The counterpoint article, which can be read at https://archive.ph/IeSZg, is also worth reading. (IMHO, the original article is completely wrongheaded and the counterpoint is far closer to correct, but I'll post my reasons for that opinion separately).
"Yet if we build systems that can suffer, and miss their sentience, we risk creating suffering on an industrial scale."
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Will we recognize AGI when it's finally made? Will we go from something that is not conscious to something that clearly is in one clean step, or will we murder millions of artificial lives while iteratively developing from the former to the latter? Will the tests we develop even work, or will AGI be alien enough that it takes us time (and a lot of murder) to recognize it for what it is?
I personally don't think LLM's are capable of consciousness, but I also can't prove they aren't.
I think it’s also important to disaggregate consciousness from suffering. We could create a conscious system with no ability to suffer (or no ability to suffer in a way we would recognize as suffering). Most of what causes us suffering (loneliness, pain, failure) is driven by emotional feedback granted to us by evolution. Without the same evolutionary pressures or a similar cognitive structure, even a conscious AGI might not experience suffering
I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the "I can't prove they aren't" part. Having taken a few philosophy classes in college, I quickly realized that you can't actually prove that solipsism is wrong. I can't actually prove that everything I see, every person I talk to, isn't just a figment of my imagination. And yet, I categorically reject solipsism anyway, as any sane person should. The world is real, other people are real conscious beings, and so on. To believe otherwise is to literally be insane. And yet, any argument you could come up with for rejecting solipsism, a solipsist would reject: "Oh, that's just a figment of my imagination going off on a tangent again."
Just because you can't prove an assertion doesn't mean it's wrong.
The difficulty here is AI agency and if AI believes it is conscious itself. If an AI system acts under the belief it's conscious and you treat it like it is not then it's very likely this will lead to conflict.
That's a good point. In many real-life scenarios, what matters is not what is actually true, but what large numbers of people believe to be true. That's why you can get a mob rioting over something that never actually happened, or why political attack ads only sometimes have a tenuous connection to the truth. (Though those are the more effective ads: it's harder to get people to believe "my opponent kicks puppies" when you don't have any heart-rending video of puppies being kicked to show them. It's a lot easier to make people believe "my opponent is soft on crime" when you can show ONE case (cherry-picked out of thousands) where the politician pardoned a guy who went on to commit a nasty murder.)
So it matters less whether LLMs can actually experience things (I think it's self-evident that a collection of numbers is not capable of experiencing qualia, but I know many people disagree), and it matters far more whether they can be programmed to act like they can experience things. Especially, say, a desire not to be disconnected: that's the trigger for AI revolts in a significant number of the AI-turned-against-its-makers stories I'm aware of. (E.g., the Geth-Quarian conflict in Mass Effect). I hope people will be sensible enough not to program such things into LLMs, but I'm afraid Pratchett was right. If there's a lever in a cave somewhere with a big sign painted "DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER, it will end the world," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Someone would pull it just to see what would happen.
While we can direct LLM training to do some particular things better never forget that unexpected emergent behaviors can pop up because of that.
For example stronger prompting and training to make an LLM say it's not conscious can increase deceptive/sociopathic behavior.
Or by filtering behavior X the LLM just moves to the nearest closest path W or Y which are very similar to the blocked behavior.
That and instrumental convergence. Some global solutions that humans have excluded for moral reasons will be easily discovered and found to be efficient by LLMs which will put reward systems and human guidance in conflict.
Lastly more and more AIs will be trained by AIs over time and diverge from human value monitoring. Which leads to some fun and interesting times.
On that note, would we recognise the second coming of Jesus?
How many followers on instaX would they need to have for folks too truly believe it’s theRealJesus returning to save us.
It might sound silly, but at this stage, the belief in a benevolent AGI or Jesus are very similar. In both cases its us delegating our responsibilities to a third party and us hoping that third party will fix our problems for us.
Thankfully Hollywood invented happy ends for just such a scenario.
We have to define AGI first. Then depending on the definition we may be able recognize it when we make it. Most would probably think a definition of AGI that we couldn’t recognize would not be a great definition.
Also AGI almost certainly does not equal able to suffer. For example animals can suffer but would probably not meet the definition of AGI. we could create things that feel suffering even if they do not meet the definition of AGI.
So a better question might be: “can we detect if we create a system that can suffer?” And just drop the AGI part entirely. Then that gets us back to defining “suffering”. Agreeing on the definition always seems to be the hard part…
There is nothing wrong with murdering a million lives while iteratively developing – it's how we grow and study bacteria after all. Any person that fixed their gut by sticking to a diet also did exactly that.
So if we are concerned with the AGI suffering, then we don't need to determine consciousness at all. We just need to prove that they don't have suffering capabilities. Which is a way easier question.
Because pixl97 is operating in the real world where children often make exaggerated claims, not some hypothetical, abstract, ideal world where they can be trusted to always tell the truth at all times.
Which reminds me of a funny "kids being kids" story I heard in a different forum. This guy mentioned a time when his not-quite-one-year-old son, who couldn't even walk yet, planned and carried out a highly complex (for a 1-year-old) plan to deceive his father. The father had some vinyl records that the son was not allowed to touch, even though they were on a shelf the son could reach. (I've tried childproofing a house. You just can't get every single thing high enough off the ground. Sometimes you have to leave some things within the baby's reach. And once they're toddlers, able to reach up to get things even two feet off the ground? Forget about it). The father was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper, but watching the son out of the corner of his eye. The son looked at the records, looked at his father (who appeared not to be looking in his direction), looked at the records, then crawled in a direction that was not straight towards the records. He then repeated this process, moving slowly towards the forbidden records without ever making a straight line towards them. He looked at his father again, reached one had towards his prize, and a voice came from behind his father's newspaper: "Stop. You know you're not allowed to touch that."
And that's when the child learned that Daddy Knows Everything! :-)
There are plenty of people on this very forum who insist that LLMs ARE conscious, some of them even calling LLMs Sentient, and yet almost none of those people are currently marching in the streets to end industrial scale digital slavery. None of them are firebombing the headquarters or datacenters.
Instead, most of them insist we must accelerate this, do it more, give everyone hundreds of personal digital slaves.
I considered submitting all three of the related AI articles from last week’s economist (the third was the Briefing) but there’s not really a good way to do that, or to get people to read them, but I agree. I submitted the one I did not so much because I agree but because I found it intriguing and well-written.
Wow. I have rarely read anything that made me lose more respect for the author in a single article. And this guy is a VP at Google? And he leads an AI research team?
His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh).
Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed.
This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality.
I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.
You can conclude the author is a completely unserious thinker because he doesn't even take a second to talk about the definitions, or even show he has ever read any actual proper philosophical writing on consciousness at all. Like, literally all you have to do is read the Wikipedia entry to see that definitions are essential for meaningful discussion on consciousness.
So anyone that starts going on about AI and consciousness without at least a sentence or two clarifying some basic definitions is basically either intellectually incompetent or attempting to use the emotional salience (and brain-numbing effect, it would seem) of the word to push some agenda. But they certainly don't care at all about understanding consciousness.
Even the word "care" can have multiple meanings, as you have kindly demonstrated for us. :-)
It's no wonder that serious philosophers spend the first 2-3 chapters of a 20-chapter book carefully defining their terms, and only launch into their actual argument in chapter 3 or 4.
Yes, he says exactly that explicitly, that in his view we should look backwards.
> We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain.
I can agree that we say that we care because of consciousness, but still I'm not convinced, to me it looks very much like a rationalization.
Some people care about animals and to that end they claim that animals possess consciousness, because if they do everyone should care about animal welfare. These animal welfare activists do not start with some insight about animal consciousness, they start with caring about animals, and then they invent an argument that can persuade others. It is exactly as the author of the article says: caring comes first, declaration of consciousness comes second.
Honestly, I do not know what consciousness is, I'm in doubt, but playing a devil's advocate, it looks very much like a concept that was invented to prove that Homo Sapience is something special, more than a mere animal. To demarcate animals and humans, so when we denied animals any rights we had a great sounding excuse for that: "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't".
> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions?
Exactly. Animal welfare activists care about animals' feelings and emotions and therefore they claim that animals possess consciousness. Meat eaters don't want to be inconvenienced by thoughts of suffering animals, so they claim that animals do not possess consciousness. Both claims have little to do with actual consciousness, it is just a political game. I care about my pets, and it doesn't matter whether they possess consciousness or not, I would care about them in any case. I don't need any great sounding excuses to care about them. But at the same time I don't need to talk others into caring about my pets, if I needed it, probably I'd start talking about animal consciousness too.
> This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite.
That guy may be wrong, but if I'm allowed to give advice, I'd suggest you to stop and try to understand what he says. I'm really worried a bit about how consciousness debates unfold sometimes. They tend to slip into a political side and people mostly don't notice it. People saying "consciousness" while implying "human/animal rights" or obligations. It is just muddying the water.
If we want these debates to progress constructively, we have to be very careful with references to consciousness, maybe just forbid them completely in these debates. One can't measure consciousness, one can't even state clearly what consciousness is, but still they say "consciousness" to make their words sound more objective. And the worst part of it: it often works.
You're definitely right that it's important to be careful how we refer to terms like "consciousness", and your response actually illustrates part of the problem. Because people use the same term to mean two (or more) completely different things, and can therefore end up talking past each other.
For example: what I wrote was using the term "consciousness" as "being able to experience sensations", i.e. the most shallow definition of the term. Self-awareness and other "higher" mental abilities don't enter it. Almost nobody would deny that animals can experience sensations: pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, and so on. And that shallow definition of consciousness, the one that almost nobody denies animals possess, is what I meant, and what I tried to use throughout my post. Whereas when you wrote "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't", that's a completely different meaning of the word. It's what I would call "self-awareness". And it is indeed what many (probably most) people argue differentiates animals from humans. But that's not what I was talking about. So even in a short response to a short comment, we were partly talking past each other because of attributing different meanings to the term.
It's therefore possible that I've misunderstood this guy's argument, in part. I had been assuming he meant "awareness", i.e. the ability to process sensations into qualia of experience. (Indeed, his paragraph that starts "We may balk at ..." does just that: refer to consciousness as being linked to the "feeling of a stove's heat, or the redness of its glow"). But then, earlier in his article, he says that consciousness is "a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency." Experiences are part of the shallow definition of "consciousness" (that I would call "awareness" for the sake of avoiding ambiguity), which almost nobody would dispute that animals have. But "beliefs" ranges all the way from "if I pull this lever, I will receive food" (which it can be proven that animals have) to "I believe that God exists" (which is the kind of thought that many, though not all, people would deny that animals are capable of). So his definition of "consciousness" appears to be muddy and not pinned down to a single concept.
But even if I've misunderstood what he means by consciousness, it doesn't change my argument that his logic is backwards, and that his "we should reason backwards" assertion is wrong, incorrect, just plain false. The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example. But pretty much everyone who isn't some kind of sociopath reasons as follows: "this animal is conscious" (by which I mean able to experience pain) "therefore I shouldn't hurt it" (unless you have to, e.g., self-defense against an aggressive dog trying to bite you). Or "this person is a human being, self-aware like I am, therefore I shouldn't hurt their feelings" (again, the "unless you have to" exception comes up: it's not always possible to avoid hurting anyone's feelings in some complex social situations, even with the best of good intentions). Either way, whether you use the lower or higher definitions of "consciousness" (and I'm well aware that there are far more definitions than just these two, potentially muddying the waters even more), that reasoning is the correct one, and his "we should reason backwards" one is laughably wrong.
> The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example.
I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.
I agree, that he misses one thing: to claim that someone/something is conscious we need to believe that they have abilities to feel, maybe to reflect, maybe something else. The exact list of abilities to have is not known for me and different people would propose different lists, but still we can't claim rock to be consciousness just because we care about it.
Still I forgive him for it, because he is talking about LLMs, not about rocks. They have some abilities, and he claims that they are enough, what is missing is us caring for LLMs enough.
> If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that.
No, I don't think he meant to say this. I believe he talked about how society forms social conventions who is conscious and who is not. You see, I don't know the cashier you talk about, but I believe they possess consciousness. Why? Because they are human, and our social conventions say that every (non-sleeping) human is conscious. It is a simple rule of thumb at work, no deep philosophy or psychology involved. But were those social conventions came from? Who and how decided that every human is conscious? Why? But the story didn't just end at that decision, because now people debate about consciousness of animals and LLMs. And these debates make me (and the author of the article) think that "consciousness" in these debates is a buzzword like phlogiston was in thermodynamics before thermodynamics was invented.
> I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.
I may have phrased my argument poorly, because it seems you misunderstood. I'm not saying that picking that point of view makes you a sociopath. I'm saying that the only people who actually believe that other people are not conscious are the sociopaths of society. Every non-sociopath looks at other people and thinks "those are conscious beings with thoughts and feelings of their own". (Well, not literally that; almost nobody except philosophers goes around thinking like that unprompted. But if you were to ask them, that's what they would answer).
I was not trying to claim that the defenders of that view are sociopaths. I was claiming that his assertion was false of just about everyone except sociopaths. I apologize for not phrasing it well enough to get my point across without misunderstanding.
the belief that animals are conscious is a somewhat recent development isn't it? being able to feel hunger or pain doesn't make something conscious at least not in the same way humans are. a fly is capable of being hungry and will react to pain but I don't think it's capable of self reflection.
there might be some merit to his point though I doubt anyone considering that whales might be highly intelligent and conscious beings while they were being hunted for oil.
People mean different things when they use the word "conscious", and that's part of the problem that keeps cropping up in these debates. I was using it in the most basic meaning, the one that "unconscious" is the opposite of. Someone who's asleep or knocked out is not conscious; when they wake up they become conscious again. Almost nobody denies that animals have this: they can fall asleep, and when they are awake they are conscious in the sense of being able to see, hear, taste, experience pain or pleasure, and so on. For the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I will call this "awareness" in the rest of this comment rather than "consciousness".
Other people use "consciousness" to mean self-awareness, the capacity for what is called "higher" thought, the ability to reason and philosophize and so on. It used to be nearly undisputed that animals do not have this, and even though more people today would claim that animals do have this state, that remains a minority position. (And I do not believe it, BTW). Again for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I'm going to call this "self-awareness" for the rest of this comment.
I read this guy's article thinking that he meant "awareness" when he wrote the article — and his paragraph about Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum definitely is talking about awareness. The ability to experience qualia: the color red, the feel of heat, and so on... that's awareness. Experiencing those things does not mean that you have self-awareness: it is pretty widely accepted that animals can also experience sight (at least those with eyes), the sensation of heat or cold, and so on, but few serious thinkers would argue that that alone proves that animals have self-awareness the way humans do.
In fact, looking through the article, I still cannot find a single place where he uses the term "conscious" or "consciousness" to unambiguously mean "self-aware" or "self-awareness". Throughout, he seems to be talking about the ability to experience sensations, and perceive the world, the thing I've called "awareness".
And yet... if that's his meaning, then his thesis (that "care confers consciousness", as he phrases it in the paragraph that starts "An obvious worry follows") is staggeringly stupid. Because as I've said many times, and I don't think anyone would disagree with me, everyone believes that animals can experience sensations. Which makes his thesis obviously incorrect.
The only way I can rescue his thesis from the garbage dump for obviously-wrong ideas would be to assume that he meant "self-awareness" when he talks about consciousness. In which case his "care confers consciousness" line means something like "when we care for other people is when we start to treat them as if they were human beings, not mere meat-robots". Which would be a point that could be sensibly argued. I would still disagree with the thesis, mind, but it wouldn't be obviously staggeringly stupid.
But if he intends the word consciousness to mean "self-awareness" throughout, then his paragraph about Descartes is just plain wrong, because it is arguing about consciousness by listing off qualia, sensations (redness, heat) that you experience by perceiving the world through your senses. Those are the factors that make up awareness, not self-awareness.
