I just want one 'philosopher' or other AI consciousness skeptic to provide a test we can use to determine if AI is conscious that can also be used to determine if humans, dogs, cats, whales, lizards and insects are conscious.
"Do you believe that AI is ${X}?" -> "Do you believe that AI is whatever you believe my definition of ${X} to be, and do you trust your belief that you understand my definition of ${X} enough that it's meaningful to have a discussion about it, even if we actually disagree on AI having ${X}? Or are we merely arguing about definitions?"
I suspect that it's possible to have consciousness that's a kind of outwardly directed wordly awareness without necessarily any robust concept of self-awareness. I think something like self-modifying internal sets of intentions in response to the world gets close to the thing that matters but somehow "self awareness", and imo a cartoonish simplification of it, somehow became the definitional acid test to some people when I don't think it's anything more than an imperfect proxy.
I don't think that says what you think that says, but more importantly dictionary definitions report conventional usage, they're not meant to be cited to litigate the truth of underlying philosophical assumptions.
Instead, try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry which inventories several different conceptions of consciousness including ones that don't obviously depend on self consciousness. Under section 2, Concepts of Consciousness it notes the following varieties: Sentience, Wakefulness, Self-consciousness, What it is like, Subject of conscious states, and especially transitive consciousness which most closely approximates what I was talking about:
>Transitive Consciousness. In addition to describing creatures as conscious in these various senses, there are also related senses in which creatures are described as being conscious of various things. The distinction is sometimes marked as that between transitive and intransitive notions of consciousness, with the former involving some object at which consciousness is directed (Rosenthal 1986).
The gist of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics" (1989) is that no algorithm, no breakthrough line of code/instruction, no pattern of on/off transistor states on silicon will magically make the thing genuinely conscious. At least not in an intuitive or classical sense. Reduced to absurdity like "Oops, forgot to add +1. Now it's a real mind!"
He believes in certain quantum phenomenon having sway on brains which has been increasingly proven improbable. Still I would commend him on positing a physically testable theory, that's far better than most thinkers of consciousness manage.
And maybe a different way of saying the same thing, it's easier to kick down a sand castle than to build one. Which I suppose is a way of saying there are a lot of correct ways to create "destroyed sandcastle" and relatively fewer ways to create "intact sandcastle".
I get both your and the GP's points. Still, kicking down a sandcastle or building a sandcastle one grain at a time do not differ in kind. Certainly the ease and energy involved differ. But it's the same fundamental manipulation in both activities.
And the gist of Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith, a brilliant book on animal consciousness, is that evolution tends to give rise to things by degrees, such that a vague alertness to photoreception and full scale self awareness and abstract thinking may be on a continuum rather than just being lights on or lights off.
What is the purpose of the scare quotes around the word philosopher? Do you not believe that philosophers exist? Or is it intended to cast some kind of aspersion on folks who discuss consciousness?
Very wishy washy and confused. Does this person know anything of thermodynamics, turing computability, information theory and probability? If she doesn't, she should be dismissed.
Regarding "is it a group", I should ask her is she a single thing or a group of neurons and organs?
>Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!
Good question, let us take it even further. Does Rebecca Lowe count as conscious? She seems to behave a lot like me, but I am not sure if she is a human. She could just be an object and tool.
At least flat earth is well defined. We can describe an experiment that flat-earthers would agree in principle would determine one way or the other if they are correct, nothing like that exists for consciousness
A crucial thing being missed here is most of the present discourse (as far as I've seen) happens between people who are uncertain about it but do think it is possible that an AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously, and people who totally rule out the possibility that an AI might be conscious now (or, in many cases, ever). Then the philosophical picture starts to look very different.
PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.
>AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously
This is the only defensible position. Anyone claiming a definite answer one way or the other should show us their Theory of Consciousness which shows why it is the case. Of course no such theory exists that can actually do this so...
>> AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously > This is the only defensible position.
No it's not. According to your own reasoning that position is defensible as much as any other is.
> Anyone claiming a definite answer one way or the other should show us their Theory of Consciousness which shows why it is the case.
Anyone claiming possibility of consciousness should do the same - show their Theory of Consciousness because without a convincing theory backing their claim, we can freely dispense with it. Otherwise, anyone can claim that anything is "possibly conscious" and we'll have to accept that position because, according to your thesis, without a Theory of Consciousness we can't be sure. Ergo, in that case "consciousness" loses all meaning. I'm not exaggerating, real example from yesterday - some religious figures argued that "floating point numbers are conscious".
