Max Tegmark

He might be wrong, he might be right, but we should test it.

He postulates that consciousness has to do with loops in the information processing.

So our brain has loops.

information can go round and round.

In computer science nerd speak, you call it a recurrent neural network where some of the output gets fed back in again.

And with his mathematical formalism, if it's a feed forward neural network where information only goes in one direction, like from your retina into the back of your brain, for example, that's not conscious.

So he would predict that your retina itself isn't conscious of anything.

or a video camera.

Now, the interesting thing about GPT-4 is it's also just one way flow of information.

So if Tononi is right, GPT-4 is a very intelligent zombie that can do all this smart stuff, but isn't experiencing anything.

And this is,

Both a relief in that you don't have, if it's true, in that you don't have to feel guilty about turning off GPT-4 and wiping its memory whenever a new user comes along.

I wouldn't like if someone did that to me, neutralized me like in Men in Black.

But it's also creepy that you can have very high intelligence, perhaps then it's not conscious, because if we get replaced by machines,

It's sad enough that humanity isn't here anymore because I kind of like humanity.

But at least if machines were conscious, they could be like, well, but they are our descendants and maybe they have our values and they're our children.

But if Tononi is right, and these are all transformers that are...

Not in the sense of Hollywood, but in the sense of these one-way direction neural networks.

So they're all the zombies.

That's the ultimate zombie apocalypse now.