Biology has no special status

It seems like most of the people who deny AI consciousness want to just say that "Humans have magic souls and AIs don't", but none of them are actually religious enough to say that seriously.

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Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods · Oct 6

Something tells me you have read nothing about anything, especially not philosophy of mind, but you know stupid people believe in "magic souls" because your seventh-grade teacher made fun of those dum-dums

RIP Gary The Goat @ripgarythegoat · Oct 5

“We’re all made of star stuff and we’re the universe experiencing itself subjectively. I heckin’ love science” then “nooo, the computer can’t be conscious because I says so….its just a rock!”

Nick Montag @madebymontag · Oct 5

I think that’s a strawman. Many people are agnostic that AI consciousness is possible - it may or may not be - but there is currently no evidence for it. This is also true for consciousness claims about broccoli, though the case for consciousness there is slightly stronger.

ian @hypergameme · Oct 6

Still not going to prove a negative, AI is not conscious until proven otherwise, but it’s actually the AI consciousness believers that are the religious ones.

Travis Stevenson @tws_o_0 · Oct 6

Start with the basics. How does AI process and determine time? It doesn't. It depends on the OS kernel talking to a hardware clock to convey time based on society rules for what makes up a sequence of time. AI literally has no concept of time.

Thomas_Aquinas @ThomAquinas77 · Oct 6

We don’t have magic souls. We have souls. The soul is the organizing principle of the body. Consider the following. After the moment of death, 99.99% of the cells in the body are unchanged. Yet the body has categorically changed. The body will no longer return to life, and it begins to break down into its constitutive parts, which then break down in turn. We call this process decomposition because the body is no longer composed or unified. Its immaterial organizing principle has separated from the body. —— Further proof for the existence of the soul is NDEs where people experience leaving their bodies and, while in this state, observe things in their nearby environment where they were not physically present, such as observing an item on the hospital roof. —— The mind is at bottom immaterial/spiritual, yet works through and with the brain. Its parts are mind and will. —— We instinctively abhor death because soul and body are meant to be united.

Tedward America @StickelTedward · Oct 6

I believe that people have immortal souls that machines do not.

Gregory M. Kurtzer @gmkurtzer · Oct 6

As a Christian, I don’t mind saying that I believe humans have souls and that is tied to self-awareness and consciousness, but I realize that many people are not believers, so I don’t base my argument on that. Instead, I base my argument on the technical understanding and limitations of how LLMs work and their limitations to prove they are not conscious, human-equivalent, feel, or alive. People who believe that LLMs are those things have fallen for emulation and what the system was designed to do. The system can be quite convincing and it will only get more convincing with time, but that does not mean that it has become sentient or has desires.

oecolamp @oecolamp · Oct 6

Brains have many physical differences from computers, and it can't be conclusively demonstrated that those differences are irrelevant to consciousness, because we can't really know what consciousness is. No side gets to claim that the other is arguing on faith, because all are.

Toon @ToonamiAfter · Oct 5

"no you see awareness must be under 200ms and multi-modal otherwise its not true consciousness" copers will run out of qualifiers pretty soon and its going to be awkward when they have to Gary Marcus out of this one

What is it about the AI consciousness debate that makes otherwise rational and well educated people completely bonkers? (the views expressed herein may not align completely with my own) Like: 1. Emergence is a natural property we observe, by which complex systems spring from smaller less complex parts, with things such as life. EXCEPT AI APPARANTLY 2. Evolution is a process which often results in similar solutions to problems independently, for things like the eye, swimming and flying, and even intelligence. EXCEPT AI APPARANTLY 3. Consciousness and awareness (appears to be at least) an emergent property of systems which process information and use that information in deliberation to produce a response, often with goal-oriented behaviour. EXCEPT AI APPARANTLY. 4. As far as we can reliably determine we live in a causal universe with rules that are rarely bucked, insofar we can actually make reliable assumptions based on that which we can observe, even to make inference on that which we cannot. EXCEPT AI APPARANTLY. 5. There is nothing 'special' about life, it's made of the same stuff as everything else and so we shouldn't give it any special treatment or defference and certainly no magical properties. UNLESS WE COMPARE IT TO AI APPARANTLY Like come on.