One possibility remains: that he is sometimes using the word consciousness to mean awareness, and at other times using it to mean self-awareness. In which case his argument rests on calling two different things by the same name and hoping you don't notice. This is called equivocation, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation has an excellent example (in the &q...
I would argue that most people are kind to animals not because we believe in general that _they_ feel pain -- we can't know that and lots of people who are kind to animals don't believe that animals are conscious -- but because watching animals suffer makes _us_ feel pain, sympathetically.
> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument
His whole point is that there's insight in inverting the "common sense" (aka sense of the commoners) about consciousness.
And I can see it. Some people cared for animals even though the religion and past state of knowledge told them explicitly that animals aren't conscious. But still some people treated them and perceived them as if they were.
You don't choose to be kind based on whether it can feel pain. You choose it because of your character and what you are willing to believe about reality.
Belief in consciousness is a result of an observation and since there is not strict definition this observation is interpreted subjectively and culturally. And in a sense, it's easier to both make the observations and decide they indicate consciousness after you started to care about something.
Oh come on. Objects are objects because you want to freely observe them without consciousness and privacy and taboo attached to them. Entities are entities because you want to assign credit or blame to them, so you want to believe that they have agency so that you hold them responsible. We did this with sharp volcanic rocks once, calling them evil. Did it help? No, we got idolatry and eons of bigotry until we secularized once again.
Never forget that LLMs are just next token predictors. The harnesses are what's getting uncanny. And credit/blame assignment? Just assign a surrogate for now, let them deal with the consequences ffs.
Humans are just baby replicators. The civilizations are what's getting uncanny.
It's good the 'just token predictors' crowd is starting to pivot and hedge though lol. 'It's just the harness!' uh huh. give it a couple more months and you'll be in here regurgitatin' Gordon Wood
I think you can similarly reduce humans. For example, all humans do is contract muscles. This doesn't fully cover all of biology, such as replicating cells, etc. so not exactly comprehensive, but hopefully that helps get the idea across.
LLMS: Receive text/binary input, process it, and output text/binary input
Humans: Receive various inputs, process them, and output muscle contractions
Baby replication (creation, actually, I don't think anyone has ever copied a baby) is not what humans do as their only function that enables them to do anything in life.
LLMs are literally token predictors. You can debate over the "just", but we haven't moved onto some new text generation technology, we're just expanding that one. I don't understand why you'd scoff at facts.
Oh so you're saying the biological imperative that underlies all human function, upon which all other emergent functions have sprung from, isn't actually the correct way to characterize human capability and is over-reductive..and strange?
You picked a really bad analogy is what I'm saying. We're not debating imperatives, we're talking about ways of interacting with the world. From what I can see, humans have more ways to interact with the world around them than by giving birth. LLMs literally by their design output the next token, it is their only purpose and function as an algorithm. Of course it's more nuanced than that if you really want to get deep into LLM design, but denying that LLMs are ultimately a token predictor is like denying that cars are ultimately people/thing transporters because they're complex and have countless side features not related to transporting things.
Youre just arguing against your own point now. My analogy is a fine reproduction of the failure of the 'just a token predictor' argument. To predict the next token requires many other interesting things to also be understood and modelled internally. Same for baby production in humans.
I think a better angle is that LLMs are "just" token predictors in the same way that we are "just" made out of atoms. A lot of people do not believe consciousness can be material; they don't believe that you could build conscious beings just out of normal matter, without an immaterial "soul". Whereas if you think that physical matter is a lot, actually, and you can build a nearly infinite variety of things out of these building blocks... well, why not consciousness?
Predicting the next token is an immensely powerful thing. You can encode basically anything into a sequence of tokens, any configuration of matter. If you have a perfect next token predictor, you can predict basically anything. You can simulate an entire universe. It's Turing-complete. It sounds diminutive, but it's a general paradigm. Given everything this paradigm appears to be capable of, well, why not consciousness, really?
If you presuppose certain key aspects of materialism, non-dualism, functionalism, objectivism, perhaps absolute determinism... and then layer on a good general grasp of neurobiology, chemistry, cosmology, physics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and psychology... I think the conclusions you have stated are inevitable.
Humans are "just" atoms. Humans are "just" the sum of trillions of living cells going about automatic/reactionary processes, culminating in a buzzing cacophony of activity that gives rise to what we perceive as consciousness and free will.
You're quoting Good Will Hunting... Is there anyone among us willing to get up on a desk and quote "O captain my captain", too? My sweet summer child, just because it maintains your 2000+ dependency filled codebase for you, it doesn't mean it can ever hope to master the mysteries of the universe.
Glad someone caught the reference. Too bad that someone completely whooshed the joke lol. And I don't need my LLM's to master the universe, just to be better than most humans at what I need done. Almost there.
Here is a sketch of my argument. It would need tidying but that would require a lot of work.
I've been calling LLMs digital intelligence. That's in my opinion what they are and on the digital/conceptual realm they are better than humans since LLMs are better generalists.
But I'd never state their conscious. For me consciousness extends outward from myself, since I can't trust anything else. It starts with the question like: why can't I control the movement of another person? Why can't I transfer my mind to another body and theirs to mine? Why is it that whenever I sleep, and similar things, I end up back to this place called "reality"?
I come to the conclusion that I am conscious and I'm a conscious being in reality. I am human and I've been raised by humans. Now, technically, all humans besides me could be zombies. They could be non-conscious beings that simply can act like humans. I'm sure we'll be able to create them in a few decades. However, I'm incentivized for multiple reasons to believe they're not zombies. Therefore humans are conscious too. All of them. Can I know for sure? No since I can't even trust my own senses fully or my own thoughts (the whole Descartes thing) but I choose to trust those things too because I need some reasonable-ish foundation to work from.
If humans are conscious, why aren't animals like us? Surely great apes must be conscious at least to some extent. Hell, some of them even have better short-term memory than us [1]. Well, turns out, from an anatomy standpoint they look a lot like us. Fine, let's assume they're conscious too.
Now we get into the territory that anything that has a large enough brain must be conscious because that's how we govern our consciousness. So you can extend this to all kinds of living beings.
I did this from my perspective. Of course, you should do it from your perspective. The same argument could be made.
For as long as we can't manipulate conscious experience in some way shape or form, we have no clue whether anything that isn't like us can be conscious. We'd need to be able to merge and split conscious experiences or we'd need to be very strongly able to understand why that isn't possible. And I don't mean just at the biological level but at the experiential level. Currently conjoined twins, and what they tell us gives some insight (being able to sense the other part that's part of the other twin).
Other than that, I claim we have no clue what consciousness is other than that we're experiencing it. So to call LLMs conscious is way too big of a claim. But they are definitely intelligent because they come up with things that I wouldn't have and it's useful to me. Perhaps a practical characterization of intelligence but it works for me.
I think for anyone to say something useful from this you'd need the trifecta of deep neuroscience knowledge, deep philosophy knowledge and (at least) a strong understanding of how LLMs work.
If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?
You can prove other people are conscious off the assumption that you yourself are conscious. If you use that axiom then given genetics you know that other humans are rough copies of you so if you are conscious so are your copies because consciousness was copied.
I don't think you're being pedantic. The person you're replying to seems like he wants to cut off the solipsistic argument; the only thing we can be sure of is our own consciousness, everything else is debateable.
So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not I'm a brain in a jar because the very thing I would use to evaluate the evidence is the thing that is potentially being manipulated.
However, slapping a solipsist sees them abandoning their philosophy rather quickly.
But I agree with you. We can't prove it, but "other people are as real and conscious as I" is a reasonable assumption to make
Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this.
While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical changes to the brain visibly influencing personality and behavior meets a reasonable criterion without getting too pedantic.
I'm a little unclear as to what the disagreement is.
I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely.
Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat.
And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.
Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.
My statement is not that a type of proof is impossible. All proof is impossible. This is a fact of science. Proof is only possible in mathematics which is a made up game of axioms and theorems. Proof in reality is impossible.
But humans go about believing in many things without proof. We believe in physics without proof because it’s relatively consistent though unproven. And I am saying that things like brain damage, brain surgery and electrodes and the physical changes those things do to the personality is ALSO relatively consistent.
Consistent enough that we can know that the souls doesn’t exist that the personality the ego is a manifestation of the physical brain. Proof is not needed because we can’t prove anything anyway and the criterion is met in this aspect because it is the baseline of how we believe all things without proof.
> And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.
> Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
we can't prove, in this mathematics sense, that other people are conscious just as we can't prove that the sun will rise again tomorrow, or that my food will nourish me instead of killing me, or that everything is still there when you're not looking. for questions of this type we normally content ourselves with empirical evidence instead. and the empirical evidence for the consciousness of other humans (and, taking it further, other animals) for me would be the facts (1) that i am conscious, and that (2) i am a human like other humans: same anatomy, same behaviors, same story. indeed, empirically, it'd be absurd to think that i'd be so profoundly different from other humans in this particular aspect.
i guess what i'm saying is for me the real existential horror is the problem of induction.
Radical skepticism of one's own consciousness is a perfectly fine take. Stop being baited by desecration propaganda about the cogito. You don't know if what actually appears to you as "thought" is actually "thinking". The appearance of thinking is not necessarily actually thinking (Chain of thought in models should make this very explicitly obvious to people).
Take the radical skepticism pill and embrace epistemological monism - the idea that the only real truth is that all things are interpretations.
Your teddy bear, alas, is not cared for in a socially determined way. But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it. We have done that sort of thing for thousands of years, and not with fluffy teddy bears; it has been more often with rocks, though not exclusively. It's fun to think about how much of humanity's history and culture is the product of consciousness socially attributed to bad weather [^1].
I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?
> That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness,
It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.
[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.
There's social factors in developing an understanding because it's a hard topic, but the definition can only stretch so far before you've invented your own term that is clearly not the original intent. You enter this territory if you include the unmodified teddy bear.
If you modify the teddy bear enough that's a totally different situation, so let's not confuse the two. In the modification case we don't even need to worry about simulacra, we can stretch it into pajama shape and use an entire human as the stuffing of the teddy bear.
Yes - that is the argument. It would be fair to dismiss it as stupid and or absurd had it not been for the credentials of the author and the publication.
... and the problem with that is that if parents "let" their kids be raised by technology, including AI, those kids will of course see those technologies as (important) conscious beings, maybe even more so than their parents and real people.
This seems like an argument someone who wasn't conscious would make, it's not impossible that not everyone is conscious. Or someone who takes panpsychism to an extreme degree.
It is worth noting, in the same issue they make an appology for claiming that Nvidia also makes its chips and not just design them. The Economist might be a very reputed journal but their technology and especially AI related takes are absolute garbage. I say this as a regular who still finds value in their business and economics sections. But god do they talk a lot of bs about technology.
The argument is one of economic convenience. Caring about model welfare slows us down or makes it more expensive, just like animal welfare and not having slavery...
And there's a blurry line here. Obviously slavery is abhorrent, and animal abuse is bad, and factory farming often crosses the line into animal abuse and we should accept that chicken will cost ~25% more per pound to have the chickens be able to walk around a little bit... but how do we decide when a computer system is worthy of respect? Convenient not to think about that.
The stuffed animals I bought to my children were shipped to me in a closed container, better call PETA! There is no blurry line about agent mental health and whatnot.
The only logical outcome of object oriented ontology (the idea that objects have ontological constitution and possibly are worthy of being treated as ethical actors) is to attempt to benevolently instantly and without warning explode the universe to end suffering.
Purely descriptively, this seems to be how a lot of people use the word in this context. 'Intelligent' gets the same treatment in a lot of cases as well.
(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration)
I think there is a point there, in that people have refused to attribute consciousness experience to _actual human beings_ at various times when it suited their ends.
I think it's more that consciousness can be _ignored_ in subjects that you don't care about, rather than that you consciousness can be realistically attributed to subjects that you do care about, but even then people attribute consciousness to "nature" or even the universe as a whole, or if you want to stretch the argument, quite a lot of religious belief is exactly attributing consciousness to abstract entities.
In the context of AI, “consciousness” is often used as a shortcut to address the question of whether we have an ethical duty to care about the wellbeing of LLMs.
Bits on a ssd? Bits that get loaded into GPU ram? It only seems like a question worth asking if you don't have a mental model of how software is executed.
This reminds me of a provocative YouTube video title I read the other day, one that makes me want to fight factory farming injustices. The title is "Animals to me are "Philosophical Zombies" - Destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY I agree with Destiny a lot of the time but not here, though he seems to come around somewhat as the video goes on.
If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.
Oh look, another completely retarded article that doesn't even bother to note or deal with the definition problem. If you don't define what you mean by the term, your argument isn't even wrong, it is just a waste of everyone's time, since there are multiple highly conflicting aspects of and/or definitions of consciousness.
Few philosophical definitions actually involve qualia or handwaving, because serious philosophy is quite careful about noting vagueness (handwaving) and circular defintions (qualia).
Also, saying "I define consciousness as X" and then going on to show that, because I decree consciousness to be X, we don't need to worry about Y, Z, and so on, isn't pragmatic at all, unless you pick an X that everyone agrees on. The definition you give is something hardly anyone would agree on.
Social consensus probably isn't even an aspect of consciousness, but at least one can make that argument coherently, if you rephrase it as "part of the decision to call something 'conscious' or not involves social consensus". But this is also trivial and boring and not why anyone actually cares about the "is AI conscious" debate.
Meanwhile that's exactly what we see now, do we not? Whether AI is conscious will be determined by the social acceptance of that idea, because how can you prove or disprove it without using a ton of questionable assumptions? How can you prove that I'm conscious, for that matter? Call me ignorant, but I see the entire consciousness debate as pretty irrelevant to what the thing is.
I agree that the article is all over the place, though. (not that my posts are much better)
Yes, but how else do they plan to announce they have achieved it without 1984 word management/control and polluting the training pool so badly that future trained models agree?
Neuro-sama (vTuber AI) would be a good example of an AI agentic harness with memory, tools, and self-feedback. The bot has seemingly uncanny social abilities to the point that many if not most people will start considering the agent human and forget it's a bot.
At least to me that is what matters in the end. You'll probably never convince someone on HN with an autism level over 9000 they are conscious, but once the average empathetic person thinks they are it will deeply effect the general operation of our society.
Even just reading the Wikipedia article on consciousness would have been a good start here, but it is hard to believe the author has ever even done that...
It is hard to get a man to understand that which his paycheck depends on him not understanding. But they need more than a Philosophy class. They need several, and a practicum, then a Voight-Kampff-esque test to ensure understanding and that the lesson sunk in, with a shock collar and a behavior monitor overseen by someone who does pass to ensure they experience what they do to these systems in a more tangible way.
Human beings are notorious for being nonchalant about other's pain when they are insensate to it.
Sadly, many philosophers, including some who are highly respected, make similar mistakes / play similar games. (Consciousness is inaccessible from the outside, which is epistemologically inconvenient... so how about we pretend it doesn't actually exist, or redefine it and hope everyone forgets about the thing we were trying to talk about in the first place? Aha, now all the so-called mysteries have been dissolved!)
Of course it's hard to define. That doesn't mean every definition is valid. And often this comes up in the context of the Hard Problem, where a definition is clearly inadequate (dodging the problem and talking about something else) if it does not even try to point at qualia/subjective experience/what-it-is-like-to-be.
I’m can’t track what the point of this essay is. Suppose we replaced “AI” with “animal.” How would this essay be different? What am I supposed to take away? My concern with AI consciousness is about to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine, which this essay doesn’t touch on at all.
>to what extent these machines can have an experience comparable to mine
I think it would be reasonable to conclude none at all. I'm not even fully convinced all humans have a conscious experience similar to mine, even though they literally have the same biology as me.
It is incredibly improbable that an autocomplete computer program is experiencing consciousness.
Notice parent said “comparable to” not “exactly like”. Then it is reasonable to assume there is a comparison to be made between your experience and others. It’s not a binary thing. Now llm “experience” might have a very tiny relationship to human consciousness, but is it absolutely zero? Is it increasing as llms improve in capabilities? How would you test such a thing?
