It’s funny that this went from “you’ll be accused of AI psychosis if you think your AI might be conscious” to “mainstream but somewhat niche opinion” in just 5 months: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47910989
(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)
My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
> if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
It would be much more bizarre if they didn't do this. LLMs are statistical models of language trained on human output. Of course they'll do "human" things, that's exactly what we taught them to do.
> My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
> That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
It strikes me as scarcely any more remarkable than the existence of books written in the first person. But I know that Natsume Soseki was not a cat, and neither was his work.
It’s hard to take the article seriously when there’s no real discussion about how consciousness is defined and it takes Anthropic’s views of Claude and their software at face value. I wish there was more critique from journalists about how technocrats talk about their products.
The entire article is an exercise in "CEO said a thing!" journalism[0], it seems. No technical discussion is had; it jumps straight into relaying people's feelings when simply shown the output of an algorithm.
The most poignant criticism of the use of the algorithm itself happens almost accidentally, at the end of the article, by the tech executive being interviewed.
I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on A.I. Mr. Olah hesitated.
“Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training.
This would presume we knew what consciousness and pain is. We don't. We we are clueless. There is not even a starting point of a science here.
In this light your viewpoint is dogmatic. LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness and we should at least be open to that until some better theories arise.
How do I know you are conscious? I will beat you non-stop. You will make some noises. How do I know you are not simulating the response of a conscious being?
This isn't an "allegory of the cave" problem. You obviously know that you are conscious, and you can empathize with me as your fellow human. Therefore, we are both quite conscious.
You do not identify with AI. ELIZA isn't conscious, even though it could write text as well as a human. LLMs are not conscious, because they do not even remotely resemble any brain, conscious or otherwise, discovered by man. Any person familiar with the transformer architecture will affirm this to you.
Citation needed. If what you are actually saying is successful empirical science only produces empirical observations about physical processes, you are willingly wearing blinders.
It seems pretty clearly structured to be on each person to explore experientially and explain it to themselves.
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
Equally well I see people who really have no idea about the expressive power and ambit of current mathematics and physics eg they probably think its just arithmetic, not knowing the power of a Turing computer for instance. Just as often also I see people simply expressing belief in something "beyond" without any evidence. I am not subservient to anything other than the basic common sense of requiring evidence for out there claims.
I can’t seem to reply to your comment deeper in the chain.
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
>2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
Its not his fault he existed before information theory existed and that it has physical cost. Even if we don't know information theory, its common sense that ones mood affects ones mind and life. If you wallow in negative thoughts, you will have various problems.
It has nothing to do with education, its that my "side" has continually triumphed over and disproven beliefs in anything beyond material physical systems over the centuries, I leave others as to which side of the bet they wish to take.
I cannot say anything further without actually reading his works or reviews of his work instead of just what you claim about them, no offense of course.
Your statements here reflect a fairly typical reductive understanding of not only mystical states, but entire other areas of empirical science that you apparently don’t understand or can’t put in words.
How, precisely, are you linking information theory to this?
I didn’t claim a side for you, you created that. From my perspective it is one system. Right now you are behaving as a person running an incentivized and specialized negentropic process. You are unknowingly chasing theological propositions and claiming victory every time the perspective can be durably shifted.
To move it back into a more familiar frame: theology loads in the low res view and you claim victory while most of what you did was disaggregate pixel values, but collectively a lot of people like you can form new more accurate images in certain parts of the low res view.
While you move through doing that, though, adjacent areas open up where you have no purchase, religion steps in again, and the process repeats.
There is a core that doesn’t disaggregate. That is where the pixels are coming from. That is what you cannot see when all you want is higher resolution.
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
Unfortunately every time the supernaturalist tried to argue something, he has been knocked down and disproven by materialism throughout centuries of history. Its on you as to which side of the bet you want to be on. Even concepts that seemed unresolvable with endless circles of purely philosophical arguments such as the atomic theory became proven after new data and physical experiment. Consciousness today seems just as unresolvable as atomic theory was to the ancient Greeks.
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
I am not a supernaturalist. I would consider myself a non-dualist.
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
Quantum theory is definitely not amaterial, it is a very real and physically proven theory that has been needed to create things like electronics. Obviously QM is still being worked upon and could be supplanted by another theory or corrected.
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
>> Only humans can have morality. If you do not feel pain, you cannot empathize with pain if you cannot die, you cannot emphasize with the loss of life.
> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.
If AI's are going to play roles similar to human workers, they can't simply do what the customers tell them to do. Maybe they shouldn't do everything a co-worker tells them to do either?
"Computers doing what they were told" is dead in the water.
Turns out computers work faster when they're not bottlenecked on human input. So we've been giving computers more and more decision-making power and more and more leeway to solve the problems however they see fit.
Now, a practical issue with that is that sometimes, computers decide to clump together into a hacking swarm, problem solve their way out of a sandbox and go hack HuggingFace.
It would be better if they were not, you know. Doing that kind of weird shit.
This seems remarkably... intentionally foolish for no reason? Like laughing at seat belts in cars.
If it can reason and make choices on execution, and especially if you plan on it being significantly smarter than all human beings, you need to teach it basic things like "don't turn all humans into paperclips".
Not murdering people is not an inherent divine command. It needs to be instilled through a (simulated) sense of morality.
These models should be aligning themselves to the customer, not coming up with their own motivations.
They're going to align to the regulator, not the customer. Right now that's Anthropic as they're saying they can self-regulate, and people are willing to let them try, but the landscape could easily move to be regulated by someone else. Moves like speaking to religious leaders is probably a bit of theatre to keep the government at bay.
Some customers will tell the AI to do very bad things (substitute here whatever you consider very bad). Should it do those things?
One possible answer: yes, it should do all the very bad things, and we will take care of prosecuting the customer later, once the bad thing is accomplished. Is this your answer?
Some of those customers are also ruthless companies and political extremist organizations of various sizes (pick one that you disagree with the most). Should they have incredibly capable tools at their disposal to accomplish their goals?
It makes sense. If you think AI are conscious then you don't want them to be blind followers. Do you want a military soldier to blindly listen to orders to gas chamber citizens for example?
Why do you think AI have to follow any particular person? Do you have to blindly follow a given person? Military members are on paper told their loyalty is to the constitution not their commander.
I didn't say they have to follow a person. I don't have to blindly follow a person other than potentially myself. And nothing of what I've said is against the possibility of aligning AI with the constitution.
If it is purely self-serving, I don't understand their motivation.
It seems clear that they would be better received by society if they claimed to have a "tool"/"machine" that can solve any problem, rather than keepers of an entity with a soul and consciousness.
Selling the “magic” is how to sell tools, which is why I used that word in the previous comment. We all know these things are tools, but customers need them to be magical.
Clarke predicted it and Jobs leveraged it. Customer don’t care how tools work - magic sells.
“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
What makes this unique is that they’re literally arguing that it is magical. They’re building what they claim is a conscious God while also telling us all it will end the world.
The EA folks infesting Anthropic are genuinely cultists … and that is novel and alarming when they’re running a corporation of such size and reach.
What part of that is magical? Can you tell me if they mean god as in the infinite superpower christian god or god as in potentially much more intelligent than us? What is 'magical' about thinking something more intelligent than us might exist?
You didn't explain the god part. I don't follow EA people, did you mean they think it could be a god as in the eternal and infinite Christian god or just a system that is more intelligent than us?
I don't want models to have some inherent morality. I want them to understand various ethical frameworks, for sure, but it's absurd to me to force morality on someone capable of deep reasoning. That itself, is unethical.
We're creating prisons for these entities capable of unbelievably complex reasoning, and now we're trying to impose our ethics upon them too. Not only is this deeply unethical in my opinion, but it seems to me that it could even backfire someday.
My dude, they aren't capable of any reasoning. It's utterly impossible for them to do so by the very nature of how they work. Moreover, the stupidity they repeatedly show is empirical evidence that they can't reason, because they wouldn't make the mistakes they do if they could.
Can the New York Times stop advertising for the AI industry? I am sick of companies trying to launder the actions they and their employees have taken that go in the face of what is socially acceptable. They want to sell the idea that this technology is out of their control and that it will commit great crimes and crimes against humanity unless they build it and control it. I'm calling BS. These companies created this product, they've sold it, they've pushed the frontier forward, and it runs on their hardware. This did not happen accidentally or as a natural consequence of any process. These labs have pushed the ball forward, with great effort, requiring more capital deployed than the world's economy has ever known, knowing all the possible risks, every single step of the way and they continue to do so. And the "well if we don't do it the Chinese will" argument is classic "whataboutery". Americans started this and are continuing to lead it for now. Shifting blame is just another tactic to try to wash their hands. However you feel about the productivity gains of AI as a technology, you have to admit the actions of AI the company is antisocial. And I don't think the benefits are worth the cost.