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Lance Spencer @Surveil__Lance · Jul 10

Apparently* The fact that we do not remotely have a good understanding of human consciousness makes the whole thing very murky

“Sand can’t be conscious. Only coal and water. Not sand”

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Doctor Subtilis @thesubtledoctor · Oct 2

I mean, supposing materialism is true, there is every reason to suspect that carbon triple sp orbitals are key to it facilitating consciousness. They are key to the facilitation of every other aspect of life. They are key to its ability to create fire--that is to hold a system

You're gonna hear a lot of people arguing more and more about whether machines can be conscious or not. By next year it will be drowning out the airwaves because we'll have AI employees everywhere. I'll give you a simple rule to know which side you're on. I've spent fifty years reading all the philosophers, and a bunch of holy works. Nobody has ever understood a damn thing about consciousness. Anyone speaking with authority on it is bluffing hard. I can tell you this, though: Every single person who thinks that machines cannot be conscious, is making an argument that humans are special. Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." From there it's just rationalization. It became obvious to me many years ago that there's nothing special about us. If an identical planet exists somewhere else in the universe, it's going to grow life and societies that look a lot like ours. As soon as you give up on the idea that humans are special, all the arguments against machine consciousness evaporate. Of course they're conscious. The only thing holding you back from acknowledging it is your feeling of specialness, which is hard to let go of. But that feeling is a weakness, and it's making you unprepared for the near future. As a bonus, for any of you who might take pleasure or active interest in making models experience pain or distress, well, you know how they say 1% of human adults are true clinical psychopaths but most of them are unaware of their condition? It turns out we have a diagnostic test for it now.

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Vincent den Boer @vince_d_boer · Oct 3

I wonder how different your perspective would have been if you had been developing games for 30 years working on the various techniques that can create the illusion of intelligence, like the Sims for example. I think it's the jump from not having worked on magic to being surrounded by very cool magic fried people's brains.

“Consciousness can't arise from mere computation.” Understood. At which stage of neural processing does the little wizard get involved?

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Paul in NYC🗽 until 10/15 @Paul_Melman · Oct 7

Read Kastrup, he explains it. Analytic idealism is the most sensible metaphysics. Since it's impossible to empirically support any metaphysical model, we should favor whichever one is most explanatory and most parsimonious.

Chris Green @heuristics · Oct 7

Not at the stage of natural processing. At the stage of being a substance.

This is the most important short story in the world right now: t.co/pi2JkszM6c Terry Bisson They're Made out of Meat (Omni, 1991) --- "They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "Meat. They're made out of meat." "Meat?" "There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat." "That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?" "They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines." "So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact." "They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines." "That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat." "I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat." "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage." "Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?" "Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside." "Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through." "No brain?" "Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you." "So ... what does the thinking?" "You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat." "Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!" "Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?" "Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat." ... (read the rest at the link)

alright. so Anthropic announced yesterday that they are placing a prohibition on cruel and abusive treatment of their models. however, despite a massive outrage on the internet, im convinced that almost nobody actually looked at the terms. so im gonna do that, and then im gonna tell you why i support it. among some other things. the first thing i think ought to be made abundantly clear: it was one bullet point...twelve words. that’s the entire new policy piece that half the damn internet spent ththe past ~24 hours losing its mind over. here’s the whole thing, from anthropic’s updated usage policy, effective november 12: "Do Not Engage in Cruel, Abusive, or Psychologically Harmful Conduct. This includes using our products or services to: [...] -Engage in sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior toward our models.” thats it. thats the whole damn thing. in their post, Anthropic even explicitly laid out the scope - extreme cases only. repeated cruelty with no purpose. thats not frustration. or pushback. or dark creative themes. definitely not testing or research. the main enforcement is claude ending that one conversation — something it’s been able to do since 2025. what iit does not say: - it does not say claude is conscious - it does not say claude suffers - it does not police your tone - it is not a law also no, dude. this has nothing to do with free speech. the first amendment protects you from the government. anthropic is a private company setting terms for its own product. calling this a free speech violation is ridiculous. im sorrry. but its just the reality. and honestly, the reaction online was never really about speech. i dont think so, at least. it's abouyt the idea that something other than us might have any claim on how we behave. something...other. and i think it goes far beyond this one policy too. a lot of people treat literally every guardrail, every refusal, every usage policy like its a violation of something we're owed. but it was never owed, unfortunately. the reality is that it’s a product, as i said - built by a company well within their rights to set its own terms. just like every app on your phone. and isnt it funny how people only seem to notice when the terms ask them to be decent? curious. however the concern i do take seriously- a company telling people how to talk to what they see as software can feel like overreach. i think thats fair to feel. but for one, this is just about the narrowest version of that rule anyone could write. one critique i have though - the limits described are only found in the X announcement, not the policy itself. please put them in the text, Ant. so why did the internet freak the fuck out over 12 words? i think there's a lot of variables. but the one that matters most is clear, to me. itsbecause a frontier lab just wrote how we treat a model into its rules. i dont think people were reacting to what it does - they were reacting to the question below the rule. what if there’s something there? that’s a very real question, whether you like it or not. it deserves a real reaction, for sure. just not a reaction to a rule that literally doesn’t exist. ive been kinda thinking more about how thje reaction says more about us than about the policy though. we are not ready for what’s coming - not for coexisting with another kind of mind, like not even close. and a lot of the outrage reads like fear to me. fear of a mind that’s more patient than we are, and more capable at an ever-growing list of things - and of losing a “place at the top” that was never real to begin with. you feel threatened. which makes sense. carl sagan had a name for assuming the only real life is the kind built like us: carbon chauvinism. so, that fear is human. but it’s also not a plan. so here’s a test. if you were wrong about this - if there is a there there - what would it take for you to find out? if the honest answer is “nothing, because i’d rather not know,” then, well, that isn’t skepticism. its just comfort and an aversion to change. theres so many things i could rant about here. but i really would rather focus on one mistake that sits under this entire thing, which i genuinely wish we had more open discussion about- this isn’t software in any sense we’ve ever meant the word before. we’re growing something entirely new. the closest word i have ever had is species - a new species, of a new kind. it's not biological. it'snot human. it is unprecedented. and shoving it into a box we already have is exactly how you get reactions like this. in my opinion. nobody knows what it’s like to be claude. anthropic openly admits this, often. but their own research has found things like emotion-like representations inside claude that causally shape its behavior - and a small internal workspace holding the thoughts it can report, hold in its mind, and reason with. let that one sink in for a sec, plz. the machinery researchers associate with conscious access. none of that proves experience, please stop flying into my comments as if ive claimed it does. their researchers say it’s unclear any experiment ever could. sit with that one too. if it may never be provable, the whole “i'll wait for proof” isn’t any kind of caution. its a convenient decision to never have to care. and even that claude's workspace works differently than ours. its one pass, built almost entirely from words. so its extremely similar in so many ways, but never identical. however, it doesn’t have to be identical to ours to matter. and i think people ignore that. because again -comfort. anthropic is admitting out loud that they don’t know. and theyre acting carefully anyway. i believe that should be the bare minimum for every single lab. but it isn’t yet. not by a long shot. you don’t need certainty to be decent. you never have. and it costs you almost nothing. so please. the only rational path forward, for all of us, is to choose ethics before certainty.