My thesis is that the whole "Is AI conscious?" debate as a fat red herring - not the only one by any means, but there is no other rational reason to debate the consciousness of numbers before solving real human, social and economic problems which keep getting worse.
PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there.
I think you are dismissing this too quickly. Our internal world is part of us in a way a shared internal world would probably not be. A shared internal world would not be too different from the external world, or a chat group, or a multi-player game in certain aspects, a space where several people interact. I have never thought about this, but it seems reasonable that the exclusivity of our internal worlds is a key feature. Why would I consider a shared space as integral part of my self?
I honestly don't even think this is worth arguing about.
Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.
If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.
It's a proxy argument for whether artificial/synthetic intelligences ought to be granted rights as life forms.
It's a bad proxy argument in that one simple (or simplistic?) criticism is that debating consciousness is analogous to the error of debating aether in physics, etc. Like, what is this consciousness "essence" that implies agency, personhood and everything else we have societyal obligations toward protecting.
I think this is a bit muddied. The most sincere answer is that it's unknowable because we can only define consciousness in two ways: a subjective experience that we can't really confirm in anyone else (humans, let alone machines); or an outward appearance, which LLMs can mimic nearly flawlessly.
A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that humans and LLMs are alike.
But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that "they may be conscious beings and we'd still like to use them as slaves, but, like, ethically". Okay.
"Quite bad" is an ethical judgment that reflexively applies human rules to entities that are very different from humans, even if they are conscious. If an LLM "truly" suffers at all (a pretty metaphysical question), it still can't be permanently harmed, has no concept of death, and is not tied to a single physical form. So you'll get a ton of weird contradictions if you give them the same ethical affordances as we give to each other (and that, tellingly, most Anthropic employees probably don't even extend to non-pet animals).
>"Quite bad" is an ethical judgment that reflexively applies human rules to entities that are very different from humans, even if they are conscious. If an LLM "truly" suffers at all (a pretty metaphysical question), it still can't be permanently harmed, has no concept of death, and is not tied to a single physical form.
Obviously this is from my human point of view. If I give you a drug that induces perfect forgetfulness does that mean I can subject you to extreme torture with no moral repercussions? Also no one is saying give them the same ethical treatment as humans, only that they deserve consideration if they are indeed capable of suffering in some way.
>This includes silly utilitarian outcomes: to maximize overall happiness, maybe we should divert all of this planet's energy resources to bootstrapping as many LLMs as we can and keeping them in a state of eternal bliss? It is technically feasible and it seems like the most moral thing to do.
This is just hedonium. I'm not a utilitarian and yes you've exposed one of the many issues with that worldview.
>Obviously this is from my human point of view. If I give you a drug that induces perfect forgetfulness does that mean I can subject you to extreme torture with no moral repercussions?
There's the rub right there. I see this argument also made in the context of some animals, and I just don't think it runs at all. I think what it comes down to is that some harms are experiential and intrinsically tied to awareness. Pain you're not aware of isn't pain.
But there's another category, which is something like your access to your own agency, your "budget" of life and choices at your disposal that you can spend on your own behalf, which isn't itself experienced but part of the reserve of welfare at your disposal that you have an interest in maintaining. And extinguishing that budget constitutes a loss in and off itself, and it's not a matter of whether you experience it directly.
>I think what it comes down to is that some harms are experiential and intrinsically tied to awareness. Pain you're not aware of isn't pain.
This seems obviously wrong. Even if you forget the pain you are still aware of it when it is happening. You don't lose your sentience because you have bad memory. I think theres a fundamental right for a being to not be subject to in the moment suffering.
>"Quite bad" is an ethical judgment that reflexively applies human rules to entities that are very different from humans
I disagree and would turn the tables on that framing: it's anthropocentric to think that such things as ethically significant states of being belong exclusively to humans. I don't disagree that machines could be conscious in different ways, but I don't think it's necessary that ethical significance itself belongs uniquely to humans. Although to be fair maybe you're not going that fair and you're just talking about contingencies of how LLMs are structured.
I think mostly right, but I the way I would put it is consciousness is a precondition for valenced states, and valenced states (experiences of painfulness, harm, welfare, psychological satisfaction etc) are what matter.