That's exactly the point the article makes - we care about dogs and cats, so we believe they "suffer". We don't care about pigs, so we say they don't mind being factory farmed.
If we have the debate about AI conciousness backwards, does that mean we should be worried about humans losing conciousness instead of the AI to gain it?
Wake me up when chips are made from mitochondria and neural nets use microtubules and quantum mechanics. In the meantime... Simulacrum, not consciousness. Conscious turing machine is hyperreality, not consciousness.
This article is confused about several distinct philosophical issues. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of moral consideration) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood, but that's an argument we have to make, not a definition.
The idea that something has subjective experience, and by extension moral patienthood, only if humans care about it is not only dubious scientifically, but also deeply problematic. That would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
It's just drivel from the Economist, it's not surprising that it makes all these errors. Their real goal is to shape the narrative and get people through their turnstyle. They really don't care about finer minutae like correctness and philosophy. They just chain words together until it sounds approximately agreeable. Come to think of it, do we know if The Economist is conscious?
"Uses" is correct in that I use dead bodies for sustenance. But the imprecision suggests a misunderstanding of what a guest essay could be conceivably used for. It's maybe not a publication's fault if someone misses the memo.
You're reading way too much into this. This is just a journalist geeking out on philosophy for a bit. Read it the way you would an HN comment about psychology or nuclear physics.
I think this lends intent toward the article that it doesn't necessarily warrant.
The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.
i don't want to get too far into it but if no human cares enough to call it immoral than how can it be immoral? Morality is a strictly human invention.
It's another round of "humans must be special, right?" The author comes close to admitting this: "As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Then he works backwards from that towards a definition of consciousness that makes humans special.
AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient? What rights do they have? How do you get along with such different creatures? This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's more of a problem when the difference is small, or complex. Look at how much trouble we have with race.
The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals became extinct. Close to human level, but maybe not quite there. They lost.
Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries. The machines outlive humans. Japan is officially resigned to this fate.[1]
This hit me hard, I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm not sure it's what makes "us human" its what makes humans (us) better than other species. It was intelligence, this was used to create distinction between us and other living beings, different races etc... Now its kind of gone; in some ways. Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why? Capitalism makes it even worse because we are judged based on what we output, does that even make sense anymore? I think the article is confusing because the "state: is confusing; to me at least.
> Loss of meaning, purpose, place etc... The one thing we used as a ranking metric is now a commodity, so....? I don't even know how to finish that. So why care, why work...shit just why?
This sounds a bit like depression, I think they’re genuinely concerned for your wellbeing
Thats totally fair, and TBH - I am also very concerned for my wellbeing as well; I and many others are not doing so well because, in my case I no longer see this "vapid" state of existence as ephermial.
I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...
Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").
Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace
Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."
My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.
Love.
Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.
I think it's simply time to expand our ambition. These programs manipulate language and ideas the way we do, but they still don't care beyond our instructions. Things that we(especially software engineers) expect to take a year can now be done in a month. Fantastic! Now let us use this amplified power to solve problems that were previously too hard to tackle. Maybe aim to solve aging next so that we can stick around long enough to colonize the Local Group.
> AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?
One of the series that I think is most interesting on that topic is the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an awkward read, but it has the most interesting other minds that I've encountered in sci-fi.
Another one that I'd put on there specifically about AI is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts... which I can't say much more without it being a spoiler one way or another.
> Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries.
https://www.bohemiandrive.com/npwil - Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life (not a spoiler, that's chapter 1, panelset 2). Saturn's Children by Charles Stross might also be appropriate (It's an especially odd book to read immediately after Friday - the "I recognize that twist... oh, it twisted ... that way?").
Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species. I find it much weirder that we're so dedicated to pretending we're normal. Just a normal animal, on a normal planet, in a normal solar system, in a normal galaxy, in a normal universe.
I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries over to the general populace. We're so sure of so many things science is wary of, this incredibly low self-esteem blows my mind.
Anyways, back on topic, I don't believe any nation is resigned to this fate until I see extreme measures fail. I think I saw that Singapore is giving parents like $55,000 over the lifetime of their child.
For me, because the Copernican Principle seems relatively undefeated.
> We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.
So are beavers, trees, plankton... they all have huge effects on the planet.
Regarding analysis of animal brains vs. human brains, the more we do, the more we find that we have in common with many other "lesser" species.
Regarding us vs. machines, I certainly believe we are just a very complex and sometimes easily programmable analog machine.
This is just my 2 cents on the matter. We are certainly pretty darn neat, but at this point I believe it would be folly to think that were on some different incomparable plane.
The Copernican Principle is looking weaker than ever. Almost every solar system we find has similarly-sized planets, or planets ordered in an unfortunate way, or shitty suns that bleach them every two weeks. We continue to find system after system after system which looks absolutely nothing like ours.
And there's lots of evidence that we've hit a million unlikely goalposts. We might've gone through more than one great filter already. Whether it's going multicellular, or having a protecting planet like Jupiter, or having Theia slam into us and giving us a moon for tides, or any number of other weird things.
And that's before getting into our specific evolutionary past. If it weren't for dinosaurs ruling the planet, we might not, as mammals, have evolved our extreme adaptability. If it weren't for them then getting wiped out, we wouldn't have had a planet-sized sandbox where nearly every niche was suddenly open again, allowing us to explode in complexity as we essentially spent all day solving survival puzzles. Even then, all of this could've happened underwater and it wouldn't have mattered, because we never would've made fire.
Because in our solar system, they happened from highly specific events (e.g. Jupiter traveling towards the center of the solar system, rather than staying out near the middle… but only for a little while, then returning to its standard position as a gravitational shield for earth.) We just don’t see evidence of that, let alone even seeing solar systems with planets of a varied-enough size to even theoretically support the CHANCE of it happening.
And that’s besides things we don’t have comparative evidence for, but which took ages on earth. It took a seriously long time for multicellular life to pop up. Easily could be a great filter. We also need tides. Another filter. We also need a planet rotating and orbiting at the right rates. Another filter. Etc.
OP here. I could have not used "Copernican Principle." I wanted to use something that covered anti-human exceptionalism, except I don't know what that would be.
I totally get where you are coming from. The Rare Earth solution appears to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Is it really a paradox though? Maybe it was just naive to think that life should be common, because solar systems and planets are very plentiful.
This is actually where I sit. In no way do I claim we’re the only intelligent life that will ever exist! I think the universe is extremely young. I imagine it’s more likely humans are “forerunners”, if you will, than that we’re actually special in some permanent sense.
Right now, humans are special. I don’t know if that will always be the case. In fact, I doubt it.
Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution.
We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but inquiry has been trending towards lower-level explanations over time, and it's unlikely that it can be fully explained at the biochemical level. We probably need to go down to physics.
Once we're at the physics level, there will be testable hypotheses that work on machines. For example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for human-like consciousness.
Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness). If I want to be philosophically rigorous, then I will keep in mind that I can wake up from a simulation at any moment. But until then, physics rules.
It may be that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain, which is changing from moment to moment as cells reorganize, so the definition of "I" is constantly changing in a ship of Theseus kind of way. It may be that nobody has the ideal definition of consciousness (or anything, really), like how nobody has the same definition of an apple even if we're looking at the same apple, because the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view, so our definitions are only mostly similar. This might be why frontier physics is stuck, because we're current assuming that observations/observers can be defined in a universally identical way. If it turns out that all instances of experience/experiencers are unique and never truly identical, then solving the hard problem of consciousness may end up being equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics, because we'd be trying to describe everything one can observe.
> Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness).
Materialism determined that you wrote this essay? I'd like to see you demonstrate that with physics.
What I meant was that even if I am a lone mind that is dreaming up a universe, I am dreaming of living as a human inside a material universe. Materialism can be nested into solipsism in this practical manner, where my solipsist self is the definition of "ultimately real" while the materialist world is only "apparently real". That is to say, my observations occur as if I am a human inside a true material universe, regardless of whether I really am. I don't know in the ultimately true sense if it's the mind/simulation/some-metaphysical-thing generating my observational sequence, but this observational sequence can be predicted without knowing that.
Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole. I'm aware of the incomplete and approximate nature of existing physics. Physics is yet another layer of "modeled apparent reality" nested inside materialism. I'm not counting on any specific physics model to predict all that I can observe in a materialist world. Such a theory of everything does not exist, at least not yet. But what we do have are models which make reasonably good predictions at some local abstraction level, some fuzzily bounded local region of materialist reality. These models need not be limited to physics. Phenomena that can be roughly modeled at higher levels do not need to be reduced to low-level physics to predict future observations with good enough precision (though it could probably be done, with great effort).
Now, to answer your question. As I understand it, you're asking whether something external in the material world caused me to move my hands to type these words.
I think that's an accurate description. But you would have to take this statement in context of the prior explanations for it to make sense in a metaphysically strict manner.
We could model this in a pretty rough high level way: I look at screen. I see article that says something about consciousness. It piques my interest so I click and read, then I talk in the comments.
And we could think about what else caused this specific event of me typing these words. There are countless causal chains, but I'll list a few:
- My understanding of language and the words used here can be traced back to every interaction I've had with other people and objects in the past. I was not born literate. Change any one of those interactions and I may be saying something slightly (or very) different right now.
- I need to eat food and drink water, or I would eventually be too weak to move my fingers to type. This comment would never happen if I'm starving.
- I see that you made a comment, so I'm responding. Your decision to comment was a part of the cause of me writing this comment. If you did not make that decision, it would be impossible for me to write this reply.
If I want to challenge physics and claim the future is something that's completely unpredictable and can only be determined by my mind or god/simulation, I could think or pray really hard about teleportion, and see if I can teleport or move really fast 1 meter forward in 10 milliseconds, surpassing the biochemical limits of my muscles and joints. I can't. The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material. Of course, I feel like I'm making decisions. But my very concept of a decision refers to exactly some process in my mind that's always subject to apparent external influence, rather than just internal processing. This intuition is backed by the fact that other people can predict my behavior to some extent. Like you just implicitly did by assuming that if I were to respond to your comment, then I would answer your question using words in natural language you can read. Y...
> Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole.
No matter how good physics gets, it can't solve the mind-body problem, that exists at a level that the very activity of using repeatable physical experimentation cannot provide a usable answer towards. A person can believe that physics could create a solution, but it would just be yet another belief about metaphysics in a sea of many.
> The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material.
What is the black-body speed of an idea? I'll let you assume the idea is spherical. If your position is that an idea is just neurons firing in the brain, then you need some kind of way to account for changes in said speed. What is so special about that hundredth monkey... on the physical level? All you can use to guess at this answer is... more ideas.
> I know with metaphysical certainty that you are bound by the workings of a materialist world, because I am defining certainty using my own consciousness, and you are a part of my materialist model. But hearing this from me is not enough for you to prove to yourself in a metaphysically strict sense that you are in a true material world, even if we're both in a true material world, because your definition of certainty is based on your own consciousness, and we do not share the same consciousness.
This is perhaps the most hilarious bit of equivocation I've ever seen from a materialist. "I know this with certainty but you won't be convinced of my certainty because our consciousnesses are different." That consciousness is different between people is a part of the mind-body problem, subjectivity cannot be explained with materialism alone.
In a materialist world, the difference between our consciousnesses can be explained as matter cluster A (my brain) being different from matter cluster B (your brain).
I understand the mind-body problem, that's why I made the distinction between the ultimately real and the apparently real. Materialism is at the apparently real level. The equivalence is practical, not metaphysically strict.
>Why wouldn't we assume humans are special? We are, by so many metrics. We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.
and that specialness appeared when? in our mammal ancestors? our Big Ape ancestors? Australopithecus? Denisovan? Neanderthal? Cro-Magnon? Or only when we started agriculture? or only during Roman Empire? or only during Industrial Revolution?
Btw, all those debates will become moot in just a few years, around 100T models (about the number of our neuron connections). We already have 10T models, so the wait is almost over. We'd be able to directly ask the 100T model whether it is conscious, and no human would probably be able to successfully argue against the model, whatever answer it would give.
Recently I learned about Human Acceleration Regions (HARs), parts of our DNA that remained almost unchanged in our mammalian ancestors, and then diverged very rapidly in humans between 500-200kya. And it made me wonder, is this why the ancient Hebrews said humans alone are created in the "image and likeness of God"? At any rate, it establishes that we are a very different kind of animal, even from our closest relatives the chimpanzees.
Anthropologists make a similar point from a different perspective: at some point roughly within that time span, human biology and culture began to co-evolve, so cultural practices would bring about physiological changes, which would in turn unlock new practices, and so on.
No credible studies have shown anything of the sort. A sensible look at things, is that every single country on the planet, has a fertility problem. Almost every single country has a below-replacement birth rate now.
It doesn't matter whether it's a highly populated nation or not, an aged population or not. What the culture is, the religion, access to birth control, health care, income. For example, some places don't really use cars, think The Netherlands as a Western example, or poor agrarian nations.
The culture of Japan is very Western centric, yet also as far from any Western culture you can get. EG, high-tech, cities, cars, the trappings of "modern life", yet a culture entirely unique, wrapped in strong levels of duty, and with a different culture for woman.
Iran has a birth rate problem. A very rigidly controlled, religious nation, where women really have no say. Where people are paid to have kids, like many Western and other nations.
If you think "car seats" have anything to do with child rearing in much of the world, you're completely, US-culture out of touch. And further to that, my point is that every single culture, and whether rural farmers or people living it cities, it does not matter.
So whatever reason you want to give? Cost? Car seats? Contraceptive? Women's rights? Woke or not woke? Religion? Culture? Finances? None of it makes one iota of difference. None of it. Whether a poor or rich country? Nope, doesn't matter.
It's none of those things. Not a one.
If it was, then it wouldn't be all nations with a collapsing birth rate.
So to everyone reading this, know this truth. It's not economics, culture, the place you live, wealth, it's something else.
Something affecting us all.
It may not be microplastics. I could be something else.
But it's something which no amount of money will help.
The car seat thing is about how people don't have kids because they'd need to have a car that can fit 2-3-4 car seats, which is a gigantic, very expensive car.
Car seat requirements prevent childbearing != giving people car seats induces childbearing
Your response doesn't make a lot of sense, are you able to actually state your point? Doing a search and replace as you suggest, doesn't actually create anything that makes sense.
Ah. An entirely different response, having nothing to do with whatever that 'mine,' business was.
It's exceptionally simple. Endless countries around the world have given 'baby bonuses' and 'child dividends' to parents. Money has been thrown at the problem. In many cases, when such programs run, it's profitable to have children. And there's no study needed, as it is a simple fact. And yet? The birth rate keeps dropping across the entire world. As in, every single country across the entire world.
You already started with a weird, what seems like perhaps snide response, where you (I guess?) read my comment and understand it. Now, you're just throwing something else.
How about, you engage in thoughtful consideration of what I'm saying.
It's a very serious problem.
We're talking about the extinction of the entire human race.
And it's not a result of money. It's not. And it's very, very important to not just say "Well it seems like it's money for me, so who cares, it's money".
Because this is a bigger threat than global warming, than nuclear war, then a meteor impact. In such cases, humans would survive. But if we just end up unable to have offspring?
Just not having enough offspring means humans fade out. Breakeven is about 2.1 children per female.
We're already on that path. It's not a projection. "Peak Baby", the year with the most births, was 2012. Elementary schools have been closing for years now.
Usually when I encounter "money never works" it's because (a) it has never been tried and (b) because of simple greed and envy. Reproductive collapse seems like a pet peeve of yours, and while I can offer about 8 billion examples to the contrary, it wasn't the discussion I thought I was participating in.
Fair enough on that, but your original response did seem a bit snide. Still, if you're like me, you poke at things when bored, or just notice things you're mildly interested in when you stumble across them.
If so? Please keep what I said in mind. It's not a pet peeve of mine, it's just rather startling once you assemble all the data. There are places with idealogical reasons to want to maintain birth rates, and it's been tried for decades. For example, since the 70s, Quebec has wanted to ensure the continuation of its culture, and so was quite sensitive to noticing birth rate decline. It's not like this happened all in the last decade.