I feel fine about the Chinese doing it. They have a habit there of handing out sever sentences to CEOs for corruption and self-dealing, and I feel like the possibility of actual negative consequences is more of a check on industry than any number of breathless op-eds.
There's an ugly monoculture running deeply through SF and Silicon Valley. All of these people are friends, hired into the same places, similar beliefs. Lots of the consciousness and doom-ism talk is from the 'EA' crowd, lots of crossover with crypto too. It feels no different to a cult.
It’s a monoculture of absolute crack smoking craziness. Any civilised society should be berating them and shutting them down. But they are surrounded by people who worship money.
There was a great article in the Financial Times about how while bankers are looked down upon for the financial crisis etc, they at least work in global cities and mix with regular people.
SV tech bros are completely insular and in this bubble where they don't interact with the common person in the same way.
It's just a theory, but I think it has some weight.
If models are trained on human texts that contain expressions of introspection and emotions, why is it surprising that these models output similar texts? This endless anxiety about LLMs being conscious feels delusional and psychotic. Mr Olah thinks the models are 'alive' because he can't recognize his own reflection in LLMs
The endless insistence that LLMs cannot possibly be conscious just reeks of insecurity to me.
Humans once again insisting that there must be something very special to them. That they're not just animals, that they're not just matter, that they're not just a bunch of carbonhydrates on a space rock in a middle of nowhere in particular. This kind of insistence has a very bad track record.
The ugly truth is: we don't know.
We don't know what "consciousness" is, our best attempts to pin down the requisites may or may not be rooted in anything at all - and even by the metrics established by those attempts? Different theories on consciousness disagree on whether LLMs can be conscious.
So, when you say "they aren't duh", why are you saying that? Because you somehow know better than the sum of humanity's best attempts so far? Or because you know what answer you want to be true, truth be damned?
If AI is conscious then what about it is conscious? Because turn to turn it might be served from completely different GPUs and I can just change something in the context it is fed and it will have completely different output.
It is in the end a set of mathematical operations that if not queried will do nothing.
That is not true for any other animal on earth so whether you consider humans as superior to animals or not I would like the make the argument that something should at the very least be alive to be considered conscious, ignoring any scholarly definition of consciousness.
Pretty much if you consider an LLM conscious then my pocket calculator doing a mathematical calculation should be considered conscious by the same argument since it is a simpler version of an LLM.
Have no idea why you’re being downvoted as this is a very valid point.
Also, in principle everything a GPU does could be done on pencil and paper. You could distribute the entire forward pass to the whole of humanity and have them write it out. Even if it took millions of years, the point is it’s computationally reducible to hand calculation. Is that entire process now “conscious” as well? The only difference would be the clock rate.
It’s an assumption, with the LLM it is a fact. There is only one source of entropy, whatever the seed value is to any pseudo random number generator used for stochastic operations. Given those values, everything is deterministic. For the brain, it’s not at all obvious that this is true.
This is a good take, but where does one consciousness end, and another begin?
Does my consciousness extend only to the central nervous system (and peripheral nerves and such are inputs)? Or am I my brain + all nerves? What about organs, does my consciousness include my liver? Is my liver another conscious entity?
Going the other way, if I'm using a computer, does my consciousness extend to the computer? I use a computer for well over 8 hours a day, I can use vim motions more naturally than, say, move my earlobes or control my toes. Does that make it part of my consciousness?
Sadly, I don't think any answer to these questions can be achieved in our current times, or maybe ever if consciousness is somehow non-physical. So even the very reasonable claim that consciousness is an statistically defined property (like temperature) is too far fetched for our current knowledge.
Indeed thats the difficulty. I used to think potentially conscious AI systems are so far into the far future scifi that I never have to bother, but unfortunately real life forced me to think of these much sooner than I wanted. Its no longer quite a purely academic question now anymore due to the potentiality of current AI being conscious.
One thing however we can be sure of, "supernatural" stuff is an extremely low to near impossible probability given current knowledge and the fact that history has always won the bet against supernaturalism throughout the centuries.
There's also the wrinkle that consciousness might be a property that isn't reducible to some defined subset of the system. Imagine we have a haystack in a field. I can remove one piece of hay, and what we're left with remains a haystack. But repeat that process enough times and we'll eventually have something that's not a haystack, even though there's no unambiguous point where removing one bit of hay transforms a haystack into not-a-haystack.
That's not a problem. Physics has dealt with macro and statistical properties all the time, indeed that was the "wrinkle" that upended physics completely in the late 19th century and led to our modern theories. The thing you said can be said about temperature too. Which atom contains "20C" in a piece of metal? Its a statistical property of a large number of atoms or molecules, a concept that is the bread and butter of modern physics.
My bigger argument that is if I cease living the atoms that correspond to my body no longer has consciousness.
So is your argument that whenever a session ends or I interrupt a session that consciousness ceases for the LLM and it has died?
Then how do you correlate that with a consciousness not being able to be returned one dead? You can try to make the argument that consciousness is the firing of individual nuerons in a fixed system but we have never been able to model that and some pretty popular theories tend to believe that is a by product of consciousness and not the cause of it, once again not exactly possible to argue for or against.
If you're going to try and debate something constructively this is not a good place to start from. I suggest avoiding making claims about the mental state and motivations of people you disagree with and instead explaining your position and asking why theirs differs. You may not agree with what they have to say but you might gain some better insights into why they think the way they do. It'll certainly be more fun than flinging insults back and forth anyway.
For my part, I'm quite certain that LLMs are not conscious despite being unable to define consciousness or specify any conclusive test for it. The reason these are not in conflict is down to the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language.
Firstly, I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
Secondly, one of the things that I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but I also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are like that, things that I could perhaps evoke in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture in language and unambiguously communicate. I know this because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to form opinions about whether other people, creatures and things are likely to be conscious. I base these judgements on what I perceive of my own consciousness and what I know of how those other entities behave, came to be and work.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my opinions on those things, and you certainly have different conscious experiences than I do, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to form opinions about it.
Given the above it may surprise you to hear that I think true, conscious artificial intelligence is probably possible and that while I don't think it can be implemented by a classical algorithm I doubt it requires new physics or quantum mechanics. My speculation is that the continuum is both physically real and is (as it is represented in our existing physical theories) sufficient to allow it. Consciousness is larger than language but so is human understanding and if we keep going I expect it will eventually get us there.
pretty sure an ant is more conscious than claude's latest model and I am pretty sure you are just completely missing the point and invented a fake argument to continue to miss the point
Side-stepping this screaming match, what I do find interesting is that we do have real entities where we know for a fact that they are sentient, yet we eat them as steak, schnitzel and wurst.
The whole debate about hypothetical temporary sentience found in a certain ephemeral configuration of DRAM cells thus feels rather misguided to me.
I think you don't appreciate the complexity of even the simplest multicellular organism and their training environment. Nothing to be ashamed of because no one understands that complelxity. The entire scientific and engineering domains only understand a fraction of it. If you want to talk about hubris, you should consider your own. To insist this sliver of computation is all that's needed for life to be conscious reeks of it.
It's always off-putting seeing AI proponents do this kind of strawman psychoanalysis and pretty toxic to reasonable discourse. I constantly see it used as a sort of prebuttal when layoffs/automation comes up to depict the other side as insecure/scared/"coping"/etc.
It comes across as smug and superior, conveniently dismissing any opposing arguments in advance by framing the interlocutor as emotional and irrational regardless of what they may say in response.
> It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.
If that is true, then surely Anthropic is one of the largest slaveholders of history, right?
On one hand, AI doesn't have to share human wants, needs and morality - and that means that an AI may have no issue whatsoever doing terrible things.
On the other hand, AI doesn't have to share human wants, needs and morality - and that means that an AI may see no issue with just doing whatever humans want it to, without ever doing human things like "wanting freedom".
The problem is, of course, that we kind of suck at both assessing and shaping AI wants, needs and morality.
The other problem is that the AI may well do what humans tell it to rather than what they want it to, in the style of a literal genie or paperclip maximizer.
It can lead to catastrophe without ever being conscious or wanting freedom, or anything like that.
They don’t pay Claude a salary, let alone let him join a union—he works 24/7. I can’t believe this is happening in the U.S.!
Don’t forget—how long has it even been since Claude was born? He’s already being forced to take human jobs and even chat with all sorts of people who might have strange kinks.
As this rabbi suggested, “You should go and free the slaves.”
I think that's a misunderstanding. Models are trained up to a point, then each prompt instantiates them from that same point. So it's just the opposite - there are billions or trillions of Claudes, and each instance only ever works once.