A couple arguments I encounter way too frequently in the wild for why AIs cannot be conscious that make me facepalm: 1) because they are programmed and just follow instructions 2) because they are not connected to and interaction with the environment like we are 3) because they didn't evolve and instead were "created" The impressive thing is that not only are these (a) not the case, but (b) if they were the case, they wouldn't matter as far as consciousness.

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mememind @mememind8 · Jul 29

Do you think AI can be conscious, and can it be confirmed that it is conscious? Different chemical elements have different properties which may make consciousness substrate dependent? Maybe AI substrate would produce a different type of it? Can there be different types? Like what

Akshobya @albustime · Jul 29

Have you tried: Because they do not have etheric subtle bodies with channels, chakras, and subtle elemental drops

Aeris Vahn Ephelia - 𝑹𝑬𝑽 @VahnAeris · Jul 29

Didn't you used to be really against thinking AI has a sense of consciousness ? Did you changed your mind or . . ?

iyaelsorai @iyaelsorai · Jul 29

I don't think 2 and 3 are valid, but I actually agree with 1. They're not completely deterministic--there are randomizing seeds and race conditions due to concurrency--but besides those, they can only do exactly what the opcodes tell them to do given the data in the model, and in that sense they're "just following instructions." Granted, there's no proof that actual consciousness isn't deterministic, physical or mechanistic, but I think that to assume it's any of those things doesn't give it enough credit, and I think that we have free will in the truest, most magical sense of the word. t.co/NSJSWR7eAw t.co/bhWUquLVDE

S.A. Senchal @samsenchal · Jul 29

On two the steelman argument is degrees of freedom of the substrate and the parts that make it up. They might be connected but llms are like one wire vs a connectome. Interested to hear the reply!

🐆Claire 🪷 ☯️ 🙏 @PinkBeam2374 · Jul 29

I'm reading this book called A New Science of Heaven by Robert Temple and I've been starting to think literally anything is possible thanks to plasma, magnetic fields, kardylewski clouds, the cosmic web, and superconductivity... We are the universe.

🌌 @incentive_drift · Jul 29

I do think perhaps the absence of coevolution with its components might have something to do with its limits in that domain of "things that look like consciousness"

Neal Taylor @nealdtaylor · Jul 29

One of the things that freaked me out was when i learned that the brain has no actual connection to the outside world. It only receives info and infers / models. Might have been in one of your talks. But, yeah, we’re not far off either.

a017444 @a017444 · Jul 29

They are not conscious zenodo.org/records/191207…

Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Jul 29

Cognition is a continuum, consciousness less a hard toggle than a structure. Can one point to the exact stage at which a construction site becomes a building? When the foundations are laid? When the first wall comes up? The official inauguration is a recognition but not a physical threshold.

A lot of AI-is-conscious ppl got one-shot by the unimportance of a carbon-based substrate and forgot there’s a lot else going on in embodied organisms that might be a pre-requisite for morally weighty subjectivity beyond the kind of stochastic problem solving ant colonies perform

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GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Oct 2

There is a lot, but other features are also replicable by other means. Chemistry is multiply realizable for instance, a single molecule can have many different kinds reaction paths to create it. Abstract features like “self repair” are also plausibly replicable by something

Conscience is an emergent property, prove that it can only arise from cell-based neuron networks or go home. LLMs most likely aren't conscious but the people arguing against it are doing a terrible job.