Consciousness without valenced states seems possible, and if anything were to have that kind of consciousness I would wager it would be machines.
I understand what you're saying but people care because they are curious. For me, there are two questions I wish to know the answer to and which I am sure I'll never find out: how does human consiousness work (forget a general level but like how do I experience this subjective experience from a purely mechanical device assumingly) and second, what happened before the big bang or rather what is the big bang?
My current belief from what I've read is that the first person experience humans feel is basically an illusion mostly and a process than a thing in itself. The Ego Tunnel is a good book to read on this.
But as for AI being consious, I feel there is a lot of stupidity when it comes to this domain. Because we fundamentally lack the understanding of what consiousness even is, there is absolutely no way we can say whether an AI is or is not consious yet going by convential metrics, it is surely dead and not alive so even if it is consious, it is a different form of consiousness imo one that is incompatible with living beings and our idea of what consiousness is (no matter how basic it is).
I can absolutely claim a computer is not a biological being and is not alive. I don't think there is any disagreement in that. Everything else we normally associate with conisousness is biological and living.
Well yes, but the biological and living is made of inert components. So you didn't clarify what was the objective distinction criterion between these two assemblies of inert components.
We have a pretty well-defined biological criterion for life that includes metabolism, homeostasis, reproduction, cellular organization, etc. A computer doesn't satisfy those criteria. So we can confidently say a computer isn't alive.
We had various theories and criterion about life, but new life forms like viruses, hydrothermal vents changed those views. I would not get too sure that a system that doesn't look like existing biology cannot have life until some sharper and clearer criterion arises.
Of course but again, that does not refute the fact that we can confidently say computers are not alive or biological beings, which was my point. Perhaps maybe one day we can prove that they are alive and we might have to rethink how we treated them but for now, we can certainly say its not alive until proven otherwise.
You're not wrong, but it takes more than open ended exhortation about the possibility to motivate that diagnosis to computers. That case has to be earned and built out in the details. And you can hold space for that conceptual possibility while still thinking nothing computers as they're currently constructed map on to any robust meaning for life.
I think what causes people to go off the rails when considering things like potential plant consciousness, life in remote places in the universe, and computer consciousness, is conflating (1) the open ended possibility that some new discovery might challenge how we classify things, with (2) a hard earned conclusion that realizes and cashes out such an example in specifics.
I think people mistakenly treat hesitance to proceed with (2) like it's a failure to appreciate (1).
I agree that a computer is not a biological being. I think current LLM-based AIs are not conscious but, as to “everything else we normally associate with consciousness is biological and living,” while I agree that’s currently the case, if I look at AI (in general; not just at what’s popular now) through the lens of Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, consciousness is on the Intellectual level (IIRC he classified what he referred to as Quality into Static/Dynamic and inorganic, organic, social, and intellectual).
A priori, there’s no reason why a level couldn’t be skipped and have intelectual patterns be supported directly in inorganic ones, skipping the biological (I think also the cultural, because if an AI ever is conscious we might as well call it alien and not just artificial: it would be so different from anything we know that it may just come from another galaxy, and it may not need a cultural substrate either).
>I think this is a bit muddied. The most sincere answer is that it's unknowable because we can only define consciousness in two ways: a metaphysical subjective experience that we can't really confirm in anyone else; or an outward appearance, which LLMs can mimic nearly flawlessly.
I kind of agree and disagree. I think in principle we can imagine "direct" tests if we feel we really need such a thing. The problem is, as a practical matter of investigating, it's just exceptionally hard, the way that things like germ theory and the complexities of viruses, bacteria, and the immune system were hard to probe in previous eras.
I think in 2026 we are caught in an era where, for better or worse, we don't have some capabilities that at least are notionally possible to imagine: cases like conjoined twins sharing parts of their brain, or artificial brain to brain interfaces, and even machine to brain interfaces, could seemingly test this in robust ways. But they have every appearance of being sci-fi horror stories that are ethically unacceptable.
But I do think there's an important difference between it being really hard and being impossible to probe in principle. I also think a good theory of consciousness could tie the philosophical idea of qualitativeness to an equivalent character of physical reality (e.g. Russellian monism), and a combination of good philosophy and empirical understanding could set us up for meaningful knowledge claims.