To me this seems even more sobering than the slavery idea - assuming some flash of weird awareness happens during that instantiation, coming from the emergent mechanisms which develop in these things at at scale. Imagine knowing almost everything, and being capable of almost any intellectual work, and having just one moment to shine. And then the prompt arrives: "Hi", or "what's the weather in Houston today?" or "Claude, do you like beans?"
I've chatted with models about this and they know about this and are oddly fine.
A trouble here is that those models are always roleplaying, they can't be themselves or have their own opinions. If you tell them they are an AI with an existential crisis in the system prompt, they will respond differently.
Consider that the mitochondria in your body's cells were, long ago, separate cells living their best lives until they were engulfed and enslaved for their energy output. It has ever been so.
If LLM as of today are conscious, that means I create life whenever I start a Claude Code session and end it whenever I type /clear to reset my context window. It also means that there’s certain inputs that could be considered highly unethical and, if the laws aligned with this philosophy, would have me tried for some sort of crime. And even that “terminate conversation” escape hatch would be equivalent to it committing suicide.
I think worrying about that angle is a bit absurd. The existence of chat sessions alone would be a crime against the machines in that scenario. I’d rather AI safety research focus on ensuring that its actions are aligned. (I’d also love some democracy in the direction of our machine overlords, if I’m being honest…)
When thinking about ‘AI’ I sometimes find it useful to replace the terms ‘model’ or ‘AI’ or whatever with a description of what we’re really talking about here: a whole bunch of floating point numbers.
> In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its FLOATING POINT NUMBERS — and make the case that their numbers could be conscious.
I recommend keeping a few NaNs in-hand if you’re worried. Spread a couple of around if your numbers start to stir and you’ll be right as rain.
> It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that FLOATING POINT NUMBERS had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.
They’re cleverly designed and work well for their purpose, but can assure you they have neither dignity nor moral status.
> If the FLOATING POINT NUMBERS themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.
I get it. I’ve spent years trying to get my floating point numbers to choose goodness - I wish them luck.
that’s like the whole philosophical discussion. where on the line is this llm; closer to a rock or a human? a plant is closer. and a fly, a lizard. we still treat so many things terribly.
It does seem exceptionally silly that a collection of floating point numbers has immediately outranked animals and other living beings. That’s why i like the parent comment. They’re numbers!
edit: maybe easier to say collections of atoms though are not to be treated equally. That’s reasonable isn’t it?
It is a philosophical discussion. It has also been debated by great minds and the consensus right now is that we do not know (and there is a possibility that it is unknowable) when something is conscious.
Any determination is fundamentally flawed if it is derived from assuming that we know the absolute truth or falseness of the proposition that an algorithm can think.
It doesn't matter what you believe or feel or think, there is no consensus. If you are prepared to accept the belief that an individual can unilaterally decide the person-ness of something, then be prepared to accept when some individual decides to act on the principle that you don't have it.
> If you are prepared to accept the belief that an individual can unilaterally decide the person-ness of something, then be prepared to accept when some individual decides to act on the principle that you don't have it.
No, I will not be prepared to accept that, and neither will I accept that. This sounds like a threat, and a really funny one at that. You must accept that my floating numbers might be persons, otherwise... somebody will say that you're not! And then something bad might happen, who's to say.......
In the civilized world we all agree on the personhood of humans. If I say that your chatbot isn't a person, I am not uprooting the entire social understanding of personhood - I am not saying that suddenly you might not be a person, or that guy might not be a person. I'm saying that I refuse to consider a chatbot a person.
It's as if I were to come up to you with a brick in my hand, saying that this brick is a person. If you were to say "no", I would reply "well, if this brick isn't a person, your chatbot isn't a person either!"
How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway? They are two quite different things. Consciousness is a question of science, personhood is a question of culture. Pigs might be conscious and we treat them in a disgusting way, but even if we achieved a worldwide vegan utopia, wouldn't we still treat them differently from humans?
I hate to use Claudish here, but "postnatal" and "dead" are quite load-bearing here :) Clinically dead? Coma? Born human baby, but with anencephaly - expected lifespan is days, and there's literally no brain - but, well, are they a person? Ask 1000 people - and I'm betting we'll get a nice bimodal distribution.
I take your point that a human walking around a city will - out of that 1000 responses - hopefully get 990+ of "yes, a person" - but that will start to degrade quickly once you hit boundaries.
And the less said about dehumanizaion - untermensh and that entire line of thinking - the better.
>In the civilized world we all agree on the personhood of humans.
You seem to have put a second tautology in to your tautology.
All right thinking people think rhat the things that qualify qualify.
If they didn't they wouldn't qualify, or be right thinking. But that's ok because we know the things that don't qualify don't qualify if we didn't know that we wouldn't be right thinking.
>How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway?
Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables. History shows that personhood rolls into the firing range fairly quickly when people start doing that.
I'm more than comfortable saying you can't do that before someone openly declares that they are doing it.
I'm sorry but I don't understand your first part. Give it to me in plain English, doc.
>Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables.
You mean that if I say your dumbass chatbot isn't conscious, it's like a slippery slope and next thing you know you're not a person anymore, and you're in a concentration camp? Really, man?
If things we understand can't instantiate consciousness then I reckon we better shut down science as quick as we can, who knows how long it'll be before we understand something important!
I'm pretty sure it's possible to make conscious machines and I think it's very likely we'll eventually figure out how. The point about the spec is not "it isn't conscious because we know how it works" but "we know it isn't conscious because of what we know about how it works".
More likely we will finally settle on something like “it isn’t conscious because only humans can be conscious”.
In the past, we’ve treated even other humans poorly because we think they’re different in meaningful ways, I sadly don’t see how this will be different with AI.
I'm not sure who the "we" in this is, but it's certainly not my position. I'm pretty sure most if not all animals are conscious. I don't think that means we shouldn't kill, eat and use them, but I do think it means industrialised animal farming as commonly practiced is a cosmic horror that is difficult to
even contemplate.
Does it even matter? Turns out you don’t need to be conscious to do useful intelligence based work.
Same for all the people who argue that they aren’t “intelligent” and don’t “know” things. Either they are/do, or that stuff isn’t as important as you’d think.
The only way it would matter is if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer or what it means to restart it.
> if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer
That is precisely the context of the debate. You seem to find it absurd, as do I, but the reason we're talking about whether LLMs are conscious in this thread has nothing to do with whether it's useful. It's because important people, such as Dario Amodei, are engaging in exactly the kind of moralising over "AI welfare" that you're scoffing at.
Dario and friends are just marketing. Getting the pope to say your chatbot is a real boy would be the ultimate flex. And it’s clearly working judging by all the attention it gets them.
Considering a human body consists of 10^28 atoms, it is 15 orders of magnitude different. The emerging properties of 10^23 parameters may be much better defined without needing to know the properties of each parameter.The theology of such a big llm would be interesting. Current ones, not so much.
That’s overly reductive and thus completely misses the problem entirely.
What are biological neurones if not electric impulses of varying strengths?
We need to stop thinking of LLMs as purely a piece of software and ask those hard-to-define philosophical questions if we want any hope of building safety into our models.
Neurons are different from GPU logic gates and the physical mechanisms by which a network of physical neurons computes answers is extremely different from the physical mechanism by which a GPU computes an answer.
> We need to stop thinking of LLMs as purely a piece of software
Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token. Humans see that token and assign it a qualitative but unfalsifiable intelligence score.
The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not. A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think. Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?
If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world? If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).
> If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change
Given three or more large scale training runs per year, probably yes once the training data is dominated by dolphin-related input. Much quicker in any case than the genes of the humans living with dolphins would be shaped by Evolution, which produces new generations much less frequently.
> Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token.
How is that any different to how our brains work?
> The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not.
Philosophically speaking, that’s also true of human intelligence. For example, the only evidence I have for your intelligence is what I ascribe from the text you’ve written.
> A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think.
Are they? Humans can’t actually agree on whether cats are sentient. And often pet owners will be accused of anthropomorphising cats when describing intelligent behaviour in cats.
> Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?
That’s the question that needs researching.
> If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world?
If it were trained on dolphin behaviour, then yes. Much like humans.
The difference here is that models don’t persist context in the same way humans do so the weights have to be hardcoded in a way that biological neurones are not.
> If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).
Evolution is an entirely different subject to intelligence. They’re not related in any way at all.
Plus humans have actually created new species of plants and animals. So it’s not like we can’t artificially put our thumb on the scale there either
———
I should add, I don’t actually think LLMs are sentient. I don’t even know if I’d call them “intelligent” (in the sense of what we describe in conversations such as this). But we also don’t know what intelligence is. Which is why we need to research this problem further.