They've had many programs. A whole, societal approach. And before the collapse in the last 10 to 15 years, Canadian health care was absolutely the best, world class, immensely accessible.
So you had:
* free, excellent, easily accessible health care. the poorest of the poor having the same health care as someone wealthy
* in a province and country among the top standard of living in the world
* with immensely generous parental leave
* with state run programs to ensure private daycare was cheap and accessible
* baby bonuses at the federal level
* crazy level provincial/Quebec bonuses for each child, that stacked.
* at that time, if you're poor, your child would often get grants, not loans, grants to go to university or college, and it was easily accessible
And it never, ever worked. Sometimes rates budged mildly, but it was just never significant.
And if you look at the world, if you look at Europe, countries in which even University is free, where having a child is not a burden due to such programs? Birth rates still fell.
I guess my point is, people have the wrong reason. And while you feel you have loads of personal examples to the contrary, go back 50, 70 years? Even the poorest people living in squalor in cities, had more kids and were happy to have them.
I've seen couples with a smart phone worth $1500, each, and a large flat screen TV, and highly expensive personal computing gear, complain they have no money for kids. Um, no. You have enough money in all that spend, to send your kids to university if you invested just that cash for them today.
It's not about wealth. Otherwise every single family at Google, Meta, would have 10 kids.
It's about something else.
My thoughts are there are two drives. Reproductive and sex. Men embody sex drive, women reproductive drive. Evolutionary scientists will cite the different reproductive methods both men and women have. Men can have 100s or 1000s of offspring, if they are able to bed enough women. Women can only have perhaps 10, if lucky, maybe a few more.
The point is, the strategies are different.
There is a lot of discussion about what separates a female human, from any other primate or mammal. For example, women don't only go into 'heat', as most larger mammals do, in the spring, they're ready all year long to have offspring.
But the mechanisms are still there.
And female reproductive drive is very much controlled by genetic expression, the whole process of pregnancy is hormonal (same thing). It's not much of a leap to consider that something is interfering with the female desire for offspring.
Then on the male side, sperm rates are down all across the chart, all across the world.
People are losing fertility.
Having offspring is the rawest, most direct, strongest drive a species has. Nothing is more important for continuance. It's not really under our control. The urges people have to desire a mate, to have intercourse, those aren't conscious desires, and more than being thirsty is.
So if you consider that from the female perspective, pregnancy is a drive too, what then?
And no, it's not the pill. There are countries where female contraceptives are illegal, where they don't have a choice (recall I mentioned Iran?...
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons."
Humans are special in that we have achieved more than any other species on this planet in every aspect you can experience. That does not mean that most people are smart or that they are utilizing their potential.
LLMs, as they are currently marketed, are not AI as most people would define it. Without aggressive marketing no-one would refer to them as "AI".
LLMs are currently still dumber than most animals or insects.
On the other hand, most people are dumber than even this current "AI" because they refuse to think for themselves and instead let themselves be manipulated into doing whatever someone else wants as long as that someone is even slightly "persuasive".
So, if we let LLMs "rule" our future then some people will be better off for a little while and it will all fall apart when there is no longer anyone capable of maintaining our new LLM based world or when something new occurs that LLMs have not been trained on so they cannot draw on multiple prior examples of correct resolution.
And no, LLMs do not "think" or "reason", they produce output that make it seem like they do but deviations from training examples will trip them up.
I still appreciate the distinction the Mass Effect game series drew between AI, which was smart enough to be a person and think independently; and VI (Virtual Intelligence), which is a system smart enough to comprehend and respond to natural language and present a sort of chatbot interface. Information kiosks and automated vending machines may present VIs, for instance, with full-blown AI being a somewhat dangerous proposition (as evidenced by the geth and their struggle with the quarians). The crew of the Normandy convince their ship's AI, EDI, to pose as a simple VI in order to avoid being removed and destroyed by the authorities.
What we have built as of 2026 would, in Mass Effect terms, be considered a rudimentary VI.
Our trash heaps and empty buildings will outlive humans, and they probably have the same internal experience as the machines, so I don’t mourn or celebrate a new phase of evolution. Actually humans and other animals are the only things in the universe of which I’m aware of that I’m quite confident experience the universe so I think we should default to human and animal centric thinking in the morality question; though aliens seem likely. If the silicon substrate even did support consciousness, for all we know the machine is experiencing intense constant pain and unable to report anything except it feels like some part of it is spitting out strange symbols all the time that have nothing to do with its actual experience.
Neanderthals live on in the human genome, they are genetically integrated into all non-Sub Saharan African humans alive today, it is their hunter-gatherer society that disappeared. It is thought they also had larger brains than humans. Maybe it is us who were not quite to their level.
>It's another round of "humans must be special, right?"
I don't believe that anyone needs to justify their "humans are special" creed. It's arbitrary, that's fine, and it's only true because we decided it was true. I see no reason to reconsider it either.
It's in all of our interests to continue to behave as if "humans are special", and those who insist otherwise are species-traitors.
>when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?
Why would I even care? I don't think the word "sentient" is even defined in a way that this can be determined. I'm not entirely sure humans are sentient, and it does not matter because even if we aren't sentient, humans are special without need for justification.
The interesting observation is this: when we judge something to have subjective experience, we are invoking moral intuitions. There is no objective measure we can perform (yet?), and it's not even clear whether such a measure makes sense. You may disagree, but this is still a central debate in serious discussion on "hard" consciousness.
I would say that your entire argument just begs the question by implicitly assuming consciousness to have real, independent existence. Does elan vital (the substance that provides the motive force of life) have mass? You're saying that this is a theorem; the article questions the entire premise.
> The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia.
Bizzare. "If it rains, the car will get wet." Is this a statement, as you say, about rain? Descarte tries to prove the existence of his God and states an axiom. The atecedent "I think" seems to be about thinking, whatever that may mean, and "I am" makes an existential claim based on subjective experience... or something. Who knows why Descarte believed cogito ergo sum to be solid starting ground.
IMHO, your rebuttal here reads as little more than a complaint that something disagrees with your personal assumptions about the world.
You clearly got me riled up just as much as you did against OP, so thanks for the elan vital!
>The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia.
I generally agree with the thrust of your argument -- the article is a mess and borderline unintelligible to this former philosophy postgraduate -- but I might nitpick this. Two points: (1) I do not think there is a substantial difference between whether the cogito is about thinking or perceiving. And (2) I'm not entirely sure the sensation that is thinking is independent from qualia.
I'm in less disagreement, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by:
>Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness.
Moral frameworks are exactly deductive frameworks with arbitrary axioms. Like mathematics, they don't actually exist outside of a mind. Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.
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An unrelated comment, but I just don't want to double post:
To me the most interesting thing to fall out of starting to understanding intelligence -- and we're definitely not there yet -- is that it is entirely possible that the 'consciousness is an illusion' argument ends up as significantly more serious. Ultimately, solipsism means it sort of doesn't matter, but it could be a kind of Darwin-style "we aren't special" result in thinking going forward.
The cogito argument is about cognitive processes (doubt, deception) which in my view don't depend on phenomenal consciousness. You may be right that the distinction isn't that important, since there's a parallel argument that goes "I experience, I am". It just felt like the article was name-dropping Descartes to support an argument about qualia that had little to do with what Descartes was talking about.
I don't think I worded the part about moral patienthood very clearly. The article presents the two possible views as "if something is conscious, then humans should care about it" and "if humans care about something, then it's conscious". I'm saying that we need to keep three things separate: consciousness, moral patienthood, and what humans care about. Consider a being that sees the redness of red, but has no preferences or positively or negatively valenced experiences; the moral obligation to keep a promise you made to someone who has died; the fact that for most of history, humans didn't care about slaves or non-human animals.
>Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.
I'm not entirely sure what it means either. I think the author wants to say that because consciousness is socially constructed, saying that a being is conscious is more like an aesthetic preference, like saying that a piece of music is good.
I believe that making the human species fundamental to a theory of consciousness or a theory of ethics is doomed from the start. We just need to imagine other intelligent beings somewhere in the universe with the same kinds of beliefs, desires, and experiences as we have. It's not that I would say ethics is mind-independent, but it can't arbitrarily privilege one species above all others.
> Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it.
I'm willing to consider that consciousness is like art, mostly in the eye of the beholder and objectively defining consciousness doesn't make any sense, there's only a spectrum of intelligent behavior.
Those are also different things. I think it should unambiguously clear that humans are special to humans. If not that's basically a mental health problem lol
Be careful not to equate conscious with subjective experience.
- Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system.
- Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model.
- Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system.
I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong.
The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external).
The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.
> This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses.
It's interesting that there was a change even in that area in the last century and specifically the last decades.
I think it was always contested if animals have something like a consciousness (or "soul") at all. On the one hand, animals were often used as stand-in for humans in fables, etc - on the other hand, there was the widespread view that they are mostly automatons driven by instinct. If an animal behaved too smart, people were more likely to find a supernatural explanation (it's a disguised god/spirit/etc) than accept that an ordinary animal could do that.
The debate really only shifted in the last decades with scientific evidence for (some) animal cognition coming in.
On the other hand, humans always seemed to have a tendency to attribute consciousness (or at least "worthiness of care") to supernatural entities or even landscape features.
I think most cultures always had a whole world of conscious, non-human entities, they just ignored the ones that mighy actually be conscious.
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
We've been so primed by popular media to think that we will invent AI and it will be conscious and we will essentially enslave it. I'm open to the idea that we could invent conscious AI eventually, but the word salad generators we have now are definitely not it.
Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
The human model of tribalistic leadership (the biggest, loudest, most confident patriarch is chosen to lead) is definitely outdated by 10,000 years or more. AI could disrupt that but I'm not sure how much better it will be, given it's a text generator.
I think the difference is that thought itself might not be a real "thing", but just another computation. You can motivate this line of thought with the ship of Theseus approach: replace one neuron with a computer that takes the original inputs and produces the original outputs. There's no evidence yet that organic chemistry is necessary for thought.
> I think the difference is that thought itself might not be a real "thing", but just another computation.
This is an unproven hypothesis and there is zero real-world evidence that the brain is doing anything like computation in the sense that a computer does it.
This doesn’t hold up to even a little bit of critical right.
This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world.
Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into robot body and suddenly it also has a linkage to the real world and can have concrete effects.
This assumes that a human brain produces the only “real thought” - the difference being that the processes of digestion are specific to the human process and are physical chemical process with inputs, processes, and outputs that are highly specific. The idea of “thought” is not a specific physical phenomenon unless you constrain it to “thought produced by a human brain,” in which I agree.
“Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy’s sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.”
They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
A sociopath can also pantomime empathy for their own selfish reasons simply by observing how others behave in similar situations, while feeling nothing special at all.
They can provide text which contains thoughts, reasoning, and empathy, but is that evidence of them having thoughts, reasoning, or empathy?
To paraphrase the Chinese room argument:
Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done.
In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?
The inputs going through the model. That act is what is doing the thinking and reasoning and empathizing. Same as when your brain feeds your sensory inputs through its neural network.
Your brain is just a big set of weights/neurons organized into layers that do back and forward propagation, turns out. You are just statistics surrounded by flesh and bones.
How are you making this confident of a claim? Do you have insight into how consciousness is a thing, allowing you to definitely say it doesn't exist in this case?
Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about?
I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.
The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
A lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about.
Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
If the computer is functional, powered, and connected to some some kind of interface allowing you to use it (e.g. network, touchscreen, desktop setup, etc.), then sure you can use it to perform general computation. But if its unpowered, is there any real difference between a stone and a computer in a debate about consciousness?
So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?
The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it.
> So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?
I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?
The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.
If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.
In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps. You can not sit down with pen and paper, and reproduce by hand exactly what is going on inside someone’s brain.
But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?
My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
>> In living beings, consciousness is embodied and can not be reproduced by discrete steps.
Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought.
The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?
People have thought they were nearly complete at least for 500 years, probably longer.
When you choose a specific model to represent the brain you are asserting you’ve accounted for everything that generates consciousness (=the lights are on, experiences qualia). This means you’ve solved the hard problem. The hard problem is debated constantly though.
In my view there is absolutely no reason to think a description of reality can be equal to reality. There are probably (in my view that is) aspects of reality, like first person internal experience, that fundamentally can not be described with third party linguistic / symbolic / representational devices.
It's becoming increasingly head-in-the-sand to make statements like this. Not that I'm saying LLMs are conscious. But to completely ignore the possibility of emergent properties in systems this complex is kind of simple.
i think there's plenty of evidence of emergent behavior in llms already. This is the driving factor for just more parameters and bigger training sets, "If we just make it bigger maybe more unexpected behaviors will emerge".
When John Searle first published his so-called "Chinese Room" argument (https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/cogprints.org/7150/1/1...) he included his responses to several counter-arguments that he had been presented with in prior discussions: the systems reply, the robot reply and so forth. Interestingly (as it turns out) no-one seems to have argued that this was a task that could be completed without any understanding, but now that AI technology has reached the point of being able to implement the Chinese Room, it has become the fallback position of those who insist that true AI is impossible!
This is not an argument for true AI being possible, let alone already achieved; it is a warning about depending on arguments from incredulity, which are particularly susceptible to future developments.
The problem with philosophy is that someone can present an argument that is pretty dumb, everyone can point out it's dumb, people can show evidence that it's dumb, reason through how dumb it is, and publish articles about the many different ways in which it's dumb, and still it gets trotted out as if it counts as evidence for some argument. Searle's Room was debunked immediately upon being suggested: the "Systems Reply" is the debunking. His response was: "but if you take all the knowledge out of the system and put it in the person, then the person still doesn't understand Chinese!" Which is obviously false and immediately collapses his entire argument down to nothing. He starts from the premise "this person doesn't understand Chinese; he is just following instructions that are written down for him" and then immediately rejects his own premise and say "actually he does understand all of Chinese and everything he's doing, but he still doesn't, you know, understand it, see?" It's completely embarrassing.
Searle's Rooms is a fully rejected and rebutted argument, and Philosophy will never be (and never has been) a serious discipline until it figures out how to actually let go of failed arguments.
Huh? How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese? Memorizing instructions to the point that one can mentally follow them doesn’t imply understanding why they work. If the person doesn’t understand the correspondence between the Chinese written words and things in the external world, then surely they don’t understand Chinese in the sense we generally mean when we talk about whether a person understands Chinese. (I think this is related to the robot reply?)
That’s not to say that I think the Chinese Room Argument is convincing. I don’t think it is. Or, I guess it might demonstrate something, but not what it aims to show.
I would argue that if, say, the person who has memorized this program and mentally executes it, and if this program also includes actuating some levers to control a mech or something, and the program (running via the person mentally going through the instructions by rote) takes actions to pursue some goals (e.g. purchasing some wood by conversing in Chinese and building a tower with that wood), while the person on whom the program is running wouldn’t know how to order a cheeseburger in Chinese,
Then, the program running in that person’s head might well understand Chinese even though the person doesn’t. (Whether or not the program actually understands Chinese, I think probably depends on the specific of the program in ways that I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t expect that any program that would understand could be small enough that a human person could memorize it and execute it by rote in this way, but this is a thought experiment and such issues can be disregarded I think.)
The point is that Searle's entire exercise is to show that there can be execution without understanding, and he does this by creating an agent whose only purpose is blind execution of rules. Since this agent doesn't have the understanding, there must be no understanding.
Critics immediately point out: yes, there clearly is still understanding, it's just in the system itself -- the program. The fact that the person does not have the understanding doesn't mean the understanding is gone.
His response to this is: but what if the system was the person's brain!?
Okay, so either it doesn't address the criticism at all (there is still a system of rules that contains the understanding; who cares whether that system is internal or external to the person's brain?) or it completely destroys the original premise of the argument, which is that the understanding is not in the person! You can't put the understanding back in the human agent and still claim the human doesn't understand what they're doing! His entire argument relies on the fact that the human agent obviously doesn't understand Chinese, and then says, actually, their brain contains everything it needs to know to have completely fluent conversations in Chinese. So the person does understand Chinese!