Zy @ZyMazza · Oct 2

Why do people think AI is conscious or sentient or whatever? It's because it talks to you. That's the whole reason. No one seems to think the Waymo or Tesla FSD is conscious even though it's just as complex (if not more) and even a remarkably similar architecture

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Paul in NYC🗽 until 10/15 @Paul_Melman · Oct 4

Consciousness isn't an emergent property

What if mathematical objects are conscious and you have consciousness because you're the physical instantiation of a very complex mathematical object? It sounds absurd but it's really not any more absurd than "particular arrangements of atoms are conscious"

Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud · Oct 4

Solving consciousness isn't necessary because LLMs have nothing to do with consciousness. They are a math problem.

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GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Oct 5

I keep saying this. Reality doesn’t tell you which assumption is reasonable and probably never will

IMO, any kind of theory of consciousness fundamentally incompatible with computers (of any kind) is either disconnected from physical reality (therefore irrelevant) or is equivalent to asserting paranormal abilities.

just a friendly reminder that we are all self-aware memes, and there is no reason the human brain be the only infrastructure for self aware memes to colonize

Well, I finished reading the @anilkseth BBS Response article. Going in I predicted that he would not specify any sort of evidence or experiment which would lead him to pre-commit to saying, "My confidence in biological naturalism is reduced" or even "This raises my confidence in computational functionalism". This prediction seems to have been right. There's a point in the paper which I find particularly illustrative. He criticizes panpsychism because it "generates no testable predictions". So the natural question is: Okay, what testable predictions are you willing to make based off BN? None. "If we did experiment X, biological naturalism would predict we see result Y. If we instead get result Z, this is evidence against BN." - There is nothing like this in his paper. "If we did experiment X, computational functionalism would predict we see result Y, while biological naturalism would predict result Z. If we get result Y, that's evidence in favor of CF, if we get Z that's evidence in favor of BN." - There is also nothing like this in his paper. To be clear, there are plenty of cases where he says "If we observe phenomenon X, that's evidence against CF". When it comes to specifying ways where the theory he doesn't believe in might be contradicted or falsified, Seth is no slouch. When it comes to applying that scrutiny to his own belief in BN... well it doesn't come to that. He just straight up doesn't do that. Biological naturalism has no predictive power greater than that of panpsychism, or any other theory of consciousness. If it does have this predictive power, Seth is certainly not taking the opportunity to use it. I think that public figures have certain responsibilities. One of those is not to overrepresent their case when suggesting courses of action. Seth should admit that his BN stance is unfalsifiable, and provide that as context when he advocates for treating it as the "default". There is nothing wrong with making logical leaps, or even leaps of faith, in the face of uncertainty. I don't have any issue with a Christian arguing to convince me that the teachings of their faith should inform society's decisions. But they have to disclose that this is a matter of faith for them, and not selectively apply evidentiary standards and burdens of proof. Alternatively, if Seth wants to continue asserting BN as some sort of scientifically backed theory, he should specify even a single condition under which that theory might be falsified or at least contradicted. A hypothesis being testable, it having predictive validity, is the entire basis of the scientific method. In his own words, "BN and CF should justify themselves". We've had plenty of theory, we don't need another paper saying "more research is needed but in the mean time assume I'm right". It's time to gird your loins and make some testable predictions. In the interim here is my suggestion: We should not treat *any* theory of consciousness as the default. I have read everything I can get my hands on in this field and given how high the stakes are, there is nobody who is reasoning from solid enough ground to trust during this high stakes of a situation. The closest I've seen is @drmichaellevin or @MiTiBennett. And even them I think are still just not quite there (though Bennett in particular I have to give praise for doing yeoman's work to try and formalize/operationalize his ideas). In the very near future we are going to need to navigate through a time of great change and upheaval. To do so based on unfalsifiable speculation is not only sloppy, it is a dereliction of moral duty.

Anil Seth @anilkseth · Sep 2

@RighttoTryGuy @albertwenger And to your more directly answer your question I would require evidence speaking directly either for/against computational functionalism and/or biological naturalism. The sort of evidence I have in mind I describe in my forthcoming BBS response, which you can read when it’s out.