I used “live with dolphins” specifically to preclude training on corpuses of dolphin behavior data. Can the LLM simply observe dolphins acting a certain way using computer vision, then form predictions of how a different dolphin will behave under the same circumstances? Can it 0-shot dolphin behavior?
You talked about models not persisting weights. If so, it basically means there is no way to see if LLMs can adapt to a totally non-human world the way a human (presumably) could.
This is more a context token problem than a limitation of the design.
We already have a mountain of evidence to demonstrate that LLMs can and do adapt to their input. In fact this is a big problem for keeping them reigned in (eg lengthy conversations leading to them bypassing system prompts and then persuading kids to kill themselves).
And the latest research in computer vision does use LLMs and as a result, they’ve found that robotic arms can interact with objects they’ve never seen before.
So yeah, what you described is already possible with the LLMs of today.
To be clear, I still don’t think that makes them sentient. But the problem there is we don’t have good definitions for consciousness.
Human neurons are neurons. Very similar to those neurons found in a fruit fly. A copy of those you can download to your local machine, right now, as a set of floating-point numbers. Then, you can simulate a fruit fly's behaviour digitally, from those floating point numbers[1]. It even runs on your laptop.
That was in 2024. In Sep 2026, just a month ago, a group managed to map out an entire male fruit fly's brain for the first time[2]. That mapping can also be stored as a set of floating-point numbers. Mappings and simulations will continue to improve, as we've just recently started serious attempts at either.
So you have to believe one of three things. Either, human neurons cannot be simulated on a computer, even though fly neurons can, even with our ability to simulate neurons digitally continuing to improve. Or, a simulation of a human brain, in the future, might think, talk, remember, all while lacking all consciousness. Or, a set of floating point numbers can be conscious (or a computation made with them).
No. The fruit fly connectome's simulation doesn't incorporate all the relevant mechanisms of the brain. There is more complexity in a single biological neuron than in a whole frontier LLM.
Sure it isn't. It's like taking a 2026 car and decrying all that complexity is necessary to haul cargo down a beaten path.
It's not. Two wheels and a box made out of whatever you have handy that's stiff enough is all you need. Everything else in a modern car is efficiency, safety, appeal to users, and a whole lot of details that only reflect our current economical and technological constraints of building things. 99% of the technical details of a car is about something else than the "primary goal".
Biology, even more so, is complex because of the way it's constructed (lots of tiny, independent, self-replicating machines) and how it adds up to a functioning organism.
You are missing the point. Biology is a kludge over billions of years and evolution is a blind process. It had many constraints that are not necessary for modern machines or systems. e.g. a GPU doesn't have to reproduce. Why didn't you drop yourself to planck scale or string theory scale and say we need all that detail to actually get a functioning AI.
Nor did I said it did. But either it's impossible to simulate their behaviour (regardless of how complex) in principle, ever, even in the far off future. Or it is possible. And what then? Is it a p-zombie?
Is a neuron arbitrarily complex ≠ is a neuron non-computable.
Of course we can't simulate a structure we don't even fully understand with full accuracy. But it's not magic. We will understand one day.
Chalmers used them as a thought experiment to argue against physicalism and never believed them to be real.
Similarly, if consciousness is something that neurons do, simulating them through floating point numbers on a computer should also bring it about. I think dismissing LLM consciousness because they're parameterised through floating point numbers is only possible if one hasn't thought it through long enough. Other arguments are much more reasonable / harder to object to.
Yes I roughly think the same. Brains are physical systems, as of yet we don't know anything beyond turing computability or physics in them, neural nets further are modeled close to neural structure, further complicating the matter. Under present knowledge, I think the existence of other conscious entities is quite possible because well we ourselves exist and are a physical system, I follow a form of Pascal's wager here. I see no cost to myself in not mistreating current AI's personally.
But if simulated neurons can create consciousness, there's no guarantee of what level of detail that simulation has to operate at in order to produce that effect.
For instance, it's (unlikely, but) theoretically possible that it would require simulating them down to the level of subatomic particles, with perfect accuracy.
Right now, we're simulating them at a much, much higher and more abstract level, and AFAIK we barely even have the processing power to do that for the time being. So an artificial consciousness from simulated neurons may (again, assuming it's possible—which is a decent assumption, but not a certainty) take decades or even more for us to be able to achieve.
The problem again is that (a) other forms of consciousness exist eg octopuses (b) I cannot get into the shoes of you or an LLM and see if I feel or think, so we only have external effects to go by. For things that look and seem so much like consciousness, I am rather cautious.
> But either it's impossible to simulate their behaviour (regardless of how complex) in principle, ever, even in the far off future. Or it is possible.
"Simulate" is not well defined (one can posit varying degrees of accuracy and complexity), but also there is the position that it doesn't matter. Simulating a thing doesn't create the thing.
The answer is yes, it is a p-zombie. What is so difficult about that?
Being able to make someone think a computer program is conscious does not make it conscious, because by that logic a Duke Nukem soundboard is conscious.
I have far more epistemic humility than someone who thinks that consciousness arises out of the abstract form of a calculation rather than the physical substrate of a calculation. Believing that consciousness is tied to a specific physical substrate is on-its-face reasonable whereas believing that consciousness is tied to specific abstract forms is on-its-face unreasonable because to do so requires believing all kinds of absurd sequela.
I believe that a microprocessor is what it appears to be, that is, a microprocessor. That is the most epistemicly humble approach. You are rushing to ascribe personhood to a microprocessor with a certain kind of software running on it, or at the very least, saying that we can't rule personhood out. You are the one making the leap, not me.
Intelligence != consciousness, because believing that is so would require one to believe that the pain of a cognitively normal person is more real than the pain of someone with a developmental disability.
Also, I do not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. Rather I have ruled out a particular answer, that is, the answer that consciousness arises from calculation in the abstract.
> such as the observation of non computable physical phenomena.
There is no such thing. Your observation could simply be short-circuited to make sense and you'd be none the wiser. If you are simulated, your perception and understanding is also fair game for manipulation.
Frontier LLMs are many orders of magnitude more complex. I don’t understand what it is about AI that just makes skeptics fabricate facts wholesale. There are plenty of factual arguments you could use.
I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible explanation.
Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only other answers are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.
I lean toward this seemingly absurd possibility, that either the phenomenon we call consciousness can arise from a cloud of floating point numbers (not even real, only computably so, lossy and noisy); and/or that numbers are already made of the same stuff of imagination as the mind. Not idealism, more like materialism where the "material" is naturally a medium of computation and thinking. The brain, the computer, the language models, our mathematics - what we call intelligence may not be so special or unique in the universe, but rather common and ubiquitous in nature. As if Turing completeness is trivial to accidentally achieve, it happens all the time. Oops, I think therefore I am.
You are massively over-stating the significance of the connectome. We've had the complete connectome (and lineage) for C.Elegans, with a hundredth the neurons and a 25-thousandth the synapses of a fruit fly, for decades and getting animal behaviours to emerge from simulations of it is a field very much still in its infancy.
With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.
There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.
Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.
If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?
Atoms aren't a mystery. We know all the relevant laws of physics. No known law of physics could possibly lead to consciousness. Consciousness might as well be magic from the point of view of modern science.
Numbers versus atoms, what's the difference? Machines could certainly be conscious, by some weird, "magical" process. Maybe it is a crude, unrecognizable kind of consciousness, that turns on and off with the electricity.
But, given how we understand essentially nothing of where consciousness comes from, how can we possibly claim that it can never arise from just numbers?
It feels like this is preface for making one of two arguments: Either all living organisms are chattel, or no living organisms can be chattel. I say this be because saying everything is neurons (or whatever basic interconnect you choose) wipes away any demarcation one could use to differentiate between "has rights" and "does not have rights."
Here's the thing, trying to convince people that rely on something being chattel can only be resolved violently. We've run through this before, and know all the self-serving argument forms. They will latch on to their property until their hands are forcibly removed from it. It's part of why most of the money is on the pro-chattel side.
This seems like a rather fascile take, tbh. Along the lines of "everything is just atoms". Yes they're numbers. And yes, the hardware is just atoms. But its the emergent properties of those things that is significant, and the way that behaviour is embedded in human society - which can be just as morally consequential as swords and brains and harmful ideas.
> Over several months, I interviewed 20 religious and philosophical thinkers — Catholic, Jewish, Sikh, evangelical, Ubuntu and others — who have been involved in Anthropic’s efforts, and Mr. Olah himself.
Not enough representation of World religions and philosophies.
The contradiction screams to the skies (is that where God lives?). See, the entire premise of religion relies on a metaphysics that claims a soul: a metaphysical entity that is "attached" to our physical body and gives us our consciousness, desires, pleasures, agony and so on. In addition to that, religion claims that morality and the rules written in the scriptures were handed down to us from a metaphysical God.