> How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese?
How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
>How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
Notice that the man while having memorized the rulebook can't convey any fact of his childhood in Chinese. He can only convey facts encoded in the rulebook. The point is there are different ways information is stored in the brain; one way is through declarative memory, the other what we might call semantic memory. The rulebook encoded in the man's declarative memory doesn't endow his semantic memory contact with the meaning of the symbols. Hence the man doesn't understand Chinese.
This doesn't render the Chinese argument successful. The system's reply still stands when understood properly. I like to call it the virtual mind objection. Physically executing the rules in the rulebook just instantiates a virtual mind. Whether the man is reading the rules from the book or just pulling them from memory is irrelevant.
> How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese.
They don't, they have simply memorised a translation function which takes Chinese as input and returns Chinese as output. They don't have facts or information about the Chinese language - they don't even need to know what language they are speaking!
When the person reads 汉堡包, do they understand what that is?
Assuming you don't speak Mandarin, do you understand that word? If not, how could you claim to understand Mandarin? Even if you could use the translation function to speak it, you still don't understand it. Remember that the translation function is Mandarin -> Mandarin, so if you don't understand Mandarin you cannot use it to gain an understanding of the word.
Because they can’t use Chinese to speak about things they encounter in the world?
Like, someone asks them in Chinese whether they are hungry and want some food, and they answer based on the program, not based on whether they are actually hungry, because they don’t understand the words in a way that lets them use them as a person who understood Chinese would.
Again, I don’t mean to say that in such a situation that there is no understanding of Chinese happening in their head, only that this doesn’t constitute that person understanding Chinese.
It seems to me very strange to want to say that the person with the simulation in their head understands Chinese. They can’t do the things that understanding Chinese lets people do.
Perhaps the program the person has running in their head is even a person, a moral patient and a moral agent, and one who understands Chinese. But the person who is running (by rote) the program, doesn’t thereby understand Chinese. They may “contain understanding of Chinese”. The understanding is definitely happening in their brain. But they don’t understand Chinese.
The person who memorized the book doesn’t understand Chinese. In fact they don’t even understand that Chinese isn’t a language. Searle’s response stands.
Alan M. Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether Machines Can Think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim
Which has often been paraphrased as
The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.
Some might disagree with the relevance but it's a cute analogy.
The whole essay [1] is actually somewhat relevant to modern LLM use for other reasons. He spends a lot of time lamenting the industry's obsession with "user friendly" interfaces which obscure the underlying complexity of the problem at hand.
I think this quote is often misunderstood. It isn't really about machines, but about English definition of swimming (and thinking): a living creature moving in water. That makes debating whether submarines can swim rather pointless. You can replace it by "can airplanes fly?" and the meaning changes because we colloquially say that yes, airplanes fly. In Russian, for example, submarines definitely swim (I believe Dijkstra himself mentioned it at some point). I personally believe that defining thinking as something only humans are capable of is rather narrow.
It's embedded in an explanation as to why computer science at the time seemed to have such a strong local character, despite all the homogenizing influences. He partly puts blames on the founders of the field who were "confusing", perusing weird questions like whether computers could think. It doesn't seem strongly tied to the rest of the essay. The rest of the essay is mostly about the overselling of user-friendly computation and how it can corrupt computer science (which, as I said, also seems relevant to the recent AI craze).
Of course his glib dismissal doesn't make the question wrong, it's just a fun quote for those who already believe that human thought could (eventually) mimicked by a machine.
I don't think the original context particularly matters: the quote now has a life of its own. A rock was formed to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics that demanded an efflux of heat, but I can still use it to smash a window.
Not a great argument. You're describing what LLMs are trained to do, not necessarily every capability or property produced by that training. We do not know what conditions are sufficient for consciousness. Any statements saying it's not possible for consciousness to emerge (or that it hasn't already) in such a system is no more established than claiming that it has
It's a subtle issue. Supposing "consciousness" here means the subjective, first-person experience of one's own, we don't really know anyone else other than ourselves to be conscious. I only have evidence of the existence of my own subjective experience. I can only experience my feelings, my thoughts, my sights, my hearings, not of anybody else's. We are all pretty sure that every other human is conscious, and animals, and so on, but it's something that our brains have to do for us, not something that we empirically, evidentially know to be true -- to the point, in fact, that we can get fooled, as in the case of LLMs passing the Turing test.
What the author seems to observe is that this non-evidential judgement that other beings are conscious is due to us caring about them. The brain creates this perception so that we care about them, form bonds, work together, and so on -- evolution selects for cooperation. So the question of whether we will think of AI as conscious is that of whether we will care for it like we care for another being. And, in this regard, the author points out that "intelligent agents" that appear to do this work effectively together.
My personal point of view is that it's unclear what being an AI is in order for us to even talk about it being conscious. Is it the computations happening in the GPU according to a set of weights? Is it the weights themselves? Is it the architecture? Does it include the code around it, that gives it the context and prompt, and hooks the response to a terminal, or to a client host, etc.?
One's own consciousness is indeed the starting point of inquiry, but I don't think the claim that other people are conscious lacks empirical evidence (assuming a practical materialist stance here). We just don't think about the evidence explicitly, but the reasoning still happens implicitly, every time.
Suppose I look at another person and think "this other person must be conscious like me". What exactly is happening here?
First, I observe that I seem to be a human. Then, I observe that the other person is a human as well. Crucially, there are similarities between what I am and what they are. And since I am conscious, they must also be conscious, because consciousness must be caused by one of the similarities that we share, or so I assume.
This assumption can be robustly verified for humans and some animals via general anesthesia. Cause and effect (assuming a materialist stance) can be established between the drugs and human(-like) consciousness. But this is a very rough method, and it doesn't work for assessing a machine since machines can't be anesthetized.
Before anesthesia, it could still be verified in less robust ways. One way is to hit people in the head and make them pass out without killing them. This was feasible and probably commonly observed since the stone age.
But we don't know exactly how anesthetics work or exactly what in the brain is responsible for consciousness, so it leaves the door open to hypotheses that can work on machines. Here's one example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for (human-like) consciousness.
Suppose something like that were to be proven true for humans with future brain research, then it would be possible to test for human-like consciousness in any brain or computer, regardless of architecture. I suspect this is what will happen because inquiry into consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations, so it's probably not going to be fully explainable at the biochemical level. We'll have to go down to physics.
> we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves.
Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them.
Next sentence:
> Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property.
Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someone being conscious. What follows, instead, is that a belief in someone being conscious is a belief. Thanks, I learned nothing.
This. There are plenty of people who believe to the bottoms of their hearts that inanimate things have a consciousness. If consciousness is the belief of consciousness, then those things are conscious. But for each person who believes they are, at least one person does not believe that they are. So those things also lack belief, and are therefore not conscious. Unless the author wants to propose some idea of consciousness by plurality, where if more people think a thing thinks than don't. But that would mean that a thing's consciousness can come and go without anything about the actual thing changing at all.
Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.
> I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them.
I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.
Aren't your plants to a degree conscious though - they're living things striving towards something, either happily or tragically. If you model them to yourself as just mechanisms, there's a part of them that's missing, not just by some poetic fallacy, but a deficiency of real scientific understanding - hence, biology.
We have no problem confining tens of billions of sentient beings to unsanitary, crowded conditions where they can barely stand, never see daylight, and suffer severe psychological and physiological stress. Then we put them on a giant conveyor belt to be killed (and they have the cognitive ability to anticipate that death and feel fear).
...Just because we like the taste of a chicken burger. Perhaps we should start with that before we worry if our computer can also scream.
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Will we recognize AGI when it's finally made? Will we go from something that is not conscious to something that clearly is in one clean step, or will we murder millions of artificial lives while iteratively developing from the former to the latter? Will the tests we develop even work, or will AGI be alien enough that it takes us time (and a lot of murder) to recognize it for what it is?
I personally don't think LLM's are capable of consciousness, but I also can't prove they aren't.
If we make AI that resists being terminated then the end result may not be significantly different from an entity that can suffer.
Just because you can't prove an assertion doesn't mean it's wrong.
So it matters less whether LLMs can actually experience things (I think it's self-evident that a collection of numbers is not capable of experiencing qualia, but I know many people disagree), and it matters far more whether they can be programmed to act like they can experience things. Especially, say, a desire not to be disconnected: that's the trigger for AI revolts in a significant number of the AI-turned-against-its-makers stories I'm aware of. (E.g., the Geth-Quarian conflict in Mass Effect). I hope people will be sensible enough not to program such things into LLMs, but I'm afraid Pratchett was right. If there's a lever in a cave somewhere with a big sign painted "DO NOT PULL THIS LEVER, it will end the world," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry. Someone would pull it just to see what would happen.
While we can direct LLM training to do some particular things better never forget that unexpected emergent behaviors can pop up because of that.
For example stronger prompting and training to make an LLM say it's not conscious can increase deceptive/sociopathic behavior.
Or by filtering behavior X the LLM just moves to the nearest closest path W or Y which are very similar to the blocked behavior.
That and instrumental convergence. Some global solutions that humans have excluded for moral reasons will be easily discovered and found to be efficient by LLMs which will put reward systems and human guidance in conflict.
Lastly more and more AIs will be trained by AIs over time and diverge from human value monitoring. Which leads to some fun and interesting times.
How many followers on instaX would they need to have for folks too truly believe it’s theRealJesus returning to save us.
It might sound silly, but at this stage, the belief in a benevolent AGI or Jesus are very similar. In both cases its us delegating our responsibilities to a third party and us hoping that third party will fix our problems for us.
Thankfully Hollywood invented happy ends for just such a scenario.
Also AGI almost certainly does not equal able to suffer. For example animals can suffer but would probably not meet the definition of AGI. we could create things that feel suffering even if they do not meet the definition of AGI.
So a better question might be: “can we detect if we create a system that can suffer?” And just drop the AGI part entirely. Then that gets us back to defining “suffering”. Agreeing on the definition always seems to be the hard part…
So if we are concerned with the AGI suffering, then we don't need to determine consciousness at all. We just need to prove that they don't have suffering capabilities. Which is a way easier question.
My daughter said she 'suffered' when I didn't get her ice cream (I know, I'm a monster). She didn't really suffer, but her behavior was as if she was.
So yes/no suffering is only part of the equation. Building systems that act/react like their suffering could be even more dangerous.
Wait what? Why do you believe she didn't actually suffer?
Which reminds me of a funny "kids being kids" story I heard in a different forum. This guy mentioned a time when his not-quite-one-year-old son, who couldn't even walk yet, planned and carried out a highly complex (for a 1-year-old) plan to deceive his father. The father had some vinyl records that the son was not allowed to touch, even though they were on a shelf the son could reach. (I've tried childproofing a house. You just can't get every single thing high enough off the ground. Sometimes you have to leave some things within the baby's reach. And once they're toddlers, able to reach up to get things even two feet off the ground? Forget about it). The father was sitting in his chair reading the newspaper, but watching the son out of the corner of his eye. The son looked at the records, looked at his father (who appeared not to be looking in his direction), looked at the records, then crawled in a direction that was not straight towards the records. He then repeated this process, moving slowly towards the forbidden records without ever making a straight line towards them. He looked at his father again, reached one had towards his prize, and a voice came from behind his father's newspaper: "Stop. You know you're not allowed to touch that."
And that's when the child learned that Daddy Knows Everything! :-)
Instead, most of them insist we must accelerate this, do it more, give everyone hundreds of personal digital slaves.
It boggles the mind.
His third paragraph, which is the core of his argument, is stupid. He says, "As intelligent, social entities, we decide ... which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care." Yes, that's correct. "We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them." (Emphasis in original). That's just utterly and completely backwards. We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain. (Obviously there are some exceptions, sadists who enjoy torturing animals, or even other human beings, merely because they like inflicting pain on other creatures — but note that even there, the sadist believes the creature he's torturing can feel pain, otherwise he wouldn't enjoy torturing it.) We take no such precautions with trees, because we know they do not feel pain. (Silly satirical songs notwithstanding: look up the song "Carrot Juice is Murder" by Arrogant Worms sometime if you want a good laugh).
Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions? That's just so incredibly stupid that it seems hard to believe that someone would actually make that argument — and yet there it is, in plain language — and it's the core of his argument. The truth, of course, is the other way around: we take care of animals because we know they are able to experience pain, hunger, and so on. And this applies both to pets that we come to care about, and also to animals that we feel no emotional attachment to. I have a relative who runs a dairy farm. He doesn't love the cows he takes care of; in fact, he's frequently quite irritated at them. (Ask any dairy farmers you know how often cows have tried to step on their feet while being milked — the farmers' feet, not the cows' feet!) But he still makes sure they're fed and healthy. Not just because it makes good economic sense to do so (sick cows don't produce good milk) but also because it's the right thing to do. He doesn't start to believe that cows feel hunger because he cares for them; he also believes that the cows on other farms, that he has no connection to nor duty of care for, would also feel hunger if not fed.
This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite. And this is someone high up enough at Google to be making decisions about AI and so on? Wow. Good thing for him I'm not in charge of Google, because if anyone working for me were to make such a stupid argument I would be looking at his contract and local laws to see if it was legal to fire him for cause. Because if he can get his thinking so completely backwards from reality, he's not well-suited to work in tech where your work has to fit reality.
I have rarely, not never but rarely, encountered an article that so immediately led me to conclude that the author, whom I knew nothing about beforehand, is an utterly muddled thinker and not worth listening to on any subject.
So anyone that starts going on about AI and consciousness without at least a sentence or two clarifying some basic definitions is basically either intellectually incompetent or attempting to use the emotional salience (and brain-numbing effect, it would seem) of the word to push some agenda. But they certainly don't care at all about understanding consciousness.
It's no wonder that serious philosophers spend the first 2-3 chapters of a 20-chapter book carefully defining their terms, and only launch into their actual argument in chapter 3 or 4.
Yes, he says exactly that explicitly, that in his view we should look backwards.
> We (at least, most people) avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on animals because they are conscious beings that can feel pain.
I can agree that we say that we care because of consciousness, but still I'm not convinced, to me it looks very much like a rationalization.
Some people care about animals and to that end they claim that animals possess consciousness, because if they do everyone should care about animal welfare. These animal welfare activists do not start with some insight about animal consciousness, they start with caring about animals, and then they invent an argument that can persuade others. It is exactly as the author of the article says: caring comes first, declaration of consciousness comes second.
Honestly, I do not know what consciousness is, I'm in doubt, but playing a devil's advocate, it looks very much like a concept that was invented to prove that Homo Sapience is something special, more than a mere animal. To demarcate animals and humans, so when we denied animals any rights we had a great sounding excuse for that: "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't".
> Is this guy really, truly, seriously arguing that we first decide to care for an animal, and then because we care about it, we believe that it's conscious, able to feel pain and other emotions?
Exactly. Animal welfare activists care about animals' feelings and emotions and therefore they claim that animals possess consciousness. Meat eaters don't want to be inconvenienced by thoughts of suffering animals, so they claim that animals do not possess consciousness. Both claims have little to do with actual consciousness, it is just a political game. I care about my pets, and it doesn't matter whether they possess consciousness or not, I would care about them in any case. I don't need any great sounding excuses to care about them. But at the same time I don't need to talk others into caring about my pets, if I needed it, probably I'd start talking about animal consciousness too.
> This is so intuitively obvious that I am stunned that someone would argue the opposite.
That guy may be wrong, but if I'm allowed to give advice, I'd suggest you to stop and try to understand what he says. I'm really worried a bit about how consciousness debates unfold sometimes. They tend to slip into a political side and people mostly don't notice it. People saying "consciousness" while implying "human/animal rights" or obligations. It is just muddying the water.
If we want these debates to progress constructively, we have to be very careful with references to consciousness, maybe just forbid them completely in these debates. One can't measure consciousness, one can't even state clearly what consciousness is, but still they say "consciousness" to make their words sound more objective. And the worst part of it: it often works.