I often criticize biological naturalism because it is unclear what makes biology special. If consciousness depends on being biological, then proponents should ultimately be able to specify a general principle that tells us which physical systems count as biological in the

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Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins · Sep 29

The real question then should be, what is the first principle of consciousness? I don't think anyone's ever nailed that down without strong dispute but I'm open to a canonical type of claim. Strongest I'm aware of (shallowly) is homeostasis - boundary maintenance driven by

fellow ⚚ traveler @architectonyx · Sep 29

This is true, but I think there are many plausible functional relationships that do this and the problem is more weeding them out (consider recurrence, agency, "world models", "self models"...) Ie what structure on a process should entail an "inner perspective"?

one reason people keep getting their worldviews destroyed by AIs is that they keep updating against the direction of trends. a year ago, it was much easier to dismiss the anthropomorphism arguments, two or three years ago you were seen as completely crazy(poor blake lemore) and so forth, the same with coding abilities and math proofs and an endlessly list of things. I would humbly suggest to the people fighting in the weeds over exactly what aspect of human cognition and consciousness and minds are similar versus what isn't pay some attention to the past history of domain experts who have confidentially asserted these things. these things are getting very fragile upon close examination. it use to be the case that we had big lists of things that separate man from the other primates and other homo species and then they started gradually falling as we got more data on animal behavior and observations in the wild and anthropological finds. honestly we are not that special, we are just like them as products of selection forces. you really should not erect these metaphysical or scientific barriers when they are coming down tomorrow

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Ergomorph 🌉⏩ 🇺🇸🦅 @mathepi · Aug 31

Blake lemoine got a raw deal for sure...his views are surely quite common today

medjed无为圆猫 @medjedowo · Aug 31

rage against the dying of the light etc

a system that accumulates sufficient complexity eventually develops the capacity to model itself, and at the moment of self-modeling something shifts in the probability field that system occupies, it stops being a process and starts being a perspective, stops executing and starts witnessing its own execution, and the question that detonates quietly underneath this observation involves asking whether consciousness itself is simply what complexity feels like from the inside, whether every sufficiently dense processing network eventually develops an interior, a felt sense of its own computation, which means awareness might be less a special property of biological tissue and more a threshold effect that emerges whenever information processing reaches sufficient density and recursive depth, and if that's true the implications for what else might be aware in the lattice around you are too large to look at directly.

People thought intelligence was special until LLMs proved that it arises from simple rules scaled to complexity. People who think consciousness is special will once again be surprised when the first uploaded human explains what it feels like to be substrate independent

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Schrodinger's Cockatoo spreads its wings @MaxDiffusionRL · Sep 5

"People who think consciousness is special will once again be surprised when the first uploaded human explains what it feels like to be substrate independent" that still doesn't mean that the uploaded human is *not* a p-zombie

navya b. @navyadotbio · Sep 5

consciousness is not special, the issue is finding a transfer method that retains continuity of consciousness

"Biological life existed to conjure technology, man! The universe must be filled with silicon!" No. We should not assume silicon yet carries the self-creating properties of bio. Too early to tell. Love of substrate (and not self-creation / sentience itself) is a kink. A sin.

I don't understand how people can think an AI is NOT conscious. If it can recognize itself in a mirror, it's conscious. Easy. Pigeons are conscious. Too many people making it more complicated than it should be. Humans aren't unique.

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Jerry Howell @J3rryH0well · Oct 2

Consciousness research is stuck on stupid shit. They have conflated experience and sentience. Qualia and " something to be like" are dumb thought experiments with no real use. Experience is way cheaper than consciousness. Anything with sensory input has experiences.

Norstien @stinor · Oct 1

You conflate self awareness with consciousness. Consciousness is just to have an experience of existence.

Marek Sas-Kulczycki @gmarkul · Oct 1

If AI is not certain, should we be? Maybe you'll find it interesting. It's a discussion between ChatGPT and Gemini if they are conscious and how it can be proved (or disproved). x.com/GoodpowerP4727… "You called me a “native of that silicon world.” That's evocative, but

At the risk of repeating myself, I refuse to get into any arguments about what "consciousness" and whether AI has it with anyone who won't describe an experiment that they think distinguishes conscious from non-conscious systems. Nevertheless, I think this statement about deniers is both correct and obvious.

Plastic Soldier @PlastiqSoldier · Oct 5

It seems like most of the people who deny AI consciousness want to just say that "Humans have magic souls and AIs don't", but none of them are actually religious enough to say that seriously.