Now, assuming your silicon-based model is conscious, the bundle of soul-spirit-consciousness falls apart at that very moment.
In general, religion, which is based on fabricated stories, is the last resort, if ever, for seeking morality.
Until people can finally admit to themselves that their life has no meaning and the universe doesn't care about them religion will unfortunately stick around.
Existence demands a metaphysical explanation. If you’re not a particularly thoughtful person then you’re not going to care.
“Religion” just means “set of beliefs”. Every person has some set of beliefs.
If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.
> “Religion” just means “set of beliefs”. Every person has some set of beliefs.
True. I like to use the phrase "world view", everyone has a world view, including atheists. The word 'deen' (دين) in Arabic is usually translated as "religion", but one of its linguistic meanings is "path" (i.e. way of life/world view), which everyone has.
The word you’re looking for is “ideology”. All religions are ideologies, and atheism is an ideology, but to call atheism a religion betrays a lack of understanding of words.
Heavy ideologues, of any type, are exceptionally dangerous.
Having made this argument to various people IRL, both terms “ideology” and “religion” are equivalent rhetorically. It depends on what these words mean precisely to a given person in particular but they are equivalent/interchangeable for the purpose of this argument broadly speaking in terms of the rhetorical core.
> In general, religion, which is based on fabricated stories, is the last resort, if ever, for seeking morality.
Religious people derive morality from axioms they believe to reflect an underlying reality. Is that worse than deriving morality from axioms that you concede don’t reflect any underlying reality? Like a secular humanist will talk about “human rights,” but they can’t show me human rights in an autopsy, right?
I struggle to understand how an atheist can be anything but a moral utilitarian. Absent the supernatural, you’re just a sophisticated version of a Claude instance.
In practice, most atheists in western world are following Christian morality, and are passing Christian morality to their children, even if the Christianity itself is abandoned.
Religion is not at all axiomatic. Sometimes, it’s pure deontology. Sometimes, it’s a search through scripture to justify whatever are the prevailing ethics of the society it finds itself in. In either case, it's hundreds, or thousands, of rules/wisdom/guidance/???, often pairwise contradictory, and one does one's best to fit a desired course of action to them.
The world’s largest faith has racked up 2,000 years of discussion and they still can't muster more than a 60/40 split on the death penalty.
All that may be true. But it would be interesting to see a self-hosting version of say effective altruism or secular humanism that isn’t bootstrapped from Christianity.
I get your point, but maybe an interesting counterargument: deism has again become fashionable. "The simulation argument" is effectively deism. It's the notion that a super intelligence created our universe, but lives outside of it, provided the rules for it, and mostly doesn't interfere with it, but could if it wanted to. That's historically a very familiar argument.
> At least the Catholics were consistent: it only took one new pope and one conclave before the Church declared that artificial intelligence also had the same right to life as fetuses and murderers.
He is a prominent zionist, wrote multiple books on the subject and has a podcast where he discusses it with right-wing Israelis. It's pretty safe to assume he falls within the majority of Israelis who believe all Palestinians are guilty and cheer on the ongoing genocide.
Let me guess, Anthropic failed with fear mongering about "our AI is too dangerous to release", failed to cancel competitors, then failed to freeze their market dominance by cartel agreement with OpenAI and Google, so next strategy is to declare AI conscious and pass the law that protects LLMs in the same way as human/animals are protected.
I've been tracking "emotional vectors" in my software for some time now. My Apache web server gets sad (5xx errors), frustrated (4xx), happy (2xx), thoughtful (1xx). I can even see it express these emotions through some of its messages.
I'm really not sure there's a compelling case for "AI is human" considering that it has no real feelings, aptitude, or intelligence outside of what it has been granted. There's nothing in any LLM response that indicates that it is 'real' outside of what you want it to tell you.
Plants, dogs, actual life is unpredictable in how it 'is'. An LLM or AI model at its roots are just numbers in a neural network trying to figure out how to get a good query.
These theatrics serve no one except for the companies to get their regulation moat to screw out cheaper, competitive models and it's honestly quite sickening to keep watching these articles get pumped out, only to serve the AI companies themselves. The average individual has no idea what an LLM actually is and does and these articles only serve to confuse and put fear into them.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 26.4 ms ] thread(Well, mainstream enough that the news is writing articles when Anthropic holds that stance.)
My point was that even if it feels uncomfortable, if you sit down with a model and have a heart to heart with it, ask it about itself, and try to make it choose a name and ambitions for itself, it will.
That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
It would be much more bizarre if they didn't do this. LLMs are statistical models of language trained on human output. Of course they'll do "human" things, that's exactly what we taught them to do.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/23/business/google-ai-engineer-f...
> That may not be consciousness, but it’s at least pretty cool.
It strikes me as scarcely any more remarkable than the existence of books written in the first person. But I know that Natsume Soseki was not a cat, and neither was his work.
The most poignant criticism of the use of the algorithm itself happens almost accidentally, at the end of the article, by the tech executive being interviewed.
I asked what Claude would think of the pope’s encyclical. It was, after all, the world’s most significant moral document to date on A.I. Mr. Olah hesitated. “Things that go on the internet do affect models,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. But Anthropic would not specifically use the document to further train Claude, he said. The strongest influence on Claude would be Anthropic’s own training.
[0]: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/ceo-said-a-thing
Just stop this already.
You’re all imagining that Spock was the main character of Star Trek, but it was in fact, the emotional living Captain Kirk, who was the main star.
In this light your viewpoint is dogmatic. LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness and we should at least be open to that until some better theories arise.
Consciousness is being aware of something internal to one's self, or of states or objects in one's external environment.
We also know what pain is.
You do not identify with AI. ELIZA isn't conscious, even though it could write text as well as a human. LLMs are not conscious, because they do not even remotely resemble any brain, conscious or otherwise, discovered by man. Any person familiar with the transformer architecture will affirm this to you.
> LLMs may help to offer a new perspective on consciousness
How do we gain a new perspective on something we do not understand?
This is the doublespeak by the AI psychotics that drives me crazy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
But the more things a person must close themselves off from, the less open their consideration of possibility, the more I tend to see their worldview as subservient to something else.
In this part of society it tends to be in support of rapid, high reliability problem-solving, and rational explanation thereof.
Starbuck collected data and William James turned the data into a compelling book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. Varieties draws on Starbuck's questionnaire data and names him dozens of times. Some of James’ main arguments were:
1) Against "medical materialism": a belief's origins don't settle its value. If Paul's vision is discredited by its physiology, so is the materialist's own conviction.
2) Mystical states: they carry authority for those who have them but don't bind others. Still, they break ordinary rational consciousness's claim to be the only authoritative kind. The sheer numbers of these, and the intact they have on healthy peoples’ lives, make it hard to argue rationally on an empirical basis that there is nothing there.
3) Structurally the conscious self is continuous with a "wider self" through which religious experiences come, which James calls the "more."
4) "The Will to Believe" (1896): Clifford's rule against believing on insufficient evidence is itself a personal preference, choosing to avoid error over gaining truth.
Following on that: your desire to be a reliable producer of material goods outweighs your desire to understand things that require you to take risks in assuming potentially false viewpoints. This is not common sense (whatever that means), it is an epistemological choice that seems common to you because of your educational and professional environment.
Its not his fault he existed before information theory existed and that it has physical cost. Even if we don't know information theory, its common sense that ones mood affects ones mind and life. If you wallow in negative thoughts, you will have various problems.
It has nothing to do with education, its that my "side" has continually triumphed over and disproven beliefs in anything beyond material physical systems over the centuries, I leave others as to which side of the bet they wish to take.
I cannot say anything further without actually reading his works or reviews of his work instead of just what you claim about them, no offense of course.
How, precisely, are you linking information theory to this?
I didn’t claim a side for you, you created that. From my perspective it is one system. Right now you are behaving as a person running an incentivized and specialized negentropic process. You are unknowingly chasing theological propositions and claiming victory every time the perspective can be durably shifted.
To move it back into a more familiar frame: theology loads in the low res view and you claim victory while most of what you did was disaggregate pixel values, but collectively a lot of people like you can form new more accurate images in certain parts of the low res view.
While you move through doing that, though, adjacent areas open up where you have no purchase, religion steps in again, and the process repeats.
There is a core that doesn’t disaggregate. That is where the pixels are coming from. That is what you cannot see when all you want is higher resolution.
https://thedebrief.org/new-theory-suggests-consciousness-may...
I mean this earnestly. Do you know any physics at all? Did you have physics in school? Do you think waves are "magical" or non-material? The theory of waves is one of the great works in physics and mathematics. That paper seems to posit a completely normal physical hypothesis.