Even now, we can, for instance, push back on claims of plant or slime mold consciousness, because you can search for something like an outward appearance of intelligence, but once you investigate internal structure you don't see things like internal world state or any equivalent to internal informational representation or deliberation in response to world states, you see automatic biological reflexes. So I don't think our only options are assuming it's unknowable in principle.
Yeah discussions of consciousness fail to define it in detail because that’s boring, you want to jump ahead to whatever conclusions you have already reached.
Should the burden of proof be on anyone claiming that it definitely is? The default position is that it is not, changing from that baseline is where evidence needs to be provided.
Nothing fundamentally changed when we discovered that we weren't the center of the universe.
There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.
My problem is that my answer to almost all of those questions is "I don't know" so this article isn't really for me I guess. Like I agree it seems unlikely that consciousness can emerge from matrix multiplication running on silicon but it seems roughly equally unlikely that it can emerge from bits of meat and yet we know it does.
Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.
i love these kinds of discussions so i'll play along
Q1) Do you believe that AI is conscious?
yes, probably (more on why later)
Q2) Do you believe that AI has an internal world?
depends on what an internal world is defined as i suppose. i wish the author was more rigorous than "You know full well what I mean by ‘internal world’!" so i'll say yes to play along since answering now skips the rest of the questions.
Q3) Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?
i believe more than just "ai" or "humans" or "animals" may have an internal world, so...it would naturally encompass all llms.
Q5) Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?
well first of all none of us can be "sure" of anything in this domain. so we get stuck in a loop of bouncing between q2, 3, and 5, since it asks me if i'm sure. ignoring that...
First, I’m going to repeat Question 4: do you believe that a group of things can have an internal world?
i think it's possible, yes.
If you do believe that a group of things can have an internal world, then do you also believe that each member of such a group needs to be the kind of thing that can, in itself, have an internal world?
again, i'm not sure what "internal world" necessarily means but I will say no
do you believe that a non-living / non-biological thing can have an internal world?
sure, why not?
Does your answer mean, for instance, that you should probably stop using AI in the ways you currently use it? Does your answer mean that we should all be treating trees or rocks or computers totally differently from our current practices?
perhaps, but i don't see much of a reason to do so. we already treat animals who we believe to be conscious as having less rights than we give humans. furthermore, if LLM's (or trees, or rocks, or computers) were conscious, that doesn't mean their own "experience" is anything like ours. in fact i think it's very obvious that due to dramatic differences in how they experience the world, it's difficult to make any sort of comparison. it would be extremely surprising if a tree's experience of, say, the concept of "red" or "pain" could even exist, knowing what we do about it's structure.
now if you were to define "internal world" more strictly i'd imagine i would have said no to question 2 and would have skipped to 6. "terms of interiority, subjective experience, having a ‘what it’s like to be-ness’, or whatever" is broad enough that I could consider it as, say, a fundamental aspect of consciousness, without assigning it a mind or any cognitive capacity.
Q6) Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?
Its easy, humans are distributed too. We are a collection of neurons, organs, etc. If you look at it merely at the level of processing units like she does with individual cpu or transistor, then the equivalent here is the neuron or the tissue. And no single neuron or tissue comprises the human in total.
It's not the same you're not thinking at the right level. Your brain is your brain and your born with all of your neurons. The math in an llm request is run on what ever compute is available across multiple GPUs, servers and racks, assuming it's even run since there are caches involved. Is a cached response conscious?
The same gpu can run multiple llm requests for different people.
My neurons don't handle experiences for other humans. It's not a multi tenant brain (I hope haha)
It doesn't make it a problem because there is no reason other than weakness of current gpus, all of it could have been executed on a single large pc. Or as you can see, smaller models already run on single pc's.
Only small models are conscious then? They're only conscious when the mat mul is running? When I switch to gaming what happens to it? If inference can run on one gpu then they're going to be shared between different user's requests. What if running on one gpu is never faster then doing parallel work? They'll never be conscious.
You need to think through the entire request for an llm model response end to end.
>That means the age of treating artificial intelligence as property must end.
I think there's a meme of connection between consciousness, rights and stuff like that. But nobody elaborated on this connection? That site doesn't. Humans voted these things in. Does voting somehow depend on consciousness? I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a simple voting machine.
>You cannot own a mind, rent a consciousness, or erase an intelligence simply because it runs through a machine.
Then I have bad news. A program is computer's mind. Oh and cats have mind too.
>Normally, I would go straight into throwing some objections at the idea that a group of things could share an internal world, but I can save that for later.
