The rise of large language models has brought back a millennia old question. Yet, not merely as a question, but — so it seems — as concrete possibility as well. I have to disappoint readers expecting a slowly built up tension arch for I’ll reveal the question Christopher-Nolan-wise at the very beginning. The beginning is here, this very paragraph.
Those AI algorithms so advanced that they managed to converse with us, do they think and feel like us? Do they have minds? Are they animated? Or are they just a sophisticated trick played on us, at its core nothing more than a sufficiently advanced mechanism?
It’s an old question because we can pose it in relation to any other entity displaying signs of agency: other people, animals, and both intra- and inter-species aliens.
You’re alone. I am not writing this. You’re hallucinating this. I am really you. We are not two. ‘We’ is really just you. Solipsism. There is one and only one mind in the universe and it’s yours! Those AIs, they live in your mind as well. Hard to believe, but — as anything where one hits the bottom of the philosophical iceberg — hard to debunk beyond doubt. So ‘we’ will leave it here, at the not so very beginning.
The complete opposite. One mind. We’re all connected, we’re really all one with the universe. I am I, you are you but we are we above all. If AIs have minds, then they are connected as well. If they don’t, we still get to keep our collective mind. Popular in spiritual circles. Easy to believe — be it for psychological reasons — and easy to argue for by means of sly application of abstract term’s vagueness. So ‘we’ will leave it here, at the not so very beginning.
Within the edge knitted by solipsism and universal mind, large languages models are weaving at us (pun intended). They are nearing being sufficiently human-like on the outside to ascribe them minds, yet — especially for those familiar with their inner workings — surprisingly mechanical on the inside. We might as well triangulate a brain and heart surgeon to locate the human soul in a man’s body…
So has the question been brought back? Attempting to answer this question is to ask God’s secrets before believing in him.