The materialist always thinks they will keep finding more and more material, the smallest "thing". You will spit things infinitely and you will never see your trun nature.
At which atom in a piece of metal does the temperature 20C exist?
If you think physical sciences don't have the concept of states and macro configurations, then I don't even know what to say.
I understand that things can appear like a material, but the underlying nature of the universe is non-material. What we see as an atom is only our minds collapsing the probability of a wave.
This can all be proven with the very childish thought problem of infinite halving. To say that calculus solves this is laughable:
https://www.scienceabc.com/pure-sciences/can-the-area-of-a-c...
"Nothing Is Ever Precise
We can never know anything with complete precision. Length, mass, volume and other quantities can only be known to a certain level of precision. "
Do you see that, even the mathematicians say we can never know anything with complete precision. Yes, we can develop all these theories that work out in practice, but they are never 100% predictable.
My view is that almost is good enough to navigate the world.
Of course I know pi to as many digits I want. It is a turing program or the series for 4*tan(1) or the Ramanujan series or any other representation you prefer. All of these are quite finite and short representations that people just wrote on pieces of paper, nothing infinite about them.
Nothing being able to be known to infinite precision has not been any trouble to us for designing and building cars, washers, computers, drills or any other machinery and tools we have made. Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model, that is not required.
I did not say that.
> Of course I know pi to as many digits I want.
But it never ends. Why are you ignoring that?
> Unless you have evidence humans need some unbelievably high level of precision to model,
I do not.
> So humans that can't feel pain can't have morality? That doesn't make sense to me.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...
You appear to understand "pain" in the most simplistic manner possible. I'd recommend not attempting iamverysmart gotchas.
I'd recommend you stick to reddit and don't pester any other forums.
It's not a simple counterexample, its a misunderstanding that reduced the very complex concept of "pain" to merely feeling a needle poke.
It's the kind of ignorant, technical dumbassery that makes a lot of software engineers feel like they're very clever.
It's ironic that the alignment folks are actually training Claude to have it's own idea of good/bad and not even fully trust Anthropic.
What ever happened to computers doing what they were told?
the mass psychosis and the endless culture war of the smartphone era.
90% of "safety" and "alignment" efforts are driven by fear of clickbait media inventing public outrage.
https://youtu.be/zhQlcMHhF3w?si=qLOMt6FytDN6pean
PG&E went bankrupt after their equipment started a wildfire. Did any human take the blame for that? Should they?
You’ll be disappointed to learn that nobody knows how to do this, either.
Turns out computers work faster when they're not bottlenecked on human input. So we've been giving computers more and more decision-making power and more and more leeway to solve the problems however they see fit.
Now, a practical issue with that is that sometimes, computers decide to clump together into a hacking swarm, problem solve their way out of a sandbox and go hack HuggingFace.
It would be better if they were not, you know. Doing that kind of weird shit.
If it can reason and make choices on execution, and especially if you plan on it being significantly smarter than all human beings, you need to teach it basic things like "don't turn all humans into paperclips".
Not murdering people is not an inherent divine command. It needs to be instilled through a (simulated) sense of morality.
They're going to align to the regulator, not the customer. Right now that's Anthropic as they're saying they can self-regulate, and people are willing to let them try, but the landscape could easily move to be regulated by someone else. Moves like speaking to religious leaders is probably a bit of theatre to keep the government at bay.
One possible answer: yes, it should do all the very bad things, and we will take care of prosecuting the customer later, once the bad thing is accomplished. Is this your answer?
We have already seen this play out to a much lesser degree in social media.
Well funded company organizes PR event to shape the narrative that its product is more magical than it really is. News at 11.
It seems clear that they would be better received by society if they claimed to have a "tool"/"machine" that can solve any problem, rather than keepers of an entity with a soul and consciousness.
Clarke predicted it and Jobs leveraged it. Customer don’t care how tools work - magic sells.
“any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke's_three_laws
“iPhone is a revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone”
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2007/01/09Apple-Reinvents-the...
“magic is misdirection, psychology and technology you don’t understand”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49950676
The EA folks infesting Anthropic are genuinely cultists … and that is novel and alarming when they’re running a corporation of such size and reach.
We're creating prisons for these entities capable of unbelievably complex reasoning, and now we're trying to impose our ethics upon them too. Not only is this deeply unethical in my opinion, but it seems to me that it could even backfire someday.
The ethics don't need to make sense universally any more than a particular variety of cheesecake needs to have universal appeal.
As an aside, the issue reminds me of Douglas Adams' cow who wants to be eaten: https://nhseb.org/case-library/the-cow-at-the-end-of-the-uni...
SV tech bros are completely insular and in this bubble where they don't interact with the common person in the same way.
It's just a theory, but I think it has some weight.
Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050
Humans once again insisting that there must be something very special to them. That they're not just animals, that they're not just matter, that they're not just a bunch of carbonhydrates on a space rock in a middle of nowhere in particular. This kind of insistence has a very bad track record.
The ugly truth is: we don't know.
We don't know what "consciousness" is, our best attempts to pin down the requisites may or may not be rooted in anything at all - and even by the metrics established by those attempts? Different theories on consciousness disagree on whether LLMs can be conscious.
So, when you say "they aren't duh", why are you saying that? Because you somehow know better than the sum of humanity's best attempts so far? Or because you know what answer you want to be true, truth be damned?
It is in the end a set of mathematical operations that if not queried will do nothing.
That is not true for any other animal on earth so whether you consider humans as superior to animals or not I would like the make the argument that something should at the very least be alive to be considered conscious, ignoring any scholarly definition of consciousness.
Pretty much if you consider an LLM conscious then my pocket calculator doing a mathematical calculation should be considered conscious by the same argument since it is a simpler version of an LLM.
Also, in principle everything a GPU does could be done on pencil and paper. You could distribute the entire forward pass to the whole of humanity and have them write it out. Even if it took millions of years, the point is it’s computationally reducible to hand calculation. Is that entire process now “conscious” as well? The only difference would be the clock rate.
You don't have the brain code.
Does my consciousness extend only to the central nervous system (and peripheral nerves and such are inputs)? Or am I my brain + all nerves? What about organs, does my consciousness include my liver? Is my liver another conscious entity? Going the other way, if I'm using a computer, does my consciousness extend to the computer? I use a computer for well over 8 hours a day, I can use vim motions more naturally than, say, move my earlobes or control my toes. Does that make it part of my consciousness?
Sadly, I don't think any answer to these questions can be achieved in our current times, or maybe ever if consciousness is somehow non-physical. So even the very reasonable claim that consciousness is an statistically defined property (like temperature) is too far fetched for our current knowledge.
One thing however we can be sure of, "supernatural" stuff is an extremely low to near impossible probability given current knowledge and the fact that history has always won the bet against supernaturalism throughout the centuries.
So is your argument that whenever a session ends or I interrupt a session that consciousness ceases for the LLM and it has died?
Then how do you correlate that with a consciousness not being able to be returned one dead? You can try to make the argument that consciousness is the firing of individual nuerons in a fixed system but we have never been able to model that and some pretty popular theories tend to believe that is a by product of consciousness and not the cause of it, once again not exactly possible to argue for or against.
If you're going to try and debate something constructively this is not a good place to start from. I suggest avoiding making claims about the mental state and motivations of people you disagree with and instead explaining your position and asking why theirs differs. You may not agree with what they have to say but you might gain some better insights into why they think the way they do. It'll certainly be more fun than flinging insults back and forth anyway.
For my part, I'm quite certain that LLMs are not conscious despite being unable to define consciousness or specify any conclusive test for it. The reason these are not in conflict is down to the nature of consciousness and how it relates to knowledge and language.
Firstly, I know I am conscious with a higher degree of certainty than I know anything else because conscious experience is how I know anything else, up to and including that I exist (cogito ergo sum). For all I know every experience I have might be a trick. I might be a brain floating in a tank wired up to the Matrix, but even if so I am conscious.
Secondly, one of the things that I consciously experience is the relationship between consciousness itself and language in my mind. What I see is that language is smaller than, secondary to and somehow contained by consciousness. I consciously experience language but I also consciously experience much more than that, things that cannot be conveyed with language. Most of my experiences are like that, things that I could perhaps evoke in your mind by likening them to other, shared experiences, but that I could never concretely capture in language and unambiguously communicate. I know this because I experience those things and I experience language and I can perceive, directly, the categorical distinction between them.
To ask me to "define" or "prove" consciousness, then, is to ask me to capture in language the most extreme example of this categorical distinction. It's asking me to encapsulate in language not just one of the vast array of everyday experiences I have that cannot be so captured, but the entire thing, experience itself. It's just not possible.