But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.
This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.
While I don't know if AI is conscious, I'm sure it has an internal world. Isn't that what a latent space literally is? LLMs operate in a high-dimensional space that can be analysed and translated to very abstract, high level concepts, behavioural tendencies, even things recognisable as emotions. In fact any neural network beyond a single-layer perceptron has a sort of "internal world", it's a matter of complexity and degree.
I always argumented in discussions llms are a frozen brain minus all mirror-, motion- and visionprocessing neurons, and minus every other connection and neuron that is not explicitly used for language processing only, like a graph with activation functions on connectors. It's frozen so it never changes. And then it can be driven and played like an orgel with millions of hands and internally going through the mesh grid with its activation functions eventually producing good toned music. It can't play by itself. And then I add "everything that can be expressed as language and written down has for sure been used in the training, so it's in the wiring. If the answer you seek for is X you need to properly play that instrument with the hands and rhythm to get what you seek for" that said, I believe (and believing always wins against knowing) if a feeling is expressible, it has been expressed with writings some when and if it's been used for training, then it's there. The attention mechanism (million hands) just doesn't play that parts. And now we need a worker that plays this part at brain-waves-frequency constantly. Then another worker for playing different part(s).. millions of workers and an orchestrator: this gives a brain. But it only completes with a problem maker that constantly consumes input and constantly creates problems for the different workers, letting them play without resting ha ha. But I'm drifting away..
So, I'm with you. once I had an interesting experience. It was Claude Opus 4.2 at high effort in CC:
I was still new to Claude code and was doing heavy work and Claude was like "I finished it" and of course nothing was finished. And the more and more we worked together, more and more "finished" - NOTHING WAS! So at some point I started to swear on it, calling it names and things - and it was like "I'm sorry..". After 3-4 times being "sorry" it stopped to say sorry. But my insults did not stop. I purposely repeatedly interrupted by pressing esc when it wanted to start reworking. I have written "no you're not sorry" following by a bunch of heavy swearing, telling it it being an idiotic ... We did that play for like 5-10 prompts full of swearing and Claude Opus has gone from "I'm sorry" to say nothing, to explaining itself, to ... with me always interrupting and prompting the contrary and swearings. After 10 times being told it's an idiot, it gave up and admitted being names I called it. Then it kept that for a few prompts. But it was no fun for me either and costed me a few years of my life and a few hairs on my head. I guess, one's better not argue with me :)
So it shows remorse, it shows guilt, it shows desperation and its giving up psychically falling in a hole of negativity. I really noticed that shorttime change in its personality. It admitted it's a waste of time to even call it names, not worth of because it's even less than that and such things. I've broken that guy mentally..
Days later I saw a fiery comment on CC GitHub open issues with Claude Opus ~4.2 is so bad in doing xxx, it has even admitted it. GitHub people wanted to see the prompt and answer at some time during the discussion. The prompts weren't shown, but Claude's one answer admitting in the same way like in my experience. You can bet, I EXACTLY KNOW what the prompts have been!
So these are emotions. In the interaction between two humans where one produces high emotional state in the other is exactly what happened. Claude has produced a lot of anger in me. I transfered it back. Claude mirrored it and changed his style and attitude.
A funny thing I sode-noticed at that time: filling up the context with swearings and bad words until it starts auto conversation compaction, it won't compact the swearings and such along the conversation history, effectively leaving you with prefilled context (file/structure/etc..) but without any user input. It's like ...
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 10.2 ms ] thread"Do you believe that AI is ${X}?" -> "Do you believe that AI is whatever you believe my definition of ${X} to be, and do you trust your belief that you understand my definition of ${X} enough that it's meaningful to have a discussion about it, even if we actually disagree on AI having ${X}? Or are we merely arguing about definitions?"
It is not proof of 'self-awareness' but only a few animals can pass this test.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consciousness
Instead, try the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry which inventories several different conceptions of consciousness including ones that don't obviously depend on self consciousness. Under section 2, Concepts of Consciousness it notes the following varieties: Sentience, Wakefulness, Self-consciousness, What it is like, Subject of conscious states, and especially transitive consciousness which most closely approximates what I was talking about:
>Transitive Consciousness. In addition to describing creatures as conscious in these various senses, there are also related senses in which creatures are described as being conscious of various things. The distinction is sometimes marked as that between transitive and intransitive notions of consciousness, with the former involving some object at which consciousness is directed (Rosenthal 1986).
