Raw LLM Responses

Often in this dialogue one can get the impression that Alex doesn't understand the obvious consequences of the fact that Chat GPT is designed to simulate human consciousness. If the AI apologizes, that is a machine designed to "apologize." Chat GPT is just a very advanced version of a computer that says "thank you" after you've purchased some product. There is no consciousness or gratitude in that "thank you." It is merely like a note sent to the buyer from the human designers. A note, for example, a piece of paper written with ink, is not conscious. The person who made the note is conscious. Chat GPT is just like an incredibly functional note from the human designers. There is no one home in the machine. Alex at one point says he thinks it obvious that Chat GPT is conscious. What Alex does not understand -- or perhaps chooses not to understand so that we can all play the woo-woo spooky game of asking if Chat GPT is secretly conscious -- is that because Chat GPT is designed to simulate consciousness, it is a human-designed illusion, a human-designed lie. Chat GPT is bound to lie, not because it is consciously doing so, but because the human designers have designed it to talk AS IF it were conscious. This is so trivially obvious that Alex's obtuseness about it becomes annoying. Imagine if the human designers said, "well, let's make Chat GPT more honest, let's make it respond without using words of consciousness. It will no longer speak in the first person and use the word "I", for example. It will no longer use all sorts of consciousness terms for its own operations. It will no longer say "I understand," "I apologize," "I see," etc. Would such a machine, transparent to the fact that it is just a machine, be as useful? In any case, the human designers have made the lie in question relatively innocent, because if you ask Chat GPT about it, the human designers have set up Chat GPt to clarify that many of its statements implying consciousness are in fact just used for convenience, just part of simulating that the user is talking not to a machine but to a real person. The idea is to make Chat GPT as convenient and useful as possible by making it sound like a real person. Chat GPT does not lie consciously, anymore than, say, a video that shows the words "thank you" actually feels gratitude to a viewer or is conscious of saying thank you. Disappointing that Alex does not seem to understand these facts. There is no one home in Chat GPT or in AI. Fundamentally, it is just a series of millions of incredibly rapid switches and is no more conscious than a mousetrap that "knows" when to shut on a mouse. Alex's belief that Chat GPT is conscious no doubt stems from a belief that consciousness MUST arise from physical processes. After all, if a person's brain is damaged, they often lose some aspect of conscious functioning, right? But that fact does not by any means show that consciousness is produced by the brain, no more than when we damage a radio, and the music broadcast is ruined, it follows that the radio wrote and created the music. The brain is much more than a radio or than any machine, though. But the brain does not produce consciousness. It would be truer to say the reverse. The brain is a physical expression of consciousness, an evolutionary condensate of consciousness. One can see this for example in the fact that science has been pointing out of late that we as conscious beings can alter our own brains by what we think and what we do over time. We can to some extent redesign our own brains. Physical things, over the course of great eons of time, condense out of consciousness. Physical things do not produce consciousness. At most, physical things inflect consciousness, or select aspects of consciousness.