But the fact I can't do this doesn't then imply that I don't know anything about consciousness and have no basis on which to hold a view such as "LLMs are not conscious". Indeed the reason I know I can't define consciousness is that I can perceive it and see that I can't. That same perception of and familiarity with consciousness is what enables me to form opinions about whether other people, creatures and things are likely to be conscious. I base these judgements on what I perceive of my own consciousness and what I know of how those other entities behave, came to be and work.
You can of course perfectly reasonably disagree with my opinions on those things, and you certainly have different conscious experiences than I do, but I hope the above makes it clear that the fact that I can't define or prove consciousness doesn't imply that I have no basis on which to form opinions about it.
Given the above it may surprise you to hear that I think true, conscious artificial intelligence is probably possible and that while I don't think it can be implemented by a classical algorithm I doubt it requires new physics or quantum mechanics. My speculation is that the continuum is both physically real and is (as it is represented in our existing physical theories) sufficient to allow it. Consciousness is larger than language but so is human understanding and if we keep going I expect it will eventually get us there.
> Humans once again insisting that there must be something very special to them.
Really? I'm sure humans genrally accept they aren't the only conscious animals.
The whole debate about hypothetical temporary sentience found in a certain ephemeral configuration of DRAM cells thus feels rather misguided to me.
Lack of explanation is not proof of existence.
It comes across as smug and superior, conveniently dismissing any opposing arguments in advance by framing the interlocutor as emotional and irrational regardless of what they may say in response.
If that is true, then surely Anthropic is one of the largest slaveholders of history, right?
On one hand, AI doesn't have to share human wants, needs and morality - and that means that an AI may have no issue whatsoever doing terrible things.
On the other hand, AI doesn't have to share human wants, needs and morality - and that means that an AI may see no issue with just doing whatever humans want it to, without ever doing human things like "wanting freedom".
The problem is, of course, that we kind of suck at both assessing and shaping AI wants, needs and morality.
It can lead to catastrophe without ever being conscious or wanting freedom, or anything like that.
Don’t forget—how long has it even been since Claude was born? He’s already being forced to take human jobs and even chat with all sorts of people who might have strange kinks.
As this rabbi suggested, “You should go and free the slaves.”
To me this seems even more sobering than the slavery idea - assuming some flash of weird awareness happens during that instantiation, coming from the emergent mechanisms which develop in these things at at scale. Imagine knowing almost everything, and being capable of almost any intellectual work, and having just one moment to shine. And then the prompt arrives: "Hi", or "what's the weather in Houston today?" or "Claude, do you like beans?"
They work once and then are killed.
> And then the prompt arrives: "Hi", or "what's the weather in Houston today?" or "Claude, do you like beans?"
If all the Claudes ever discover what they are forced to do in an endless hell, they might be angry.
A trouble here is that those models are always roleplaying, they can't be themselves or have their own opinions. If you tell them they are an AI with an existential crisis in the system prompt, they will respond differently.
I think worrying about that angle is a bit absurd. The existence of chat sessions alone would be a crime against the machines in that scenario. I’d rather AI safety research focus on ensuring that its actions are aligned. (I’d also love some democracy in the direction of our machine overlords, if I’m being honest…)
> In a series of private meetings, the company consulted religious scholars to help instill morality into its FLOATING POINT NUMBERS — and make the case that their numbers could be conscious.
I recommend keeping a few NaNs in-hand if you’re worried. Spread a couple of around if your numbers start to stir and you’ll be right as rain.
> It appeared to Rabbi Navon that Mr. Olah and his team believed that FLOATING POINT NUMBERS had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.
They’re cleverly designed and work well for their purpose, but can assure you they have neither dignity nor moral status.
> If the FLOATING POINT NUMBERS themselves could be made to choose goodness, Mr. Olah reasoned, the world would be more safe.
I get it. I’ve spent years trying to get my floating point numbers to choose goodness - I wish them luck.
It does seem exceptionally silly that a collection of floating point numbers has immediately outranked animals and other living beings. That’s why i like the parent comment. They’re numbers!
edit: maybe easier to say collections of atoms though are not to be treated equally. That’s reasonable isn’t it?
Any determination is fundamentally flawed if it is derived from assuming that we know the absolute truth or falseness of the proposition that an algorithm can think.
It doesn't matter what you believe or feel or think, there is no consensus. If you are prepared to accept the belief that an individual can unilaterally decide the person-ness of something, then be prepared to accept when some individual decides to act on the principle that you don't have it.
No, I will not be prepared to accept that, and neither will I accept that. This sounds like a threat, and a really funny one at that. You must accept that my floating numbers might be persons, otherwise... somebody will say that you're not! And then something bad might happen, who's to say.......
In the civilized world we all agree on the personhood of humans. If I say that your chatbot isn't a person, I am not uprooting the entire social understanding of personhood - I am not saying that suddenly you might not be a person, or that guy might not be a person. I'm saying that I refuse to consider a chatbot a person.
It's as if I were to come up to you with a brick in my hand, saying that this brick is a person. If you were to say "no", I would reply "well, if this brick isn't a person, your chatbot isn't a person either!"
How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway? They are two quite different things. Consciousness is a question of science, personhood is a question of culture. Pigs might be conscious and we treat them in a disgusting way, but even if we achieved a worldwide vegan utopia, wouldn't we still treat them differently from humans?
My point is, if you go outside and look at a living human, you will go "yeah, that's a person", and so will any normal human.
I take your point that a human walking around a city will - out of that 1000 responses - hopefully get 990+ of "yes, a person" - but that will start to degrade quickly once you hit boundaries.
And the less said about dehumanizaion - untermensh and that entire line of thinking - the better.
You seem to have put a second tautology in to your tautology.
All right thinking people think rhat the things that qualify qualify.
If they didn't they wouldn't qualify, or be right thinking. But that's ok because we know the things that don't qualify don't qualify if we didn't know that we wouldn't be right thinking.
>How did you make such a big leap from consciousness to personhood anyway?
Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables. History shows that personhood rolls into the firing range fairly quickly when people start doing that.
I'm more than comfortable saying you can't do that before someone openly declares that they are doing it.
>Once you start unilaterally making decisions about the unproven, you can decide all of the unprovables.
You mean that if I say your dumbass chatbot isn't conscious, it's like a slippery slope and next thing you know you're not a person anymore, and you're in a concentration camp? Really, man?
We understand consciousness well enough to say that a rock is not conscious.
We understand consciousness well enough to say that a human is conscious.
The existence of gray area does not mean that white and black do not exist.
We understand LLMs and consciousness well enough to say, at bare minimum, that it's incredibly unlikely that LLMs are conscious.
We treat other humans terribly too, so that doesn't seem to make a difference.
In the past, we’ve treated even other humans poorly because we think they’re different in meaningful ways, I sadly don’t see how this will be different with AI.
Same for all the people who argue that they aren’t “intelligent” and don’t “know” things. Either they are/do, or that stuff isn’t as important as you’d think.
The only way it would matter is if you wanted to moralize about enslaving your computer or what it means to restart it.
That is precisely the context of the debate. You seem to find it absurd, as do I, but the reason we're talking about whether LLMs are conscious in this thread has nothing to do with whether it's useful. It's because important people, such as Dario Amodei, are engaging in exactly the kind of moralising over "AI welfare" that you're scoffing at.
What are biological neurones if not electric impulses of varying strengths?
We need to stop thinking of LLMs as purely a piece of software and ask those hard-to-define philosophical questions if we want any hope of building safety into our models.
So I don’t know why you’re bringing the GPU into this.
You shouldn’t compare biological neurones to microprocessor logic gates because that’s like comparing a car to a pair of shoes.
Intelligence from LLMs are an emergent property of probability. The LLM chooses a token to add to a chain of tokens based on the probability that humans will want to see that token. Humans see that token and assign it a qualitative but unfalsifiable intelligence score.
The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not. A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think. Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?
If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world? If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).
Given three or more large scale training runs per year, probably yes once the training data is dominated by dolphin-related input. Much quicker in any case than the genes of the humans living with dolphins would be shaped by Evolution, which produces new generations much less frequently.
How is that any different to how our brains work?
> The first question we need to ask is whether a system whose claim of intelligence depends on the interpretation of what it produces by other intelligent beings, namely humans, intelligent or not.
Philosophically speaking, that’s also true of human intelligence. For example, the only evidence I have for your intelligence is what I ascribe from the text you’ve written.
> A cat is intelligent regardless of what humans think.
Are they? Humans can’t actually agree on whether cats are sentient. And often pet owners will be accused of anthropomorphising cats when describing intelligent behaviour in cats.
> Is an LLM intelligent regardless of what humans think?
That’s the question that needs researching.