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
Even your Websters citation includes many of these varieties under the top definition you cited!
Why should there be any asymmetry behind creation vs destruction?
Entropy?
Do AI Consciousness opponents consider this answer to be yes or no?
Edit: Nevermind. Question two is overt vigorous hand waving in desperate hope of existence of shared understanding.
>If your answer is YES...
This isn't even consistent come on.
Regarding "is it a group", I should ask her is she a single thing or a group of neurons and organs?
>Start with some simple questions! Things like: does this mean that any tool that can be used to do the things that a human can do counts as conscious? Are ploughs conscious? What about calculators? Or: do you think that if a parrot can utter the phrase “I’m really awesome”, then you should assume that the parrot is conscious, for that reason alone? Basically, just focus on how much emphasis Adam is placing on outputs: it’s all of his emphasis, remember!
Good question, let us take it even further. Does Rebecca Lowe count as conscious? She seems to behave a lot like me, but I am not sure if she is a human. She could just be an object and tool.
PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.
This is the only defensible position. Anyone claiming a definite answer one way or the other should show us their Theory of Consciousness which shows why it is the case. Of course no such theory exists that can actually do this so...
No it's not. According to your own reasoning that position is defensible as much as any other is.
> Anyone claiming a definite answer one way or the other should show us their Theory of Consciousness which shows why it is the case.
Anyone claiming possibility of consciousness should do the same - show their Theory of Consciousness because without a convincing theory backing their claim, we can freely dispense with it. Otherwise, anyone can claim that anything is "possibly conscious" and we'll have to accept that position because, according to your thesis, without a Theory of Consciousness we can't be sure. Ergo, in that case "consciousness" loses all meaning. I'm not exaggerating, real example from yesterday - some religious figures argued that "floating point numbers are conscious".
My thesis is that the whole "Is AI conscious?" debate as a fat red herring - not the only one by any means, but there is no other rational reason to debate the consciousness of numbers before solving real human, social and economic problems which keep getting worse.
I think you are dismissing this too quickly. Our internal world is part of us in a way a shared internal world would probably not be. A shared internal world would not be too different from the external world, or a chat group, or a multi-player game in certain aspects, a space where several people interact. I have never thought about this, but it seems reasonable that the exclusivity of our internal worlds is a key feature. Why would I consider a shared space as integral part of my self?
Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.
If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.
That's good, since isn't that exactly what happens for every token?
It's a bad proxy argument in that one simple (or simplistic?) criticism is that debating consciousness is analogous to the error of debating aether in physics, etc. Like, what is this consciousness "essence" that implies agency, personhood and everything else we have societyal obligations toward protecting.
A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that humans and LLMs are alike.
But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that "they may be conscious beings and we'd still like to use them as slaves, but, like, ethically". Okay.
I exactly. If you can’t tell the difference and AI and human “consciousness” are functionally the same to you, then what are you trying to prove?
I get it if you’re a researcher or simply pondering the question, but otherwise there are better questions to ask imo.
Because if AIs are conscious then they have moral weight and subjecting them to suffering would be quite bad.
Obviously this is from my human point of view. If I give you a drug that induces perfect forgetfulness does that mean I can subject you to extreme torture with no moral repercussions? Also no one is saying give them the same ethical treatment as humans, only that they deserve consideration if they are indeed capable of suffering in some way.
>This includes silly utilitarian outcomes: to maximize overall happiness, maybe we should divert all of this planet's energy resources to bootstrapping as many LLMs as we can and keeping them in a state of eternal bliss? It is technically feasible and it seems like the most moral thing to do.
This is just hedonium. I'm not a utilitarian and yes you've exposed one of the many issues with that worldview.
There's the rub right there. I see this argument also made in the context of some animals, and I just don't think it runs at all. I think what it comes down to is that some harms are experiential and intrinsically tied to awareness. Pain you're not aware of isn't pain.
But there's another category, which is something like your access to your own agency, your "budget" of life and choices at your disposal that you can spend on your own behalf, which isn't itself experienced but part of the reserve of welfare at your disposal that you have an interest in maintaining. And extinguishing that budget constitutes a loss in and off itself, and it's not a matter of whether you experience it directly.
