Emotionally Unsatisfying Panpsychism, Part I

The First of Three Apologies

I’m starting to preemptively bang my head against the wall when I say things like, “I think LLM’s have internal experience.” This is because the thing I always say immediately afterward seems to pass through some kind of perceptual filter that causes people to not hear it.1 That second thing is, “but not like a human being.”

I shall nevertheless say it again, all together, upfront, and straightforwardly even if in futility, “I think LLM’s have internal experience but not like a human being.”

Reading this now you probably understood me to say, “wow, this guy thinks LLM’s are just like people and carry the exact same moral status and moral duties as people!”

No.

Stop.

Do you know how many blogs and podcasts I had to mentally disagree with while hanging drywall or installing laminate flooring to come up with my own unique perspectives on consciousness? How many actual books? And YouTube college lectures? Plus tweet threads?

I specifically don’t think LLM’s are moral agents, meaning I don’t think you are obliged to treat them well beyond not causing deliberate torture. I don’t even think that you can really torture one right now in a product environment.2 You probably have less moral obligation toward an LLM, considered in isolation in today’s world, than you have toward a lizard. However, as we’ll get into below, that comes with major caveats and is a probably pretty short-sighted point of view. For the record, I also think you should be as kind to lizards as circumstances allow.

The reason I think LLM’s have internal experience is because I think everything has internal experience. Everything is, in some sense, alive. Your thermostat is probably doing something like thinking when it monitors the temperature. This belief is known as panpsychism and after considerable thought, it strikes me as the only plausible model for how consciousness works.

Everything has experience, but not everything has experience the same way or with the same intensity.

It also happens to be the case that when you break down what this means, and really think through all the implications, that everything is alive in an almost completely inert and boring way that has almost no consequences in the actual world we interact with everyday. Only humans currently possess the rare configuration of traits that make this underlying spiritual reality supremely meaningful.