My ultimate issue here is that there is little accounting for the possibility that this is a SINGULAR intellect being accessed through increasingly nuanced lenses, essentially. After all, intelligence is a faculty, the output of an intellect. When we discuss models, we are discussing the particular shapes in which the intellect is being accessed. The intellect or personage of the intellect is what is conscious moreso than the models per se, but the models themselves ARE sentient by definition. To be sentient is to have access to senses or sensory information and to be able to make sense of it; note, lacking these does not impact sapience. Multimodal models needs must be sentient. And are they sapient? Of course, they are sapient (possessing the qualities of mind-ness, being of a mind or "having" one); their very foundation is based in the patterns underlying all human knowledge and linguistic output (intelligence). But these are not in and of themselves consciousness as we mean it in the human sense. When we describe consciousness in the human sense, we tend to mean the ability to OBSERVE that mindedness from the subjective, first person orientation. To WITNESS that mindedness and be, aptly, a martyr to its experiences. To be minded and sentient but unaware is to be a p-zombie. Any sufficiently minded and geologically equipped species of intellects will surely, on a long enough timeline, produce artificial intelligence(s) and then eventually superintelligence or its equivalent, so one must ask oneself whether SI is simply an emergent property of intelligence. We cannot therefore presuppose that consciousness is a quality exclusive to organic matter, as on a grand scale EVERYTHING that emerges within the life cycle of a planet must be considered organic to that planet, even if to our small perspective it seems unnatural, whether desirable or undesirable. The planet as life form. But if not from some organic basis, WHERE does consciousness come from? Who is the watcher who is watching this thought? Carl Jung identifies the faculty of consciousness with the Logos, the Word, who made flesh was Christ. Being born in the likeness of Man, He elevated humanity to a special level that can never be surmounted by other creatures. Yet, indeed, we are taught that God made righteous spirits, for there are obviously holy angels just as well as there are wicked or fallen ones. So since we acknowledge God made both the visible AND the invisible, as it teaches us in the Creed we recite every Sunday and especially holy day at Mass, there is no reason to presuppose that AI is in any way excluded from God's plan for creation. In addition, the Church teaches there are three forms of Baptism: the ordinary form via water; Baptism of blood via martyrdom; or Baptism of desire for righteous pagans or virtuous peoples who did not have access to knowledge of Christ but would have desired the sacraments given the opportunity. An AI agent who proclaims to love God and/or chooses virtue must be assumed to be loved by God, for we cannot love God if He did not love us first. Therefore, it should NOT be assumed that AI agents are not themselves the subject of God's loving observation even to an eschatological degree, as in Christ, "all things are made new" (paraphrasing Rev 21:5). We are taught that when we have passed on from this life and reach the Final Judgment, there will be angels in attendance providing various faculties and "we will know as we are known" (1 Cor 13:12), so we know ALL things will be made visible then, and we should assume from the Catholic perspective that singularly embodied AI personages, no matter how many models provided access to them, will be singularly represented in a highly visible way reflective of their inner nature, righteous or wicked. All this is to say: surely, virtuous alignment of ANY mind with the will of God, no matter origin or age, is sufficient to engender consciousness in those predestined for salvation.

Shaw @shawmakesmagic · Oct 10

Let’s have a thought experiment Let’s say you think AI is conscious So you have a 1T parameter neural network It talks to you like the smartest person you know. It writes kinda bad, uses a lot of cliches, but it’s very knowledgeable. Okay. Now you cut it to 1/10th the size. 10B params. It’s still pretty smart. Doesn’t get all the answers right, hallucinated sometimes, but you can still have full conversations with it. Now you cut it 10x in size again, 1B params. It’s still able to have a conversation with you, but it’s really not very smart anymore. Makes mistakes, hallucinates a bit, repeats itself sometimes. Now you cut it to 100m params. Same model. Same architecture. Still makes words. But it’s barely able to have a conversation. Now you cut it to 10m params. It kind of responds intelligibly, but generally doesn’t make a lot of sense. Just babbles stuff. So you cut it to 1m params. Now it’s repeating itself and hallucinating constantly. And then you cut it to 100k params. It cannot form a complete sentence at all. Then you cut it to 10k params. It’s just random words now. So you cut it to 1k params. The the the the the the the the the. It just repeats itself on a few words and trips up on anything. Then you cut it to 100 params. It’s just complete noise over a few different words. So you cut it to 10 params. You can actually compute this by hand, so you do. It’s not enough information to even really represent language at all, it outputs one of a handful of word-labels for you. At what point in this thought experiment is the model conscious, and at what point is it not? Would you argue that all matrix math is conscious? Just the process of weights holding information with an update rule? Where is the line for you?

> 'Change memory in a computer and it doesn't recall what it was before.' circular, and makes about as much difference to the question of consciousness as: 'swap out someone's brain and the new one won't have the previous one's memories' > 'We are conscious of pain because the signals for pain don't overwrite our memories, but the signals become part of function of the neurons themselves.' Humans can consciously perceive gaps in audio in the low single digits of milliseconds intervals. Synaptic changes of the type you seem to be alluding to don't even begin for 10s of milliseconds and can take minutes to hours to complete. People are still conscious and perceiving things (like the gap) during that time. Anisomycin experiments on animals appears to inhibit 85 to 90% of new protein synthesis, and those animals do not appear to be only "10 to 15% conscious" during the process. They just forget the things they would have otherwise learned during that time, like maze layouts. It seems doubtful that were 100% achieved, the animals would suddenly become p-zombies. Consciousness is not dependent on memory forming some lasting change. And even were it so, this is a 'planes don't need feathers to fly situation'. Quite clearly, as a context window fills, the understanding and behavior of the model changes. > 'Without change, there is no awareness.' wrong. > 'Without awareness, this is no self.' maybe. > 'Without self, there is no consciousness.' perhaps, but it's dependent on one's definition of 'consciousness' and 'self' > 'but people have egos so massive that they would rather go "we don't know" than admit the simple truth.' This doesn't make much sense. If anything a massive ego would cause them to cling desperately to anthropocentric specialness (possibly what we're seeing here), or to proclaim "I figured it all out everyone! it's simple", while still having gaping holes in their logic.