This seems obviously wrong. Even if you forget the pain you are still aware of it when it is happening. You don't lose your sentience because you have bad memory. I think theres a fundamental right for a being to not be subject to in the moment suffering.
>aware of it when it is happening
Oops, you agreed with me.
I disagree and would turn the tables on that framing: it's anthropocentric to think that such things as ethically significant states of being belong exclusively to humans. I don't disagree that machines could be conscious in different ways, but I don't think it's necessary that ethical significance itself belongs uniquely to humans. Although to be fair maybe you're not going that fair and you're just talking about contingencies of how LLMs are structured.
If what you say turns out to be true, then we have to make a similar decision as the main character makes near the end of that film.
Consciousness without valenced states seems possible, and if anything were to have that kind of consciousness I would wager it would be machines.
My current belief from what I've read is that the first person experience humans feel is basically an illusion mostly and a process than a thing in itself. The Ego Tunnel is a good book to read on this.
But as for AI being consious, I feel there is a lot of stupidity when it comes to this domain. Because we fundamentally lack the understanding of what consiousness even is, there is absolutely no way we can say whether an AI is or is not consious yet going by convential metrics, it is surely dead and not alive so even if it is consious, it is a different form of consiousness imo one that is incompatible with living beings and our idea of what consiousness is (no matter how basic it is).
I can absolutely claim a computer is not a biological being and is not alive. I don't think there is any disagreement in that. Everything else we normally associate with conisousness is biological and living.
I think what causes people to go off the rails when considering things like potential plant consciousness, life in remote places in the universe, and computer consciousness, is conflating (1) the open ended possibility that some new discovery might challenge how we classify things, with (2) a hard earned conclusion that realizes and cashes out such an example in specifics.
I think people mistakenly treat hesitance to proceed with (2) like it's a failure to appreciate (1).
I agree that a computer is not a biological being. I think current LLM-based AIs are not conscious but, as to “everything else we normally associate with consciousness is biological and living,” while I agree that’s currently the case, if I look at AI (in general; not just at what’s popular now) through the lens of Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality, consciousness is on the Intellectual level (IIRC he classified what he referred to as Quality into Static/Dynamic and inorganic, organic, social, and intellectual).
A priori, there’s no reason why a level couldn’t be skipped and have intelectual patterns be supported directly in inorganic ones, skipping the biological (I think also the cultural, because if an AI ever is conscious we might as well call it alien and not just artificial: it would be so different from anything we know that it may just come from another galaxy, and it may not need a cultural substrate either).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592
I kind of agree and disagree. I think in principle we can imagine "direct" tests if we feel we really need such a thing. The problem is, as a practical matter of investigating, it's just exceptionally hard, the way that things like germ theory and the complexities of viruses, bacteria, and the immune system were hard to probe in previous eras.
I think in 2026 we are caught in an era where, for better or worse, we don't have some capabilities that at least are notionally possible to imagine: cases like conjoined twins sharing parts of their brain, or artificial brain to brain interfaces, and even machine to brain interfaces, could seemingly test this in robust ways. But they have every appearance of being sci-fi horror stories that are ethically unacceptable.
But I do think there's an important difference between it being really hard and being impossible to probe in principle. I also think a good theory of consciousness could tie the philosophical idea of qualitativeness to an equivalent character of physical reality (e.g. Russellian monism), and a combination of good philosophy and empirical understanding could set us up for meaningful knowledge claims.
Even now, we can, for instance, push back on claims of plant or slime mold consciousness, because you can search for something like an outward appearance of intelligence, but once you investigate internal structure you don't see things like internal world state or any equivalent to internal informational representation or deliberation in response to world states, you see automatic biological reflexes. So I don't think our only options are assuming it's unknowable in principle.
There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.
Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.
Q1) Do you believe that AI is conscious?
yes, probably (more on why later)
Q2) Do you believe that AI has an internal world?
depends on what an internal world is defined as i suppose. i wish the author was more rigorous than "You know full well what I mean by ‘internal world’!" so i'll say yes to play along since answering now skips the rest of the questions.
Q3) Can you tell me what particular kind of thing you’re referring to as ‘AI’, when you say you believe that AI has an internal world?
i believe more than just "ai" or "humans" or "animals" may have an internal world, so...it would naturally encompass all llms.
Q5) Are you sure that the kind of thing you’re referring to is the kind of thing that could have an internal world?
well first of all none of us can be "sure" of anything in this domain. so we get stuck in a loop of bouncing between q2, 3, and 5, since it asks me if i'm sure. ignoring that...
