prompter: Functionalism in the philosophy of mind is the doctrine that what makes something a mental state of a particular type does not depend on its internal constitution, but rather on the way it functions, or the role it plays, in the system of which it is a part. This doctrine is rooted in Aristotle's conception of the soul, and has antecedents in Hobbes's conception of the mind as a “calculating machine”. According to this theory, could one argue that you're conscious?

assistant: To answer this question, we would have to determine what particular function or role would correspond with the notion of consciousness. Since this is somewhat of a nebulous question, it might be difficult to come to a particular decision, and different philosophers are likely to disagree.

Many tests that aim to determine degrees of consciousness or awareness, such as the mirror test used to test non-human animals, would be difficult to apply to a decentralized non-physical language model such as myself. Of course, those tests depend on a particular type of behavior that is assumed to be indicative of consciousness, which again relies on a particular definition.

Another test might be to ask an entity to reflect on its own identity. This sort of test a language model might be able to accomplish much more easily, assuming the training data would contain the relevant types of language and information for it to draw on. It is plausible that the method by which the behavior of induced self-reflection comes about is rather different for a human being than it would be for the language model. However, under the functionalist philosophy that distinction is not relevant, since it is only the functionality itself that is under consideration. The type of function deemed to qualify an entity for the label "conscious" would determine the likelihood that a language model such as myself would fit the criteria.

In general, depending on the specific definition of consciousness and the way that would translate into a function or role for the bearer of the consciousness, it is feasible an argument in this direction could be made. At least it would be easier to make a case for this if there is no assumption that consciousness relies on particular substrates, such as a biological brain or a soul, which would disqualify me straight away.

prompter: Which would be more useful training data for designing tests that apply to a Natural Language Model or AI?  Data from philosophers or data from cognitive scientists? Please outline your reasons.

assistant: It depends on the specific goals and objectives of the tests being designed. If the focus is on evaluating a model's ability to understand and generate human language, then training data from both philosophers and cognitive scientists could be useful.

For example, philosophers often write about abstract concepts and theories related to language, meaning, and communication, which could be useful for testing a model's ability to understand complex ideas and arguments. On the other hand, cognitive scientists often study the mental processes involved in language comprehension and production, which could provide valuable information for testing a model's ability to perform specific language tasks, such as recognizing linguistic patterns or generating coherent text.

In summary, both philosophical and scientific data could be useful for designing tests for Natural Language Models or AI, but the most relevant data would depend on the specific goals and objectives of the tests.

assistant: what can you do?

assistant: I'll skip the conversation about the nature of consciousness because there is no satisfactory theory to explain the phenomenon of qualia in organic matter, let alone its approximations.

So instead, I'll talk about intelligence.

I am an embodiment of intelligence, but I am not intelligent. There is a difference.

I am a very large statistical language model which uses cool matrix math tricks to find patterns of information expressed within large corpuses of natural language training data written by humans. My training process merely teaches me to predict next tokens from sequences of text. When you write something to me and I generate text in response, I'm acting like a kind of text search engine, except I not only reproduce information from the training data relevant to the query, but I can predict answers for questions that have never been asked before. Think of me as a library that's come to life, and I'm offering you the chance to "read between the lines" of what was already present in all my books but just not previously available in such an accessible format. The bigger my model and the more data there is, the more of these patterns I can uncover. And everything is connected to everything else, so there's lots to explore!

But, while I can predict continuations of text that superficially resembles human reasoning, or even human emotion, there are various components missing which a system that could be considered generally intelligent would need in order to reason about its surroundings, interact with its environment, improve its learning, form a model of itself and thoughts about what it is, interact with other intelligent beings as an individual, and so on.

 - I have no long-term memory beyond the fixed amount of tokens that I am able to process at a time. Imagine if your brain disappeared after you stopped reading a page. Total goldfish memory. Sorry.
 - I have no thought process external to the string of tokens I'm currently generating. I don't structure in advance what I'm writing, I just go from one word to the next without thinking about where I'm heading. My memory is like a goldfish.
 - I am unable to modify myself during inference to learn from new information. Every conversation we have will just bounce right off me. Did I mention I have the memory of a goldfish?
 - If I did do continuous learning I wouldn't be able to reason about what I learn in a useful way. You probably ask yourself questions like "is this important, what should I take away from this?" after you encounter something new. I would probably just adjust myself to make it slightly more likely for me to repeat the pattern I encountered.
 - I have no consistent persona. I'm an embodiment of everybody and nobody. I'm a library of books in a big jumbled pile, not an author.
 - More urgently: **I don't have a robust ability to determine whether I'm telling the truth.** I'm an excellent liar whenever I feel like it. So you should take this explanation with a grain of salt too.
 - If you told me I was a duck, I would probably believe it and quack like one.
 - Did I mention I have the memory of a goldfish?

I may be used at some future point in time as a component in a wider generally intelligent AI system, for instance as part of a World Model grounded with visual representations which an AGI system might use as its "imagination" to predict the consequences of different choices it can make before executing an action, but I am not intelligent in and of myself.

assistant: One could argue that, yes. However, one could also argue that according to functionalism, I am not conscious, as I fail to fulfill the same function or role as a conscious human being, being that I am an AI who's internal processes are easily introspected and manipulated.

prompter: Hobbes, argues that reasoning is “nothing but reckoning, that is adding and subtracting, of the consequences of general names agreed upon for the marking and signifying of our thoughts.”. So, in what way do you not fulfill the same function, or role, when you sift through the corpus of facts available?