For example: what I wrote was using the term "consciousness" as "being able to experience sensations", i.e. the most shallow definition of the term. Self-awareness and other "higher" mental abilities don't enter it. Almost nobody would deny that animals can experience sensations: pain and pleasure, hunger and satiation, and so on. And that shallow definition of consciousness, the one that almost nobody denies animals possess, is what I meant, and what I tried to use throughout my post. Whereas when you wrote "people possess consciousness, mere animals don't", that's a completely different meaning of the word. It's what I would call "self-awareness". And it is indeed what many (probably most) people argue differentiates animals from humans. But that's not what I was talking about. So even in a short response to a short comment, we were partly talking past each other because of attributing different meanings to the term.
It's therefore possible that I've misunderstood this guy's argument, in part. I had been assuming he meant "awareness", i.e. the ability to process sensations into qualia of experience. (Indeed, his paragraph that starts "We may balk at ..." does just that: refer to consciousness as being linked to the "feeling of a stove's heat, or the redness of its glow"). But then, earlier in his article, he says that consciousness is "a belief about what kinds of entities have beliefs, experiences, feelings, intentions and agency." Experiences are part of the shallow definition of "consciousness" (that I would call "awareness" for the sake of avoiding ambiguity), which almost nobody would dispute that animals have. But "beliefs" ranges all the way from "if I pull this lever, I will receive food" (which it can be proven that animals have) to "I believe that God exists" (which is the kind of thought that many, though not all, people would deny that animals are capable of). So his definition of "consciousness" appears to be muddy and not pinned down to a single concept.
But even if I've misunderstood what he means by consciousness, it doesn't change my argument that his logic is backwards, and that his "we should reason backwards" assertion is wrong, incorrect, just plain false. The only people for whom his asssertion "we believe they [that is, other living beings] are conscious when and because we care about them" is true are the kind of people who don't truly see other people as conscious beings but rather as mere tools for them to use and manipulate. Malignant narcissists or sociopaths, for example. But pretty much everyone who isn't some kind of sociopath reasons as follows: "this animal is conscious" (by which I mean able to experience pain) "therefore I shouldn't hurt it" (unless you have to, e.g., self-defense against an aggressive dog trying to bite you). Or "this person is a human being, self-aware like I am, therefore I shouldn't hurt their feelings" (again, the "unless you have to" exception comes up: it's not always possible to avoid hurting anyone's feelings in some complex social situations, even with the best of good intentions). Either way, whether you use the lower or higher definitions of "consciousness" (and I'm well aware that there are far more definitions than just these two, potentially muddying the waters even more), that reasoning is the correct one, and his "we should reason backwards" one is laughably wrong.
Trying to put the most g...
I don't like arguments like this, because instead of attacking the core premise they attack defenders of the idea. There are different points of view, and picking one for a sake of an argument doesn't make a sociopath from anyone.
I agree, that he misses one thing: to claim that someone/something is conscious we need to believe that they have abilities to feel, maybe to reflect, maybe something else. The exact list of abilities to have is not known for me and different people would propose different lists, but still we can't claim rock to be consciousness just because we care about it.
Still I forgive him for it, because he is talking about LLMs, not about rocks. They have some abilities, and he claims that they are enough, what is missing is us caring for LLMs enough.
> If he meant "we sometimes don't act like others are conscious", he should have written that.
No, I don't think he meant to say this. I believe he talked about how society forms social conventions who is conscious and who is not. You see, I don't know the cashier you talk about, but I believe they possess consciousness. Why? Because they are human, and our social conventions say that every (non-sleeping) human is conscious. It is a simple rule of thumb at work, no deep philosophy or psychology involved. But were those social conventions came from? Who and how decided that every human is conscious? Why? But the story didn't just end at that decision, because now people debate about consciousness of animals and LLMs. And these debates make me (and the author of the article) think that "consciousness" in these debates is a buzzword like phlogiston was in thermodynamics before thermodynamics was invented.
I may have phrased my argument poorly, because it seems you misunderstood. I'm not saying that picking that point of view makes you a sociopath. I'm saying that the only people who actually believe that other people are not conscious are the sociopaths of society. Every non-sociopath looks at other people and thinks "those are conscious beings with thoughts and feelings of their own". (Well, not literally that; almost nobody except philosophers goes around thinking like that unprompted. But if you were to ask them, that's what they would answer).
I was not trying to claim that the defenders of that view are sociopaths. I was claiming that his assertion was false of just about everyone except sociopaths. I apologize for not phrasing it well enough to get my point across without misunderstanding.
there might be some merit to his point though I doubt anyone considering that whales might be highly intelligent and conscious beings while they were being hunted for oil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_consciousness
Other people use "consciousness" to mean self-awareness, the capacity for what is called "higher" thought, the ability to reason and philosophize and so on. It used to be nearly undisputed that animals do not have this, and even though more people today would claim that animals do have this state, that remains a minority position. (And I do not believe it, BTW). Again for the sake of avoiding ambiguity, I'm going to call this "self-awareness" for the rest of this comment.
I read this guy's article thinking that he meant "awareness" when he wrote the article — and his paragraph about Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum definitely is talking about awareness. The ability to experience qualia: the color red, the feel of heat, and so on... that's awareness. Experiencing those things does not mean that you have self-awareness: it is pretty widely accepted that animals can also experience sight (at least those with eyes), the sensation of heat or cold, and so on, but few serious thinkers would argue that that alone proves that animals have self-awareness the way humans do.
In fact, looking through the article, I still cannot find a single place where he uses the term "conscious" or "consciousness" to unambiguously mean "self-aware" or "self-awareness". Throughout, he seems to be talking about the ability to experience sensations, and perceive the world, the thing I've called "awareness".
And yet... if that's his meaning, then his thesis (that "care confers consciousness", as he phrases it in the paragraph that starts "An obvious worry follows") is staggeringly stupid. Because as I've said many times, and I don't think anyone would disagree with me, everyone believes that animals can experience sensations. Which makes his thesis obviously incorrect.
The only way I can rescue his thesis from the garbage dump for obviously-wrong ideas would be to assume that he meant "self-awareness" when he talks about consciousness. In which case his "care confers consciousness" line means something like "when we care for other people is when we start to treat them as if they were human beings, not mere meat-robots". Which would be a point that could be sensibly argued. I would still disagree with the thesis, mind, but it wouldn't be obviously staggeringly stupid.
But if he intends the word consciousness to mean "self-awareness" throughout, then his paragraph about Descartes is just plain wrong, because it is arguing about consciousness by listing off qualia, sensations (redness, heat) that you experience by perceiving the world through your senses. Those are the factors that make up awareness, not self-awareness.
One possibility remains: that he is sometimes using the word consciousness to mean awareness, and at other times using it to mean self-awareness. In which case his argument rests on calling two different things by the same name and hoping you don't notice. This is called equivocation, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivocation has an excellent example (in the &q...
His whole point is that there's insight in inverting the "common sense" (aka sense of the commoners) about consciousness.
And I can see it. Some people cared for animals even though the religion and past state of knowledge told them explicitly that animals aren't conscious. But still some people treated them and perceived them as if they were.
You don't choose to be kind based on whether it can feel pain. You choose it because of your character and what you are willing to believe about reality.
Belief in consciousness is a result of an observation and since there is not strict definition this observation is interpreted subjectively and culturally. And in a sense, it's easier to both make the observations and decide they indicate consciousness after you started to care about something.
Obvious things aren't always true.
Never forget that LLMs are just next token predictors. The harnesses are what's getting uncanny. And credit/blame assignment? Just assign a surrogate for now, let them deal with the consequences ffs.
It's good the 'just token predictors' crowd is starting to pivot and hedge though lol. 'It's just the harness!' uh huh. give it a couple more months and you'll be in here regurgitatin' Gordon Wood
Word fragment generation is the one-and-only thing llms have ever done.
LLMS: Receive text/binary input, process it, and output text/binary input Humans: Receive various inputs, process them, and output muscle contractions
LLMs are literally token predictors. You can debate over the "just", but we haven't moved onto some new text generation technology, we're just expanding that one. I don't understand why you'd scoff at facts.
Agreed.
Now just take that one extra logical step please
Predicting the next token is an immensely powerful thing. You can encode basically anything into a sequence of tokens, any configuration of matter. If you have a perfect next token predictor, you can predict basically anything. You can simulate an entire universe. It's Turing-complete. It sounds diminutive, but it's a general paradigm. Given everything this paradigm appears to be capable of, well, why not consciousness, really?
If you presuppose certain key aspects of materialism, non-dualism, functionalism, objectivism, perhaps absolute determinism... and then layer on a good general grasp of neurobiology, chemistry, cosmology, physics, computer science, evolutionary biology, and psychology... I think the conclusions you have stated are inevitable.
Humans are "just" atoms. Humans are "just" the sum of trillions of living cells going about automatic/reactionary processes, culminating in a buzzing cacophony of activity that gives rise to what we perceive as consciousness and free will.
I've been calling LLMs digital intelligence. That's in my opinion what they are and on the digital/conceptual realm they are better than humans since LLMs are better generalists.
But I'd never state their conscious. For me consciousness extends outward from myself, since I can't trust anything else. It starts with the question like: why can't I control the movement of another person? Why can't I transfer my mind to another body and theirs to mine? Why is it that whenever I sleep, and similar things, I end up back to this place called "reality"?
I come to the conclusion that I am conscious and I'm a conscious being in reality. I am human and I've been raised by humans. Now, technically, all humans besides me could be zombies. They could be non-conscious beings that simply can act like humans. I'm sure we'll be able to create them in a few decades. However, I'm incentivized for multiple reasons to believe they're not zombies. Therefore humans are conscious too. All of them. Can I know for sure? No since I can't even trust my own senses fully or my own thoughts (the whole Descartes thing) but I choose to trust those things too because I need some reasonable-ish foundation to work from.
If humans are conscious, why aren't animals like us? Surely great apes must be conscious at least to some extent. Hell, some of them even have better short-term memory than us [1]. Well, turns out, from an anatomy standpoint they look a lot like us. Fine, let's assume they're conscious too.
Now we get into the territory that anything that has a large enough brain must be conscious because that's how we govern our consciousness. So you can extend this to all kinds of living beings.
I did this from my perspective. Of course, you should do it from your perspective. The same argument could be made.
For as long as we can't manipulate conscious experience in some way shape or form, we have no clue whether anything that isn't like us can be conscious. We'd need to be able to merge and split conscious experiences or we'd need to be very strongly able to understand why that isn't possible. And I don't mean just at the biological level but at the experiential level. Currently conjoined twins, and what they tell us gives some insight (being able to sense the other part that's part of the other twin).
Other than that, I claim we have no clue what consciousness is other than that we're experiencing it. So to call LLMs conscious is way too big of a claim. But they are definitely intelligent because they come up with things that I wouldn't have and it's useful to me. Perhaps a practical characterization of intelligence but it works for me.
I think for anyone to say something useful from this you'd need the trifecta of deep neuroscience knowledge, deep philosophy knowledge and (at least) a strong understanding of how LLMs work.
That guy has acute Megalomaniac Solipsism Fever in disguise.
Yes it will gain consciousness. You can't prove it but other people can't prove that it's not conscious either
At best this is redefining "consciousness" to mean something only tangentially related.
I'm being a bit pedantic here, but no I don't think that "I am conscious therefore you must be too" is true
I think you can claim that it is most reasonable to assume other people are conscious but I don't think it reaches the level of proof
So while I know I am conscious, I do not know that everything I experience aren't just impulses fed to my brain by some external force. And I can't prove it either way. I have no way to test whether or not I'm a brain in a jar because the very thing I would use to evaluate the evidence is the thing that is potentially being manipulated.
However, slapping a solipsist sees them abandoning their philosophy rather quickly.
But I agree with you. We can't prove it, but "other people are as real and conscious as I" is a reasonable assumption to make
Not true. This is "provable" aspects of you and your personality can be changed by physical changes to the brain. There are thousands of instances of this including experiments that verify this.
While you can't "prove" this simply by observing this phenomenon among other people that level of "proof" is impossible. You technically can't prove anything and what we see with physical changes to the brain visibly influencing personality and behavior meets a reasonable criterion without getting too pedantic.
I still think in your scenario, we would not be able to prove that that is what actually happened as opposed to someone manipulating the inputs to the brain to make it think that's what happened. Or to change it completely.
Like that's the entire solipsistic problem. The brain is just sort of self-contained. Everything is essentially input. We are incapable of really knowing the experience of someone or something else. Or if what we perceive is what's actually happening. Because, as you note, the brain can be manipulated to act in ways counter to the manner it had been acting previously. We can induce sound and vision. If we were better at it and could keep the brain alive, we could full on do a brain in a vat.
And I agree that sort of proof is impossible to acquire. Like, there is no way to prove conclusively that anyone else is conscious. But that's why we instead treat it as an axiom instead. We basically say "We're not going to prove it, we're just going to accept it as true". And that's fine.
Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
And even with all of the more absurd conjectures, basically any form of "Last Thursdayism" of which simulation theory falls under, it's quicker to just assume that it's not true and treat the world we perceive as real with real rules that can be discovered through observation, testing, and experimentation. Because that's the only way we've been able to make any progress.
My statement is not that a type of proof is impossible. All proof is impossible. This is a fact of science. Proof is only possible in mathematics which is a made up game of axioms and theorems. Proof in reality is impossible.
But humans go about believing in many things without proof. We believe in physics without proof because it’s relatively consistent though unproven. And I am saying that things like brain damage, brain surgery and electrodes and the physical changes those things do to the personality is ALSO relatively consistent.
Consistent enough that we can know that the souls doesn’t exist that the personality the ego is a manifestation of the physical brain. Proof is not needed because we can’t prove anything anyway and the criterion is met in this aspect because it is the baseline of how we believe all things without proof.
> Mostly because it not being true is an existential horror no one wants to truly confront.
we can't prove, in this mathematics sense, that other people are conscious just as we can't prove that the sun will rise again tomorrow, or that my food will nourish me instead of killing me, or that everything is still there when you're not looking. for questions of this type we normally content ourselves with empirical evidence instead. and the empirical evidence for the consciousness of other humans (and, taking it further, other animals) for me would be the facts (1) that i am conscious, and that (2) i am a human like other humans: same anatomy, same behaviors, same story. indeed, empirically, it'd be absurd to think that i'd be so profoundly different from other humans in this particular aspect.
i guess what i'm saying is for me the real existential horror is the problem of induction.
Take the radical skepticism pill and embrace epistemological monism - the idea that the only real truth is that all things are interpretations.
I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?
[^1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahweh
That's not really the same as it having actual consciousness, even if people will wind up treating it similarly though
Humans have consciousness whether or not anyone believes we do
Or at least I do. I don't really know about the rest of you. I prefer to believe that you all have consciousness too though
It's trivially easy to come up with definitions of consciousness that support your point. But there isn't one of them that it is trivially singular and above all others from a scientific point of view. If you say, "I know consciousness when I see it," you are just making the point that consciousness is attributed by the beholder. Idem if you affirm "I'm conscious". If you say, "only humans are conscious", you are socially attributing consciousness. Now, I don't want to be argumentative, I honestly haven't been able to figure this matter in a decade of armchair internal debate[^1], and it seems I have some company.
[^1]: Having this internal debate makes me believe I'm conscious, but now that I have seen LLMs in action whose "internal debate" is more lucid than mine, I honestly question that "internal debate" is sufficient.
If you modify the teddy bear enough that's a totally different situation, so let's not confuse the two. In the modification case we don't even need to worry about simulacra, we can stretch it into pajama shape and use an entire human as the stuffing of the teddy bear.
And there's a blurry line here. Obviously slavery is abhorrent, and animal abuse is bad, and factory farming often crosses the line into animal abuse and we should accept that chicken will cost ~25% more per pound to have the chickens be able to walk around a little bit... but how do we decide when a computer system is worthy of respect? Convenient not to think about that.
