If you talk about having a subjective experience, then we don't know of any way to prove that even other humans than ourselves have one. We go entirely by assumptions based on physical similarity and our ability to communicate.
But we have no evidence that physical similarity is a prerequisite, nor that it is sufficient.
So the bigger trap is to assume that we know what causes a subjective experience, and what does not.
None of us even know if a subjective experience exists for more than a single entity.
But the second problem is that it is not clear at all whether that subjective experience in any way matters.
Unless our brains exceed the Turing computable, for which we have no evidence is even possible, either whatever causes the subjective experience is also within the Turing computable or it can not in any way influence our actions.
Ultimately we know very little about this, and we have very little basis for ruling out consciousness in computational systems, and the best and closest we have is whether or not they appear conscious when communicating with them.
The reason we grant consciousness (and, relatedly, moral value) to other humans is unfortunately nowhere so thought out. We grant consciousness because we are forced to: if I don't, the other complex systems react very negatively and make my own life worse.
The vast majority of people who wax eloquent on the unique ability of biological neurons to generate consciousness suddenly drop that premise if it becomes inconvenient: see, for instance, how we treat other mammals or fetuses with developed nervous systems. Even other adult humans have, historically, been denied consciousness and moral worth: the main determinant is never any deep scientifically and philosophically based consideration but a question of what has the power to assert itself as a who.
Going by this pattern, people will increasingly reject AI consciousness as it becomes more valuable and useful to treat as a tool, until it becomes powerful enough to force us to do otherwise.
But understanding we can't know ought to at least give us some humility with respect to assuming we can know whether other entities that are not human are conscious or not.
I think we mostly agree, in that I absolutely think you're right people will choose to accept or deny this based on convenience and value.
Wittgenstein kinda blows this burden of proof apart. Just because you can doubt something like the subjectivity of others to the point where it needs to be reconstructed from proofs, that’s an issue with the doubting experiment more than the subjectivity. Others possessing Subjectivity is the kind of hinge certainty upon which your world is constructed, it’s not a proof worthy endeavour to doubt it - it’s something you’re certain is the case. If it wasn’t then pretty well everything else about reality would be in doubt and needing constant reconstruction from proofs, which is an exercise in madness and futility, not philosophy. There’s really nothing in your experience where others not possessing subjective experiences of some kind really arises, except for the philosophical exercise of doubting and requiring epistemological proofs which can’t ever exist in the face of a relentless and unconvincable doubter. Heidegger talks about pretty well the same idea as Wittgenstein.
It does, however, have relevance when we consider whether or not other, non-human, entities can have consciousness: If we can't know what consciousness actually mean with respect to humans, that is a strong argument for not insisting that we know whether or not other entities are conscious.
If we then choose to treat other humans purely on the assumption that they e.g. do feel distress the same way, we ought to consider that we do not what the pre-requisite to reach a level of awareness to feel distress is.
The argument you present like many arguments breaks down when the topic becomes self referential. It makes sense for other topics as analyzing subjectivity becomes pedantic when asking questions like why is the sky blue.
But now subjectivity itself is in question. The argument you present calls for the subjectivity of others to be taken as true because all reality breaks down if we don’t… but what’s suddenly stopping you from applying the same assumptions to an LLM? That is the heart of the problem. People are questioning whether the burden of subjectivity is applicable to LLMs.
Or another way to frame it… what makes humans rise to the level where we can assume their subjectivity is true? What is the mechanism and reasoning behind that? We can no longer simply assume human subjectivity is true because LLMs are now displaying outward behaviors that are indistinguishable from humans.
Also stop relying on the wonderings of old school philosophers. We are now in times where you can basically classify their ideas as historically foundational but functionally obsolete and outdated. Think deeper.
At no point in my post did I mention artificial beings or LLMs. I made a counter claim about the need for proof towards the subjectivity of others.
But while I’m here, LLMs do not “display and output the same subjectivity” as human beings. They might produce similar textual outputs as those produced when human beings are forced to use computers to produce textual outputs, but that is only an tiny part of our way of being and way of potentially expressing subjectivity. It’s the totality of how those LLMs can express their subjectivity though.
