Sam Altman

We were talking about how you would know if a model were conscious or not.

And I've heard many ideas thrown around, but he said one that I think is interesting.

If you trained a model...

on a data set that you were extremely careful to have no mentions of consciousness or anything close to it in the training process.

Like not only was the word never there, but nothing about the sort of subjective experience of it or related concepts.

And then you started talking to that model about here are some things that you weren't trained about.

And for most of them, the model was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.

But then you asked it, you sort of described the experience, the subjective experience of consciousness.

And the model immediately responded, unlike the other questions.

Yes, I know exactly what you're talking about.

That would update me somewhat.

I don't think consciousness is an emotion.

But yes, if it knows- So I think there's many other tasks, tests like that, that we could look at too.

I'm certainly willing to believe that

consciousness is somehow the fundamental substrate and we're all just in the dream or the simulation or whatever i think it's interesting how much sort of the silicon valley religion of the simulation has gotten close to like brahman and how little space there is between them um but from these very different directions so like maybe that's what's going on

But if it is like physical reality as we understand it and all of the rules of the game and what we think they are, then there's something.

I still think it's something very strange.

I think it's weird when people think it's like a big dunk that I say like I'm a little bit afraid and I think it'd be crazy not to be a little bit afraid.

And I empathize with people who are a lot afraid.

The current worries that I have are that