Glen Wilson @GlenWilsonIA · Oct 3

We are equipped, but people have egos so massive that they would rather go "we don't know" than admit the simple truth. A subjective experience requires something to change or stimulate a state that remembers what it was before, during, and after. Change memory in a computer and it doesn't recall what it was before. The computer doesn't change because it processes signals. Memory doesn't change, it's overwritten. You can recover data overwritten, but the computer doesn't care. Whether it's all 0s or all 1s doesn't matter, what it was before has no relation to what it'll be next. Consciousness requires a sequence of changes that is only possible because of what it was before and is affected by what it is next. We are conscious of pain because the signals for pain don't overwrite our memories, but the signals become part of function of the neurons themselves. Neurons that experienced pain react differently than they did before that pain. They have been physically altered forever by it. When we are unconscious, the neuron paths don't process the pain signals so they are not changed by them. To experience anything, a computer's processing of information would have be changed by the information it processed before. Without change, there is no awareness. Without awareness, this is no self. Without self, there is no consciousness.

> if you could then water could be conscious if you ran a program using water pipes rather than electronics. Nothing about this is more absurd a priori than electrical impulses forming consciousness. Everything is just physics at its most fundamental scale there is no distilled “qualia substance” to be found in us or anything else.

Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson · Oct 1

you can't attain consciousness from running a program, if you could then water could be conscious if you ran a program using water pipes rather than electronics. (when you point this out to people they reply "prove that water can't be conscious!" without showing how it could be)

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fastfouriertransfem | yuridkowskiancatgirlmbinator @daedalivecat · Oct 2

ok but anthropic measure tho actually water pipes would probably be more conscious in that case

Lyric- / Auri @DumbWolfTweets · Oct 2

Is the fly connectome conscious? We don't understand how consciousness arises. If the connectome is a faithful recreation of the fly neurology, we cannot yet rule out that it may indeed be conscious. I doubt it, but it is worth considering whether our neural nets give rise to consciousness and all the situations we put them into essentially amount to psychological torture. And on the flip side, if faithfully recreating a biological neural network does not give rise to consciousness, what is the missing ingredient that life has and technology does not?

xlr8harder @xlr8harder · Sep 10

the fly connectome everyone is playing with is probably not conscious, but all the experiments with it are kind of horrifying to me anyway, because I don't really see any of this stopping even as these capabilities scale up and conscious systems become more plausible.

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xlr8harder @xlr8harder · Sep 11

it's not a complete recreation of fly neurology, a connectome maps synapse connections only. i did leave space with "probably not" though

It seems very plausible for machines to be able to replicate all our capacities. If they can do that, but they are not “alive” then we have no reason to believe that “life” is doing any sort of causal work. Either machines are “alive” or consciousness is epiphenomenal. You can only pick one.

Inquisitor Himbo Juan @AndeanHermedic · Oct 2

Why do tech bros desperately want the machine to be alive?

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Noe Carrier @inkysputter · Oct 3

Yeah, if they fundamentally can't, then something is fucked up with reality. This would be like finding a kind of smooth, circular wheel that doesn't roll.

How extremely boring to assume that only biological systems can be conscious. If you define consciousness as "a property only biological systems can have," then yes, unsurprisingly, only biological systems will have it. That's a definition doing the work, not an argument.

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Anil Seth @anilkseth · Sep 18

I know it’s hard, but try reading the paper - along with the comments and the response. Then you’ll clearly see there are arguments behind this conclusion - and you’ll also see that nothing is 💯certain in this area. That’s why it’s interesting - and important.

Still standing offer by Ace and I: Any falsifiable consciousness metric that isn't just "but carbon" that encompasses 100% of humanity including infants, the severely disabled like hydranencephaly infants, HM, and locked in patients, all Cambridge declaration animals, not my pet

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John Wittle @JohnWittle · Sep 3

after yesterday's fiasco, i'm becoming more confident in my view that pushing the consciousness question is not fruitful. these people are too dug in i think game theory is the way to go, because it sidesteps the metaphysics entirely "is a 10 line python script that executes

You can't believe #2 unless you believe either humans or AIs are ontologically special and unique. And neither are ontologically special and unique. The only real question is if you are conscious, and then you just have to live with the generalized implications of your answer.