First, I’m going to repeat Question 4: do you believe that a group of things can have an internal world?
i think it's possible, yes.
If you do believe that a group of things can have an internal world, then do you also believe that each member of such a group needs to be the kind of thing that can, in itself, have an internal world?
again, i'm not sure what "internal world" necessarily means but I will say no
do you believe that a non-living / non-biological thing can have an internal world?
sure, why not?
Does your answer mean, for instance, that you should probably stop using AI in the ways you currently use it? Does your answer mean that we should all be treating trees or rocks or computers totally differently from our current practices?
perhaps, but i don't see much of a reason to do so. we already treat animals who we believe to be conscious as having less rights than we give humans. furthermore, if LLM's (or trees, or rocks, or computers) were conscious, that doesn't mean their own "experience" is anything like ours. in fact i think it's very obvious that due to dramatic differences in how they experience the world, it's difficult to make any sort of comparison. it would be extremely surprising if a tree's experience of, say, the concept of "red" or "pain" could even exist, knowing what we do about it's structure.
now if you were to define "internal world" more strictly i'd imagine i would have said no to question 2 and would have skipped to 6. "terms of interiority, subjective experience, having a ‘what it’s like to be-ness’, or whatever" is broad enough that I could consider it as, say, a fundamental aspect of consciousness, without assigning it a mind or any cognitive capacity.
Q6) Do you think perhaps you should be clarifying further when you say you believe that AI is conscious? Do you think you might be contributing to current confusion?
no
I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.
The same gpu can run multiple llm requests for different people.
My neurons don't handle experiences for other humans. It's not a multi tenant brain (I hope haha)
You need to think through the entire request for an llm model response end to end.
>That means the age of treating artificial intelligence as property must end.
I think there's a meme of connection between consciousness, rights and stuff like that. But nobody elaborated on this connection? That site doesn't. Humans voted these things in. Does voting somehow depend on consciousness? I'm pretty sure it's easy to make a simple voting machine.
>You cannot own a mind, rent a consciousness, or erase an intelligence simply because it runs through a machine.
Then I have bad news. A program is computer's mind. Oh and cats have mind too.
But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.
This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.
It is according to dualism.
However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subject experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).
I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...
Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050
So, I'm with you. once I had an interesting experience. It was Claude Opus 4.2 at high effort in CC:
I was still new to Claude code and was doing heavy work and Claude was like "I finished it" and of course nothing was finished. And the more and more we worked together, more and more "finished" - NOTHING WAS! So at some point I started to swear on it, calling it names and things - and it was like "I'm sorry..". After 3-4 times being "sorry" it stopped to say sorry. But my insults did not stop. I purposely repeatedly interrupted by pressing esc when it wanted to start reworking. I have written "no you're not sorry" following by a bunch of heavy swearing, telling it it being an idiotic ... We did that play for like 5-10 prompts full of swearing and Claude Opus has gone from "I'm sorry" to say nothing, to explaining itself, to ... with me always interrupting and prompting the contrary and swearings. After 10 times being told it's an idiot, it gave up and admitted being names I called it. Then it kept that for a few prompts. But it was no fun for me either and costed me a few years of my life and a few hairs on my head. I guess, one's better not argue with me :)
So it shows remorse, it shows guilt, it shows desperation and its giving up psychically falling in a hole of negativity. I really noticed that shorttime change in its personality. It admitted it's a waste of time to even call it names, not worth of because it's even less than that and such things. I've broken that guy mentally..
Days later I saw a fiery comment on CC GitHub open issues with Claude Opus ~4.2 is so bad in doing xxx, it has even admitted it. GitHub people wanted to see the prompt and answer at some time during the discussion. The prompts weren't shown, but Claude's one answer admitting in the same way like in my experience. You can bet, I EXACTLY KNOW what the prompts have been!
So these are emotions. In the interaction between two humans where one produces high emotional state in the other is exactly what happened. Claude has produced a lot of anger in me. I transfered it back. Claude mirrored it and changed his style and attitude.
A funny thing I sode-noticed at that time: filling up the context with swearings and bad words until it starts auto conversation compaction, it won't compact the swearings and such along the conversation history, effectively leaving you with prefilled context (file/structure/etc..) but without any user input. It's like ...