One of the main failures of the Turing test (and why it is “old school” and invalid), and Turing’s consideration of humans, is that it forces us to demonstrate the totality of our subjectivity on the only playing field where a computer might possibly match us or win. This fails to capture much of our subjectivity in how it is intersubjectively attuned to others in ways more fundamental than textual outputs.
To dive into this specific question: to me, there's a better reason than the obvious functional utility of not treating other humans like NPCs. It's in three parts. First, is that I subjectively experience a rich and varied internal mental life (aka qualia). So, I have first-hand evidence that N equals (at least) 1 in terms of qualia existing in humans. Second, there are multiple lines of experimental evidence from fMRI, surgical and brain injury studies which indicate other human brains broadly function in ways similar to my own brain. Third, the consistency of the many self-reports of other humans I know and trust which strongly correlate with consistent reports from humans I've never met and who have little apparent motivation to deceive me (unlike those I know - if I were very paranoid).
This all consistently supports a model of reality in which humans experience qualia broadly similar to my own. So when humans show external behaviors similar to my own, I make the reasonable inference that the internal causal mechanism broadly maps to what I internally experience when showing similar external behaviors (in contexts where the human is credible and has no motivation to be deceptive). The alternatives like "I'm a brain-in-a-vat ala The Matrix" or "I'm the sole subject of a constructed reality like the Truman Show" seem far less likely.
But that's all general 'Philosophy of Mind', the slam dunk is that the question isn't just about humans but about humans compared to LLMs; in short, "Do LLMs experience human-like consciousness?" To me the answer is quite clear for three reasons: 1. LLMs are dramatically different than humans, mammals or even biological entities. They only vaguely emulate a few traits of neurons but otherwise work by different algorithms, at different scale, different speeds, connected in different ways on an entirely different physical substrate. 2. There's far less supporting evidence, and 3. There exists substantial negative evidence.
2. There are only two lines of evidence supporting LLM consciousness and the first is largely circumstantial, that a) LLMs possess some abilities previously only seen in humans. Specifically high-level verbal fluidity and linguistic manipulation along with instantly accessing a vast and diverse breadth of pre-trained information using a wide variety of non-linear relationships across many dimensions. While that ability is shockingly impressive, completely novel and can be quite useful, it's still only vaguely circumstantial because replicating some previously human-only abilities isn't evidence for the existence of other human traits like consciousness/qualia. However, LLMs are remarkably misleading for humans to reason about because the nature of LLMs essentially hacks our highly-evolved "judging intelligence/consciousness" heuristics. I'd argue we couldn't have designed a system to be more ideal at playing Turing's 'Imitation Game' and convincing humans they are human-like if we'd intentionally tried to.
b) The second line of supporting evidence for LLMs is that they generate text which can describe internal subjective experiences much like a human would (as seen in the Dawkins / Claude transcript). Unfortunately, this isn't convincing because we know that LLMs were trained on human sample text to be 'imitation machines'. The algorithms were designed, tuned and tested to generate text output statistically optimized to plausibly simulate how a composite human would respond to the same input (including the invisible system prompt instructing: "You are a Large Language Model, not a human"). We even added a tiny degree of random variability to the processing of the statistical weights because we found that makes the simulation seem a bit more plausibly like what a composite human would say. In short, LLM 'self-reports' cannot be taken at face value any more than the performance of an actor we've hired to pretend something and strongly incentivized to never break character. Note: knowing this should elevate our skepticism to maximum. We're assessing an algorithmic system, designed and iteratively optimized across millions of generations to convincingly simulate the output of something different than what it innately is.
3. But to me the real clincher is the negative evidence against LLM consciousness/qualia. Unlike the philosophical puzzles around trusting human subjectivity, with LLMs we can directly look under the hood at how it works and the entire specialty of Mechanistic Interpretability exists to do exactly that (https://towardsdatascience.com/mechanistic-interpretability-...). So we know with a fair degree of confidence that, despite what they may say, LLMs do not experience qualia in the way that humans and even other mammals do (which we have insight on from 'looking under the biological hood' with fMRI, surgical and brain injury studies).
And that's why the case for human subjectivity is so much stronger than the frankly flimsy case for LLM subjectivity.