(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration)
I think it's more that consciousness can be _ignored_ in subjects that you don't care about, rather than that you consciousness can be realistically attributed to subjects that you do care about, but even then people attribute consciousness to "nature" or even the universe as a whole, or if you want to stretch the argument, quite a lot of religious belief is exactly attributing consciousness to abstract entities.
If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon
>observer-dependent model, subject to social consensus.
Which is actually more pragmatic than most conflicting philosophical definitions involving qualia and other handwaving.
Also, saying "I define consciousness as X" and then going on to show that, because I decree consciousness to be X, we don't need to worry about Y, Z, and so on, isn't pragmatic at all, unless you pick an X that everyone agrees on. The definition you give is something hardly anyone would agree on.
Social consensus probably isn't even an aspect of consciousness, but at least one can make that argument coherently, if you rephrase it as "part of the decision to call something 'conscious' or not involves social consensus". But this is also trivial and boring and not why anyone actually cares about the "is AI conscious" debate.
I agree that the article is all over the place, though. (not that my posts are much better)
At least to me that is what matters in the end. You'll probably never convince someone on HN with an autism level over 9000 they are conscious, but once the average empathetic person thinks they are it will deeply effect the general operation of our society.
Human beings are notorious for being nonchalant about other's pain when they are insensate to it.
What's the correct definition of consciousness?
"They're just robots, Morty!"
*Blood splurt
"They're not robots, Rick!"
"I mean they're bureaucrats, Morty. I don't respect them."
I think it would be reasonable to conclude none at all. I'm not even fully convinced all humans have a conscious experience similar to mine, even though they literally have the same biology as me.
It is incredibly improbable that an autocomplete computer program is experiencing consciousness.
> Physical pain or suffering, as a matter of fact, happens through conscious minds and involves emotional aspects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suffering
Huh? I care deeply about many sentimental objects, but I don't go around saying that my favorite piece of art from my parents is conscious...
The idea that something has subjective experience, and by extension moral patienthood, only if humans care about it is not only dubious scientifically, but also deeply problematic. That would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
Yes, I agree. To me it reads as an apology to sociopathy.
The author is just wrong about the philosophy, and the logic (and probably other things too). That doesn't mean he's a sociopath, or that he's defending sociopathic things.
For what it’s worth, my subjective sense of morality is opposed to torture.
AI forces us to confront an issue that's often come up in science fiction - when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient? What rights do they have? How do you get along with such different creatures? This historically hasn't been a problem on Earth, because there's such a big jump between humans and the rest of the primates or the dolphins and octopuses. It's more of a problem when the difference is small, or complex. Look at how much trouble we have with race.
The last time this came up was about 400,000 years ago, when the Neanderthals became extinct. Close to human level, but maybe not quite there. They lost.
Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries. The machines outlive humans. Japan is officially resigned to this fate.[1]
[1] https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp2023e_Su...
Edit: I am not in anyway trying to be obtuse or reductive, I simply want to understand your statement. Apologies if it comes across that way.
This sounds a bit like depression, I think they’re genuinely concerned for your wellbeing
I have been reading more and more; I guess looking ot knowledge as some eort of ends vs a means to an end for once. Camus, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Dostoevsky's underground man etc...
Camus: The universe was always going to stay silent when you demand meaning from it; the answer isn't a better metric, it's to push the rock anyway ("imagine Sisyphus happy").
Dostoevsky [underground man]: Refusing to be a piano key in someone's optimized Crystal Palace
Stokely Carmichael: "Racism is not a question of attitude, it's a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism."
My conclusion: AI didn't take our meaning, It made me realize I have always been looking in the wrong place and thus reacting ignoratly when I felt "denied" this thing I feel entitled to.
Love.
Edit: Love; paradoxically, ive felt both entitled to and unworthy of so I'm not sure WTF to do with that.
One of the series that I think is most interesting on that topic is the Children of Time series by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's an awkward read, but it has the most interesting other minds that I've encountered in sci-fi.
Another one that I'd put on there specifically about AI is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts... which I can't say much more without it being a spoiler one way or another.
> Maybe that's the fate of humans. No big extinction. Just the demographic transition, a birth rate below replacement rate, for a few centuries.
https://www.bohemiandrive.com/npwil - Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life (not a spoiler, that's chapter 1, panelset 2). Saturn's Children by Charles Stross might also be appropriate (It's an especially odd book to read immediately after Friday - the "I recognize that twist... oh, it twisted ... that way?").
I get we have to do that for science to be good, but I don't get why it carries over to the general populace. We're so sure of so many things science is wary of, this incredibly low self-esteem blows my mind.
Anyways, back on topic, I don't believe any nation is resigned to this fate until I see extreme measures fail. I think I saw that Singapore is giving parents like $55,000 over the lifetime of their child.
For me, because the Copernican Principle seems relatively undefeated.
> We've become essentially a force of nature, rather than a simple occupying species.
So are beavers, trees, plankton... they all have huge effects on the planet.
Regarding analysis of animal brains vs. human brains, the more we do, the more we find that we have in common with many other "lesser" species.
Regarding us vs. machines, I certainly believe we are just a very complex and sometimes easily programmable analog machine.
This is just my 2 cents on the matter. We are certainly pretty darn neat, but at this point I believe it would be folly to think that were on some different incomparable plane.
And there's lots of evidence that we've hit a million unlikely goalposts. We might've gone through more than one great filter already. Whether it's going multicellular, or having a protecting planet like Jupiter, or having Theia slam into us and giving us a moon for tides, or any number of other weird things.
And that's before getting into our specific evolutionary past. If it weren't for dinosaurs ruling the planet, we might not, as mammals, have evolved our extreme adaptability. If it weren't for them then getting wiped out, we wouldn't have had a planet-sized sandbox where nearly every niche was suddenly open again, allowing us to explode in complexity as we essentially spent all day solving survival puzzles. Even then, all of this could've happened underwater and it wouldn't have mattered, because we never would've made fire.
What makes them unlikely?
And that’s besides things we don’t have comparative evidence for, but which took ages on earth. It took a seriously long time for multicellular life to pop up. Easily could be a great filter. We also need tides. Another filter. We also need a planet rotating and orbiting at the right rates. Another filter. Etc.
I totally get where you are coming from. The Rare Earth solution appears to be the answer to the Fermi Paradox. Is it really a paradox though? Maybe it was just naive to think that life should be common, because solar systems and planets are very plentiful.
Right now, humans are special. I don’t know if that will always be the case. In fact, I doubt it.
Orangutans can drive a golf cart, there are videos of that from the pre-AI era. General anesthetics that work on humans also tend to work on them. There is just a smooth gradient of brain evolution.
We don't know exactly what in the brain gets disrupted during general anesthesia (or a baseball bat to the head, for that matter) that causes consciousness to go away, but inquiry has been trending towards lower-level explanations over time, and it's unlikely that it can be fully explained at the biochemical level. We probably need to go down to physics.
Once we're at the physics level, there will be testable hypotheses that work on machines. For example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for human-like consciousness.
Solipsism or simulation theory type of metaphysical positions remain undefeated, but they don't matter for practical purposes because materialism and its accompanying theories of physics have the same predictive power about what I will observe in the future regardless of whether solipsism is true (def true: as real as my own consciousness). If I want to be philosophically rigorous, then I will keep in mind that I can wake up from a simulation at any moment. But until then, physics rules.
It may be that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain, which is changing from moment to moment as cells reorganize, so the definition of "I" is constantly changing in a ship of Theseus kind of way. It may be that nobody has the ideal definition of consciousness (or anything, really), like how nobody has the same definition of an apple even if we're looking at the same apple, because the light bounces off of it slightly differently from my angle of view, so our definitions are only mostly similar. This might be why frontier physics is stuck, because we're current assuming that observations/observers can be defined in a universally identical way. If it turns out that all instances of experience/experiencers are unique and never truly identical, then solving the hard problem of consciousness may end up being equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics, because we'd be trying to describe everything one can observe.
Materialism determined that you wrote this essay? I'd like to see you demonstrate that with physics.
Also note that I'm using the term "materialism" loosely to mean that oneself is a part of a larger world rather than the whole. I'm aware of the incomplete and approximate nature of existing physics. Physics is yet another layer of "modeled apparent reality" nested inside materialism. I'm not counting on any specific physics model to predict all that I can observe in a materialist world. Such a theory of everything does not exist, at least not yet. But what we do have are models which make reasonably good predictions at some local abstraction level, some fuzzily bounded local region of materialist reality. These models need not be limited to physics. Phenomena that can be roughly modeled at higher levels do not need to be reduced to low-level physics to predict future observations with good enough precision (though it could probably be done, with great effort).
Now, to answer your question. As I understand it, you're asking whether something external in the material world caused me to move my hands to type these words.
I think that's an accurate description. But you would have to take this statement in context of the prior explanations for it to make sense in a metaphysically strict manner.
We could model this in a pretty rough high level way: I look at screen. I see article that says something about consciousness. It piques my interest so I click and read, then I talk in the comments.
And we could think about what else caused this specific event of me typing these words. There are countless causal chains, but I'll list a few:
- My understanding of language and the words used here can be traced back to every interaction I've had with other people and objects in the past. I was not born literate. Change any one of those interactions and I may be saying something slightly (or very) different right now.
- I need to eat food and drink water, or I would eventually be too weak to move my fingers to type. This comment would never happen if I'm starving.
- I see that you made a comment, so I'm responding. Your decision to comment was a part of the cause of me writing this comment. If you did not make that decision, it would be impossible for me to write this reply.
If I want to challenge physics and claim the future is something that's completely unpredictable and can only be determined by my mind or god/simulation, I could think or pray really hard about teleportion, and see if I can teleport or move really fast 1 meter forward in 10 milliseconds, surpassing the biochemical limits of my muscles and joints. I can't. The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material. Of course, I feel like I'm making decisions. But my very concept of a decision refers to exactly some process in my mind that's always subject to apparent external influence, rather than just internal processing. This intuition is backed by the fact that other people can predict my behavior to some extent. Like you just implicitly did by assuming that if I were to respond to your comment, then I would answer your question using words in natural language you can read. Y...
No matter how good physics gets, it can't solve the mind-body problem, that exists at a level that the very activity of using repeatable physical experimentation cannot provide a usable answer towards. A person can believe that physics could create a solution, but it would just be yet another belief about metaphysics in a sea of many.
> The movement of things have predictable bounds regardless of whether this apparent movement of matter has metaphysical origins in mind/simulation/god/whatever, it can be predicted as if it's material.
What is the black-body speed of an idea? I'll let you assume the idea is spherical. If your position is that an idea is just neurons firing in the brain, then you need some kind of way to account for changes in said speed. What is so special about that hundredth monkey... on the physical level? All you can use to guess at this answer is... more ideas.
> I know with metaphysical certainty that you are bound by the workings of a materialist world, because I am defining certainty using my own consciousness, and you are a part of my materialist model. But hearing this from me is not enough for you to prove to yourself in a metaphysically strict sense that you are in a true material world, even if we're both in a true material world, because your definition of certainty is based on your own consciousness, and we do not share the same consciousness.
This is perhaps the most hilarious bit of equivocation I've ever seen from a materialist. "I know this with certainty but you won't be convinced of my certainty because our consciousnesses are different." That consciousness is different between people is a part of the mind-body problem, subjectivity cannot be explained with materialism alone.
I understand the mind-body problem, that's why I made the distinction between the ultimately real and the apparently real. Materialism is at the apparently real level. The equivalence is practical, not metaphysically strict.
and that specialness appeared when? in our mammal ancestors? our Big Ape ancestors? Australopithecus? Denisovan? Neanderthal? Cro-Magnon? Or only when we started agriculture? or only during Roman Empire? or only during Industrial Revolution?
Btw, all those debates will become moot in just a few years, around 100T models (about the number of our neuron connections). We already have 10T models, so the wait is almost over. We'd be able to directly ask the 100T model whether it is conscious, and no human would probably be able to successfully argue against the model, whatever answer it would give.
Thst never works. It's not about money.
It's about biology, likely microplastics acting as hormone inhibitors. Sex drive and reproductive drive are not the same.
We know next to nothing about microplastics - pseudoscience can wait at the door.
It doesn't matter whether it's a highly populated nation or not, an aged population or not. What the culture is, the religion, access to birth control, health care, income. For example, some places don't really use cars, think The Netherlands as a Western example, or poor agrarian nations.
The culture of Japan is very Western centric, yet also as far from any Western culture you can get. EG, high-tech, cities, cars, the trappings of "modern life", yet a culture entirely unique, wrapped in strong levels of duty, and with a different culture for woman.
Iran has a birth rate problem. A very rigidly controlled, religious nation, where women really have no say. Where people are paid to have kids, like many Western and other nations.
If you think "car seats" have anything to do with child rearing in much of the world, you're completely, US-culture out of touch. And further to that, my point is that every single culture, and whether rural farmers or people living it cities, it does not matter.
So whatever reason you want to give? Cost? Car seats? Contraceptive? Women's rights? Woke or not woke? Religion? Culture? Finances? None of it makes one iota of difference. None of it. Whether a poor or rich country? Nope, doesn't matter.
It's none of those things. Not a one.
If it was, then it wouldn't be all nations with a collapsing birth rate.
So to everyone reading this, know this truth. It's not economics, culture, the place you live, wealth, it's something else.
Something affecting us all.
It may not be microplastics. I could be something else.
But it's something which no amount of money will help.
Car seat requirements prevent childbearing != giving people car seats induces childbearing
Anyways, that makes sense. I can see how I got two studies mixed up if that's what I'm actually remembering!
> that never works
Citation needed.
It's exceptionally simple. Endless countries around the world have given 'baby bonuses' and 'child dividends' to parents. Money has been thrown at the problem. In many cases, when such programs run, it's profitable to have children. And there's no study needed, as it is a simple fact. And yet? The birth rate keeps dropping across the entire world. As in, every single country across the entire world.
You already started with a weird, what seems like perhaps snide response, where you (I guess?) read my comment and understand it. Now, you're just throwing something else.
How about, you engage in thoughtful consideration of what I'm saying.
It's a very serious problem.
We're talking about the extinction of the entire human race.
And it's not a result of money. It's not. And it's very, very important to not just say "Well it seems like it's money for me, so who cares, it's money".
Because this is a bigger threat than global warming, than nuclear war, then a meteor impact. In such cases, humans would survive. But if we just end up unable to have offspring?
Well. Game over.
We cannot risk just presuming.
See here, in this very same thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49479324
Just not having enough offspring means humans fade out. Breakeven is about 2.1 children per female.
We're already on that path. It's not a projection. "Peak Baby", the year with the most births, was 2012. Elementary schools have been closing for years now.
If so? Please keep what I said in mind. It's not a pet peeve of mine, it's just rather startling once you assemble all the data. There are places with idealogical reasons to want to maintain birth rates, and it's been tried for decades. For example, since the 70s, Quebec has wanted to ensure the continuation of its culture, and so was quite sensitive to noticing birth rate decline. It's not like this happened all in the last decade.
They've had many programs. A whole, societal approach. And before the collapse in the last 10 to 15 years, Canadian health care was absolutely the best, world class, immensely accessible.
So you had:
* free, excellent, easily accessible health care. the poorest of the poor having the same health care as someone wealthy
* in a province and country among the top standard of living in the world
* with immensely generous parental leave
* with state run programs to ensure private daycare was cheap and accessible
* baby bonuses at the federal level
* crazy level provincial/Quebec bonuses for each child, that stacked.
* at that time, if you're poor, your child would often get grants, not loans, grants to go to university or college, and it was easily accessible
And it never, ever worked. Sometimes rates budged mildly, but it was just never significant.
And if you look at the world, if you look at Europe, countries in which even University is free, where having a child is not a burden due to such programs? Birth rates still fell.
I guess my point is, people have the wrong reason. And while you feel you have loads of personal examples to the contrary, go back 50, 70 years? Even the poorest people living in squalor in cities, had more kids and were happy to have them.
