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Are Large Language Models Conscious?

noemamag.com · 4,735 words · saved by 1 readers

We still don’t understand the role language plays in consciousness. The future of AI may upend what little we know. John Last is a freelance journalist based in Padua, Italy. Found in the hilly woods of Haute-Languedoc, he must have first seemed a strange kind of animal: naked, afraid, often hunched on all fours, foraging in the undergrowth. But this was no mere animal. Victor, as he would come to be known, was a scientific marvel: a feral child, perhaps 12 years of age, completely untouched by civilization or society. Accounts vary, but we know that eventually Victor was whisked away to a French hospital, where news of his discovery spread fast. By the winter of 1799, the story of the “Savage of Aveyron” had made its way to Paris, where it electrified the city’s learned community. On the cusp of a new century, France was in the midst of a nervy transition, and not only because of the rising tyranny of the Bonapartes. The previous few decades had seen the rational inquiries of philosop

Clément Thoby for Noema Magazine Credits John Last is a freelance journalist and former foreign correspondent living outside Ottawa, Canada. Found in the hilly woods of Haute-Languedoc, he must have first seemed a strange kind of animal: naked, afraid, often hunched on all fours, foraging in the undergrowth. But this was no mere animal. Victor, as he would come to be known, was a scientific marvel: a feral child, perhaps 12 years of age, completely untouched by civilization or society. Accounts vary, but we know that eventually Victor was whisked away to a French hospital, where news of his di

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