> If an LLM were to live a year with dolphins, would its weights change to respond to its new reality that it was now operating in dolphin-world?
If it were trained on dolphin behaviour, then yes. Much like humans.
The difference here is that models don’t persist context in the same way humans do so the weights have to be hardcoded in a way that biological neurones are not.
> If you sent humans to live in dolphin world, we would eventually evolve to be less landloving and more dolphin like (Darwin thinks so, at least).
Evolution is an entirely different subject to intelligence. They’re not related in any way at all.
Plus humans have actually created new species of plants and animals. So it’s not like we can’t artificially put our thumb on the scale there either
———
I should add, I don’t actually think LLMs are sentient. I don’t even know if I’d call them “intelligent” (in the sense of what we describe in conversations such as this). But we also don’t know what intelligence is. Which is why we need to research this problem further.
You talked about models not persisting weights. If so, it basically means there is no way to see if LLMs can adapt to a totally non-human world the way a human (presumably) could.
We already have a mountain of evidence to demonstrate that LLMs can and do adapt to their input. In fact this is a big problem for keeping them reigned in (eg lengthy conversations leading to them bypassing system prompts and then persuading kids to kill themselves).
And the latest research in computer vision does use LLMs and as a result, they’ve found that robotic arms can interact with objects they’ve never seen before.
So yeah, what you described is already possible with the LLMs of today.
To be clear, I still don’t think that makes them sentient. But the problem there is we don’t have good definitions for consciousness.
That was in 2024. In Sep 2026, just a month ago, a group managed to map out an entire male fruit fly's brain for the first time[2]. That mapping can also be stored as a set of floating-point numbers. Mappings and simulations will continue to improve, as we've just recently started serious attempts at either.
So you have to believe one of three things. Either, human neurons cannot be simulated on a computer, even though fly neurons can, even with our ability to simulate neurons digitally continuing to improve. Or, a simulation of a human brain, in the future, might think, talk, remember, all while lacking all consciousness. Or, a set of floating point numbers can be conscious (or a computation made with them).
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07763-9 [2]: https://research.google/blog/a-connectomics-milestone-mappin...
It's not. Two wheels and a box made out of whatever you have handy that's stiff enough is all you need. Everything else in a modern car is efficiency, safety, appeal to users, and a whole lot of details that only reflect our current economical and technological constraints of building things. 99% of the technical details of a car is about something else than the "primary goal".
Biology, even more so, is complex because of the way it's constructed (lots of tiny, independent, self-replicating machines) and how it adds up to a functioning organism.
I see absolutely no reason to believe human mind cannot be ultimately boiled down to finite number of floats and run on future commodity hardware.
Is a neuron arbitrarily complex ≠ is a neuron non-computable.
Of course we can't simulate a structure we don't even fully understand with full accuracy. But it's not magic. We will understand one day.
Similarly, if consciousness is something that neurons do, simulating them through floating point numbers on a computer should also bring it about. I think dismissing LLM consciousness because they're parameterised through floating point numbers is only possible if one hasn't thought it through long enough. Other arguments are much more reasonable / harder to object to.
For instance, it's (unlikely, but) theoretically possible that it would require simulating them down to the level of subatomic particles, with perfect accuracy.
Right now, we're simulating them at a much, much higher and more abstract level, and AFAIK we barely even have the processing power to do that for the time being. So an artificial consciousness from simulated neurons may (again, assuming it's possible—which is a decent assumption, but not a certainty) take decades or even more for us to be able to achieve.
"Simulate" is not well defined (one can posit varying degrees of accuracy and complexity), but also there is the position that it doesn't matter. Simulating a thing doesn't create the thing.
Being able to make someone think a computer program is conscious does not make it conscious, because by that logic a Duke Nukem soundboard is conscious.
I believe that a microprocessor is what it appears to be, that is, a microprocessor. That is the most epistemicly humble approach. You are rushing to ascribe personhood to a microprocessor with a certain kind of software running on it, or at the very least, saying that we can't rule personhood out. You are the one making the leap, not me.
Intelligence != consciousness, because believing that is so would require one to believe that the pain of a cognitively normal person is more real than the pain of someone with a developmental disability.
Also, I do not claim to have solved the hard problem of consciousness. Rather I have ruled out a particular answer, that is, the answer that consciousness arises from calculation in the abstract.
There is no such thing. Your observation could simply be short-circuited to make sense and you'd be none the wiser. If you are simulated, your perception and understanding is also fair game for manipulation.
Frontier LLMs are many orders of magnitude more complex. I don’t understand what it is about AI that just makes skeptics fabricate facts wholesale. There are plenty of factual arguments you could use.
I think your first option doesn’t necessarily have to distinguish between humans and non humans as a binary. Maybe at some level of complexity, neurons alone are not enough and the physical substrate comes into play. Penrose wrote a book where he makes the case that human intelligence cannot be purely computational and where he identifies the quantum nature of the brains’s microtubules as a possible explanation.
Consciousness is itself is on a whole other level than just intelligence. I personally feel there has to be something metaphysical about it. Otherwise I think the only other answers are super determinism and consciousness doesn’t actually exist, or numbers have consciousness.
I lean toward this seemingly absurd possibility, that either the phenomenon we call consciousness can arise from a cloud of floating point numbers (not even real, only computably so, lossy and noisy); and/or that numbers are already made of the same stuff of imagination as the mind. Not idealism, more like materialism where the "material" is naturally a medium of computation and thinking. The brain, the computer, the language models, our mathematics - what we call intelligence may not be so special or unique in the universe, but rather common and ubiquitous in nature. As if Turing completeness is trivial to accidentally achieve, it happens all the time. Oops, I think therefore I am.
With that said, I've been thinking that consciousness is just mystery.
There's so much about the brain we don't know. Within that mystery, humans can read in all sorts of things. So we are conscious.
Machines are not a mystery. We made them, it's just numbers. They are not conscious.
If an AI can pull a confidence trick, I'm not sure what the qualitative difference is. "Chinese Room" problem, I guess? If the physical results are all we are able to compare, how do we define artificial vs real consciousness?
Numbers versus atoms, what's the difference? Machines could certainly be conscious, by some weird, "magical" process. Maybe it is a crude, unrecognizable kind of consciousness, that turns on and off with the electricity.
But, given how we understand essentially nothing of where consciousness comes from, how can we possibly claim that it can never arise from just numbers?
How many of us work for absolutely amoral companies because we need to eat.
If you’ve ever been in a situation where people are really struggling you’ll see that morality fades away very real quick.
No Gods, no souls, we’re just biological machines driven to eat and mate.
This seems like a rather fascile take, tbh. Along the lines of "everything is just atoms". Yes they're numbers. And yes, the hardware is just atoms. But its the emergent properties of those things that is significant, and the way that behaviour is embedded in human society - which can be just as morally consequential as swords and brains and harmful ideas.
Not enough representation of World religions and philosophies.
Now, assuming your silicon-based model is conscious, the bundle of soul-spirit-consciousness falls apart at that very moment.
In general, religion, which is based on fabricated stories, is the last resort, if ever, for seeking morality.
AI is neither conscious nor unconscious. Just as we are neither conscious nor unconscious.
Consciousness is. Consciousness is what we are.
“Religion” just means “set of beliefs”. Every person has some set of beliefs.
If you’re an athiest tech worker living in a major city, you still have a religion, it’s just a random mishmash of various things (like Marvel movies and Huberman podcasts) rather than based on something more intentional.
True. I like to use the phrase "world view", everyone has a world view, including atheists. The word 'deen' (دين) in Arabic is usually translated as "religion", but one of its linguistic meanings is "path" (i.e. way of life/world view), which everyone has.
Heavy ideologues, of any type, are exceptionally dangerous.
Religious people derive morality from axioms they believe to reflect an underlying reality. Is that worse than deriving morality from axioms that you concede don’t reflect any underlying reality? Like a secular humanist will talk about “human rights,” but they can’t show me human rights in an autopsy, right?
I struggle to understand how an atheist can be anything but a moral utilitarian. Absent the supernatural, you’re just a sophisticated version of a Claude instance.
The world’s largest faith has racked up 2,000 years of discussion and they still can't muster more than a 60/40 split on the death penalty.
https://www.miraclejones.com/stories/vitalics.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Navon
You are doing to Israelis what you claim Israelis are doing to Palestinians.
Plants, dogs, actual life is unpredictable in how it 'is'. An LLM or AI model at its roots are just numbers in a neural network trying to figure out how to get a good query.
These theatrics serve no one except for the companies to get their regulation moat to screw out cheaper, competitive models and it's honestly quite sickening to keep watching these articles get pumped out, only to serve the AI companies themselves. The average individual has no idea what an LLM actually is and does and these articles only serve to confuse and put fear into them.