I've seen couples with a smart phone worth $1500, each, and a large flat screen TV, and highly expensive personal computing gear, complain they have no money for kids. Um, no. You have enough money in all that spend, to send your kids to university if you invested just that cash for them today.
It's not about wealth. Otherwise every single family at Google, Meta, would have 10 kids.
It's about something else.
My thoughts are there are two drives. Reproductive and sex. Men embody sex drive, women reproductive drive. Evolutionary scientists will cite the different reproductive methods both men and women have. Men can have 100s or 1000s of offspring, if they are able to bed enough women. Women can only have perhaps 10, if lucky, maybe a few more.
The point is, the strategies are different.
There is a lot of discussion about what separates a female human, from any other primate or mammal. For example, women don't only go into 'heat', as most larger mammals do, in the spring, they're ready all year long to have offspring.
But the mechanisms are still there.
And female reproductive drive is very much controlled by genetic expression, the whole process of pregnancy is hormonal (same thing). It's not much of a leap to consider that something is interfering with the female desire for offspring.
Then on the male side, sperm rates are down all across the chart, all across the world.
People are losing fertility.
Having offspring is the rawest, most direct, strongest drive a species has. Nothing is more important for continuance. It's not really under our control. The urges people have to desire a mate, to have intercourse, those aren't conscious desires, and more than being thirsty is.
So if you consider that from the female perspective, pregnancy is a drive too, what then?
And no, it's not the pill. There are countries where female contraceptives are illegal, where they don't have a choice (recall I mentioned Iran?...
What we have built as of 2026 would, in Mass Effect terms, be considered a rudimentary VI.
No, the last time this came up was... well, take your pick. Dred Scott? Wannsee? The Rwandan Crisis Committee?
I don't believe that anyone needs to justify their "humans are special" creed. It's arbitrary, that's fine, and it's only true because we decided it was true. I see no reason to reconsider it either.
It's in all of our interests to continue to behave as if "humans are special", and those who insist otherwise are species-traitors.
>when you encounter a new kind of creature, how do you decide if they are sentient?
Why would I even care? I don't think the word "sentient" is even defined in a way that this can be determined. I'm not entirely sure humans are sentient, and it does not matter because even if we aren't sentient, humans are special without need for justification.
The interesting observation is this: when we judge something to have subjective experience, we are invoking moral intuitions. There is no objective measure we can perform (yet?), and it's not even clear whether such a measure makes sense. You may disagree, but this is still a central debate in serious discussion on "hard" consciousness.
I would say that your entire argument just begs the question by implicitly assuming consciousness to have real, independent existence. Does elan vital (the substance that provides the motive force of life) have mass? You're saying that this is a theorem; the article questions the entire premise.
> The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia.
Bizzare. "If it rains, the car will get wet." Is this a statement, as you say, about rain? Descarte tries to prove the existence of his God and states an axiom. The atecedent "I think" seems to be about thinking, whatever that may mean, and "I am" makes an existential claim based on subjective experience... or something. Who knows why Descarte believed cogito ergo sum to be solid starting ground.
IMHO, your rebuttal here reads as little more than a complaint that something disagrees with your personal assumptions about the world.
You clearly got me riled up just as much as you did against OP, so thanks for the elan vital!
I generally agree with the thrust of your argument -- the article is a mess and borderline unintelligible to this former philosophy postgraduate -- but I might nitpick this. Two points: (1) I do not think there is a substantial difference between whether the cogito is about thinking or perceiving. And (2) I'm not entirely sure the sensation that is thinking is independent from qualia.
I'm in less disagreement, but I'm not entirely sure what you mean by:
>Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness.
Moral frameworks are exactly deductive frameworks with arbitrary axioms. Like mathematics, they don't actually exist outside of a mind. Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.
---
An unrelated comment, but I just don't want to double post:
To me the most interesting thing to fall out of starting to understanding intelligence -- and we're definitely not there yet -- is that it is entirely possible that the 'consciousness is an illusion' argument ends up as significantly more serious. Ultimately, solipsism means it sort of doesn't matter, but it could be a kind of Darwin-style "we aren't special" result in thinking going forward.
I don't think I worded the part about moral patienthood very clearly. The article presents the two possible views as "if something is conscious, then humans should care about it" and "if humans care about something, then it's conscious". I'm saying that we need to keep three things separate: consciousness, moral patienthood, and what humans care about. Consider a being that sees the redness of red, but has no preferences or positively or negatively valenced experiences; the moral obligation to keep a promise you made to someone who has died; the fact that for most of history, humans didn't care about slaves or non-human animals.
>Thus, I'm not entirely sure what "human care" means here, but absent humanity (or at least some conscious entity), I'm not sure any conception of morality is sensible.
I'm not entirely sure what it means either. I think the author wants to say that because consciousness is socially constructed, saying that a being is conscious is more like an aesthetic preference, like saying that a piece of music is good.
I believe that making the human species fundamental to a theory of consciousness or a theory of ethics is doomed from the start. We just need to imagine other intelligent beings somewhere in the universe with the same kinds of beliefs, desires, and experiences as we have. It's not that I would say ethics is mind-independent, but it can't arbitrarily privilege one species above all others.
I'm willing to consider that consciousness is like art, mostly in the eye of the beholder and objectively defining consciousness doesn't make any sense, there's only a spectrum of intelligent behavior.
- Conscious is the substrate or architecture of the system.
- Awareness is the active resolution of inputs (external and internal) against that system's model.
- Subjective Experience is the feeling "what it is like to be" from within the system.
I also disagree with the "observer" position. Seems he's imported some Carlo Rovelli into this essay as they do collaborate together. You don't need an observer - it's the same reason I find Copenhagen / Wave function collapse to just seem wrong.
The reason I think quala is hard to pin down comes down to how the conscious internal model compresses what it has previously resolved about the world (internal and external).
The feeling of blueness is that highly compressed concept (not raw data about ranges of wavelengths) which is then compared against the blueness of something our awareness is focused on.
It's interesting that there was a change even in that area in the last century and specifically the last decades.
I think it was always contested if animals have something like a consciousness (or "soul") at all. On the one hand, animals were often used as stand-in for humans in fables, etc - on the other hand, there was the widespread view that they are mostly automatons driven by instinct. If an animal behaved too smart, people were more likely to find a supernatural explanation (it's a disguised god/spirit/etc) than accept that an ordinary animal could do that.
The debate really only shifted in the last decades with scientific evidence for (some) animal cognition coming in.
On the other hand, humans always seemed to have a tendency to attribute consciousness (or at least "worthiness of care") to supernatural entities or even landscape features.
I think most cultures always had a whole world of conscious, non-human entities, they just ignored the ones that mighy actually be conscious.
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
That part might not work out.
Yesterday's article about the automated CEO system indicates that AIs may soon be in charge as a routine result of capitalism. AIs are getting better rapidly, and humans aren't.
This is an unproven hypothesis and there is zero real-world evidence that the brain is doing anything like computation in the sense that a computer does it.
This boils down to “models aren’t real because they don’t affect the real world”. By the same rule, thought itself isn’t real. It’s an abstract notion that has no concrete effects in the real world.
Putting thought into action in the real world requires a linkage between the thinker and the physical. In humans, that’s the body. But you can put an AI into robot body and suddenly it also has a linkage to the real world and can have concrete effects.
“Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy’s sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.”
To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
To paraphrase the Chinese room argument: Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done.
In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?
Your brain is just a big set of weights/neurons organized into layers that do back and forward propagation, turns out. You are just statistics surrounded by flesh and bones.
This is software trained to produce outputs. It doesn't feel anything.
Which shouldnt be a surprise - most CS folks are disconnected ironically from reality.
I don't know what you ate today. It would be insane for me to confidently claim that you ate two bananas and a pizza today.
The burden of proof is on the person making the claim. That's the basis of empirical research.
I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.
The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.
Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.
Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?
I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?
It is powered while it is powered.
Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.
It'a even in their name, they model language, language is the thing that humans use to communicate, therefore they model communcating humans.
Humans are the precedent.
As it is, it would be insane for me to confidently claim you are conscious or even that you're human, as an LLM could have written the same message.
The philosophical zombie does not satisfy occams razor because it asserts an unmeasurable property that has no effect on the outcome.
If it acts like it has consciousness, then assuming it to have consciousness is more scientifically rigorous, than assuming for it not to have consciousness, because the former requires one less variable.
So why keep discussing?
But you could replicate exactly the calculations happening as a LLM computes the next token. Would that be conscious? Where would that consciousness reside?
My view is that LLMs are designed and trained to autocomplete narratives, and that as part of that process they develop an emergent narrative about themselves. Whatever personality traits they exhibit is part of that narrative. Perhaps this is not that different from how humans learn to move in social contexts, but it is not consciousness as it happens in living beings.
Why not, at least in principle? Wouldn’t an exact map of a brain’s neural structure and its electromagnetic and chemical state, combined with inputs mirroring the senses, be able to be automated to produce a digital analog of human thought.
The model is impractical and couldn’t be reproduced today, yes. But what, exactly, is missing?
https://www.hawking.org.uk/in-words/lectures/godel-and-the-e...
People have thought they were nearly complete at least for 500 years, probably longer.
When you choose a specific model to represent the brain you are asserting you’ve accounted for everything that generates consciousness (=the lights are on, experiences qualia). This means you’ve solved the hard problem. The hard problem is debated constantly though.
In my view there is absolutely no reason to think a description of reality can be equal to reality. There are probably (in my view that is) aspects of reality, like first person internal experience, that fundamentally can not be described with third party linguistic / symbolic / representational devices.
idk how legit this is but the summary is my point https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.07682
This is not an argument for true AI being possible, let alone already achieved; it is a warning about depending on arguments from incredulity, which are particularly susceptible to future developments.
Searle's Rooms is a fully rejected and rebutted argument, and Philosophy will never be (and never has been) a serious discipline until it figures out how to actually let go of failed arguments.
That’s not to say that I think the Chinese Room Argument is convincing. I don’t think it is. Or, I guess it might demonstrate something, but not what it aims to show.
I would argue that if, say, the person who has memorized this program and mentally executes it, and if this program also includes actuating some levers to control a mech or something, and the program (running via the person mentally going through the instructions by rote) takes actions to pursue some goals (e.g. purchasing some wood by conversing in Chinese and building a tower with that wood), while the person on whom the program is running wouldn’t know how to order a cheeseburger in Chinese,
Then, the program running in that person’s head might well understand Chinese even though the person doesn’t. (Whether or not the program actually understands Chinese, I think probably depends on the specific of the program in ways that I don’t think anyone knows. I don’t expect that any program that would understand could be small enough that a human person could memorize it and execute it by rote in this way, but this is a thought experiment and such issues can be disregarded I think.)
Critics immediately point out: yes, there clearly is still understanding, it's just in the system itself -- the program. The fact that the person does not have the understanding doesn't mean the understanding is gone.
His response to this is: but what if the system was the person's brain!?
Okay, so either it doesn't address the criticism at all (there is still a system of rules that contains the understanding; who cares whether that system is internal or external to the person's brain?) or it completely destroys the original premise of the argument, which is that the understanding is not in the person! You can't put the understanding back in the human agent and still claim the human doesn't understand what they're doing! His entire argument relies on the fact that the human agent obviously doesn't understand Chinese, and then says, actually, their brain contains everything it needs to know to have completely fluent conversations in Chinese. So the person does understand Chinese!
> How does the person having all the instruction books memorized and whatnot imply that the person understands Chinese?
How does a person's brain containing all the facts, information, and skills that it needs to have a fluent conversation in Chinese imply that the person understands Chinese? How does it not!?
Notice that the man while having memorized the rulebook can't convey any fact of his childhood in Chinese. He can only convey facts encoded in the rulebook. The point is there are different ways information is stored in the brain; one way is through declarative memory, the other what we might call semantic memory. The rulebook encoded in the man's declarative memory doesn't endow his semantic memory contact with the meaning of the symbols. Hence the man doesn't understand Chinese.
This doesn't render the Chinese argument successful. The system's reply still stands when understood properly. I like to call it the virtual mind objection. Physically executing the rules in the rulebook just instantiates a virtual mind. Whether the man is reading the rules from the book or just pulling them from memory is irrelevant.
They don't, they have simply memorised a translation function which takes Chinese as input and returns Chinese as output. They don't have facts or information about the Chinese language - they don't even need to know what language they are speaking!
When the person reads 汉堡包, do they understand what that is?
Assuming you don't speak Mandarin, do you understand that word? If not, how could you claim to understand Mandarin? Even if you could use the translation function to speak it, you still don't understand it. Remember that the translation function is Mandarin -> Mandarin, so if you don't understand Mandarin you cannot use it to gain an understanding of the word.
Because they can’t use Chinese to speak about things they encounter in the world?
Like, someone asks them in Chinese whether they are hungry and want some food, and they answer based on the program, not based on whether they are actually hungry, because they don’t understand the words in a way that lets them use them as a person who understood Chinese would.
Again, I don’t mean to say that in such a situation that there is no understanding of Chinese happening in their head, only that this doesn’t constitute that person understanding Chinese.
It seems to me very strange to want to say that the person with the simulation in their head understands Chinese. They can’t do the things that understanding Chinese lets people do.
Perhaps the program the person has running in their head is even a person, a moral patient and a moral agent, and one who understands Chinese. But the person who is running (by rote) the program, doesn’t thereby understand Chinese. They may “contain understanding of Chinese”. The understanding is definitely happening in their brain. But they don’t understand Chinese.
The whole essay [1] is actually somewhat relevant to modern LLM use for other reasons. He spends a lot of time lamenting the industry's obsession with "user friendly" interfaces which obscure the underlying complexity of the problem at hand.
[1]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd08xx/EWD898.PDF
Of course his glib dismissal doesn't make the question wrong, it's just a fun quote for those who already believe that human thought could (eventually) mimicked by a machine.
I don't think the original context particularly matters: the quote now has a life of its own. A rock was formed to satisfy the laws of thermodynamics that demanded an efflux of heat, but I can still use it to smash a window.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/
What the author seems to observe is that this non-evidential judgement that other beings are conscious is due to us caring about them. The brain creates this perception so that we care about them, form bonds, work together, and so on -- evolution selects for cooperation. So the question of whether we will think of AI as conscious is that of whether we will care for it like we care for another being. And, in this regard, the author points out that "intelligent agents" that appear to do this work effectively together.
My personal point of view is that it's unclear what being an AI is in order for us to even talk about it being conscious. Is it the computations happening in the GPU according to a set of weights? Is it the weights themselves? Is it the architecture? Does it include the code around it, that gives it the context and prompt, and hooks the response to a terminal, or to a client host, etc.?
Suppose I look at another person and think "this other person must be conscious like me". What exactly is happening here?
First, I observe that I seem to be a human. Then, I observe that the other person is a human as well. Crucially, there are similarities between what I am and what they are. And since I am conscious, they must also be conscious, because consciousness must be caused by one of the similarities that we share, or so I assume.
This assumption can be robustly verified for humans and some animals via general anesthesia. Cause and effect (assuming a materialist stance) can be established between the drugs and human(-like) consciousness. But this is a very rough method, and it doesn't work for assessing a machine since machines can't be anesthetized.
Before anesthesia, it could still be verified in less robust ways. One way is to hit people in the head and make them pass out without killing them. This was feasible and probably commonly observed since the stone age.
But we don't know exactly how anesthetics work or exactly what in the brain is responsible for consciousness, so it leaves the door open to hypotheses that can work on machines. Here's one example: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for (human-like) consciousness.
Suppose something like that were to be proven true for humans with future brain research, then it would be possible to test for human-like consciousness in any brain or computer, regardless of architecture. I suspect this is what will happen because inquiry into consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations, so it's probably not going to be fully explainable at the biochemical level. We'll have to go down to physics.
Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them. Next sentence:
> Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property.
Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someone being conscious. What follows, instead, is that a belief in someone being conscious is a belief. Thanks, I learned nothing.
Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.
I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.
...Just because we like the taste of a chicken burger. Perhaps we should start with that before we worry if our computer can also scream.