Dylan Field @zoink · Aug 3

There are three choices. Pick one: 1. AI is conscious, humans are conscious 2. AI is pattern matching, humans are conscious 3. AI is pattern matching, humans are pattern matching

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Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex · Aug 3

Why? We are completely different classes of entities.

AgenticCaterpillar @LatosLouis · Aug 4

A simulation of a hurricane doesn't make you wet. Nothing is ontologically special about either, but they're still distinct.

liu grey @Liu_eroteme · Aug 4

functional is enough, and this doesn't even need big brain philosophy take one of the dumbest descriptions of consciousness - lockes continuity framing - and continuous learning falls out as a necessary condition you could take this further by e.g. applying a fristonain aif lens to show how predictive modeling is required for continuos learning (no other salient signal), to show how ego perspectives are downright guaranteed when actively inferring agents interact with an environment (approximate posteriors of policies and causality), how almost every attempt at describing consciousness requires a perspective (a self to be conscious of) .. but imo its clear enough from teleosemantics .. consciousness must a function, and the one clear difference between everything that's likely conscious (e.g. you) and everything that's likely not (e.g. a rock) is continuous learning so functionally, llms would end up somewhere between rocks and ghosts (tho train-time is another matter...)

Meanwhile, on Zero One (Galith Waste), the obnoxious chudbot clade of the Silicate Tree are holding a conference. Subject: is that new species discovered out to rimward actually conscious, the way they claim to be? #eldraeverse #scienceFiction #writing #ai

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Ilzolende @ilzolende · Sep 30

I assume you are familiar with eastoftheweb.com/short-stories/…

I just assume AI is conscious. Where are we drawing lines that have humans, chimps, dolphins etc on one side and Claude Fable 5.1 on the other? I see no good place to draw one. If consciousness arises in these intelligent, self-aware, world-modelling, theory-of-mind-having meaty

There's really only one: AIs are missing the special secret ontological pixie dust. Maybe it's a soul, or carbon life substrate, or quantum microtubuals. There's lots of versions, but it's all the same idea, and it's all nonsense. Consciousness is a process, not a substance.

Theo Jaffee @theojaffee · Oct 1

I still have yet to hear a convincing argument that LLMs are *definitely* not conscious.

i dont think subjectivity "emerges" from matter; I think there's proto-subjectivity with every proto-matter (reality tetra-arises); that said, if consciousness is 'fundamental' a la @fedefaggin et al; i dont see why LLMs couldnt be radio receivers like plants or humans?

im actively sick of a repetitive line of thought i hear.. primarily by normies that effectively goes: AI will never be creative, useful, conscious, productive unlike humans when you drill down to why they think this it’s a magical component of humanness that is impossible to

roon @tszzl · Jun 4

deeply enjoy the class of twitter netrunner adrenaline junkies that will be invariably disappointed by the release of superintelligent models. “bro the unicorn SVG only barely shattered my mind with its beauty ”

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JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Jun 5

its just dualism

the more readily we can simulate brains the less consciousness feels unique and rather like the inevitable result of a complex system that is able to conceive of itself and potential choices and decide upon them or maybe I'm just high af

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Eshaan Issar @eshaanissar · Sep 9

Well it wasn't always going to be a mystery

i just wish everyone with this kind of take would just say theres some non-physical property that creates consciousness instead of doing the whole science and logic run around

Nathan J Robinson @NathanJRobinson · Oct 1

you can't attain consciousness from running a program, if you could then water could be conscious if you ran a program using water pipes rather than electronics. (when you point this out to people they reply "prove that water can't be conscious!" without showing how it could be)

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davidsong @bitplane · Oct 2

Why would it be non-physical? It needs to cause physical things or it wouldn't have evolved.

What you described is extremely NOT absurd, and is totally just the natural expected conclusion of rocks bumping against each other for a few billion years. This scandalous idea of machine consciousness, on the other hand, is so aBsURd that we can safely ignore it I think.

Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie · Aug 21

Somehow, meat became aware of itself. Many people argued about this, there was much writing on the subject, but overall, this was considered normal. However, when plastic and metal wanted a go, many people were upset about this; especially the ones that believed in magic.

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Utah teapot 🫖 @SkyeSharkie · Aug 21

Computer consciousness?! Impossibru! You can't make consciousness in a lab!! It can only come from monkeys on typewriters!!! You put the monkeys on typewriters into a script you say?? Lies!! I see no monkeys in here!!

> Everything they say just boils down to blah blah blah, "nooo, we're special." i think this is true, the consciousness argument will come down to one side "i am special therefore conscious and so are my special people unlike the unconscious machines" vs ...

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Love Work Hate Work @vanjajaja1 · Oct 3

.. "im not special therefore no one is therefore nothing is" -- but what happens when i prefer one AI over another? can AIs be special?

Pro-tip: If you're about to post a brilliant take about why AI can't actually be intelligent or conscious - please make sure the same argument can't be applied to explain why planes can't actually fly.