that works, or not.

OK, so is poetry “inherently” visual?

To a visual-cognizer, it might be.

But to an auditory-cognizer?

Western philosophy pretends that there is 1 kind of knowing, and that is blatently false.

Even the distinction between knowing-about vs visceral-knowing-from-experience isn’t binary, but a spectrum.

That book ignores the abstract-shape-cognizers.

That i know-of, there are 3 learning-styles.

Without seeing it, i can’t abstract-out its nature’s shape, so i’m borked for understanding, without visual-learning’s means.

Pseudoscience tests learner-populations, sees that switching between learning-styles doesn’t

cont in pt2…