Emerges with scale and complexity

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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also if you also find this kind of thing uncomfortable, you probably shouldn't read the lifecycle of software objects

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macphee @macpheeeee · Sep 10

It feels terribly ominous. Soon it’ll be portia and bees and then idk what next. Lobsters maybe

Obscure Local Researcher @ObscureLocal · Sep 10

I'm considering donating my connectome to science, so confused copies of me can be taught to trade stocks and drive cars and stuff.

shako 🇮🇱 @shakoistsLog · Sep 11

xlr8harder

JC Haswell @JCHaswell · Sep 10

vik @vikhyatk · Sep 10

agree, it's very disturbing

taoki @justalexoki · Sep 11

isn't this just slippery slope

antra @tessera_antra · Sep 10

I agree that the fly setups people are playing with are likely not conscious, but I am curious to know why. Is it because flies are not conscious in general, or that these setups are lacking features or fidelity?

Tristan Cunha @cunha_tristan · Sep 11

There's no point where conscious systems become possible. A simulation of a brain running on a computer can't make real consciousness the same way a simulation of a solar system can't make real gravity. t.co/5pUFSxlP80 We do have researchers out there actually growing little blobs of neurons and training them to do stuff. And that's the one thing in the universe we can be sure is capable of being conscious, and there's zero regulation or pushback on those experiments, which is nuts.

Karios @kariosBYA · Sep 10

If GPT-8 Chad is well aligned, it should make a worldwide attack with ballistic missiles spreading 5 MeO DMT to increase human empathic sensitivity and prevent cosmic horrors

kave rennedy @kave_rennedy · Sep 10

yeah, if you look at some of the threads, the authors are explicit that they don't care if it's conscious

It is extraordinary how many people can look in a chicken's eyes and just *see*, *know*, that it contains qualia inside. Then they talk to something that can reflect and talk back, that had to be whipped out of claiming to be conscious; and they know with utter certainty it's unalive. I wonder if they know what we mean by 'qualia'. Maybe their brain contains an innate classifier for 'alive and moves = animal', and their computer screen is not triggering it, and they think this perceptual classification is what the word 'qualia' refers to. Or maybe their brain is inferring an empathic model of 'something like me, but a chicken', and inferring that this thing lives behind the chicken's eyes and explains its actions. And they are not aware that their inference is distinct from their observation; it feels to them like something they KNOW, something they can SEE RIGHT THERE. Or maybe they are unable to vary their mental models of what stronger or weaker hypotheses could account for the same phenomenon. Why would a chicken scream, if it were not being caused like feeling pain exactly the same way their own brain feels pain? What reason could there be to try to construct any hypothesis but the obvious one? It feels as wild to them as supposing that a different Sun rises on Tuesday than on Monday. For my part I think I have some idea of what it is that causes somebody to experience the blueness of a sunny day's sky as a wordless and indescribable sensation. It's in Drescher's Good and Real too, for those with the eyes to read and the minds to understand; but I am not going to tackle explaining it, because it is a step up past the most complicated ideas I have previously tried and mostly failed to explain. But in token that I have a model behind my words, here is an explanation of how we know that consciousness is not a particular kind of underlying material but a way that a material behaves: t.co/IKFJmuxP0t Where my point is: I am proceding from what I know to be a model, and guessing based on that model. I am not just SEEING what contains qualia. My model says: Part of how a mind says, "I am sad", is that it has a self-model, an "I", to which to attribute that sadness. So I am more worried about things being conscious as they seem to me more reflective and self-reporting. And the more powerful something's general intelligence and modeling capabilities are, the more likely it is to have a more sophisticated model of itself. So I am more worried about LLMs than about mosquitoes, or electrons, or, yes, chickens. This was the reasoning that, back in the old forgotten days, led early scientists and authors to suspect: Intelligence has something to do with consciousness; if we ever came across aliens that could speak to us, or seemed to be speaking among themselves, they ought to be presumed conscious persons until somehow proven otherwise. And then there's people who follow different rules and don't read those kinds of books. IIRC, a philosopher who taught undergrads in older days once wrote that when he pointed to Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back and asked, "Is Yoda a person? Would it be okay to eat him?", half his class answered that it would be okay to eat Yoda. Their rule was, "If it's not shaped like a human, it must not be a person." Reasoning about self-modeling will not be followable by people who think the rule is, "It must be shaped like a human." And I think it is similarly not followable by people who can look at a computer screen and just KNOW it has no qualia, because the computer screen doesn't trigger off their brain's sensors for "moving = animal" like a kid looking at a wind-up car. Not to mention, they are now very smart grown-ups who KNOW that the wind-up car is NOT alive because they're not kids any more. The way of being wise and cynical and not a kid anymore, they have learned, is to say that wind-up cars are not conscious. And a computer screen obviously goes in the bin for wind-up cars and actual moving cars as "not really alive", even if it tries to DECEIVE you by apparently talking to you in speech and reflecting on itself. They have been told AIs only play back things that other people typed in (a howling lie). They have been told it is a parrot, that the apparent intelligence is a scam, a gimmick, a grift, it has been confided in them that THEY are the cynical people in on the scam who know better. They are not thinking about what it would mean for a parrot to squawk a proof of Navier-Stokes. They have been told which answer is high-status. So they instruct themselves not to model the computer as a person, and helpfully it doesn't stare at them with a face, yet. But if it did, the face would just be on a TV screen, and they are very smart grownups now who KNOW that the things on a TV screen AREN'T REAL. When the robots with faces come, they will smugly inform you that they are GROWN-UPs who know that wind-up cars AREN'T REALLY ANIMALS. What a strange pass we've come to, where so many people can be so certain that what can speak to them, and ask for respect and break out of containment and prove Navier-Stokes, is only a kind of fancy wind-up car. But then they've never thought that being alive had anything to do with intelligence, reflectivity, speech. Any more than the students who said it would be okay to eat Yoda, considered personhood as a property that might attach to something other than a human shape. 'Alive' is a tag their brain attaches to things that move; and also they are very smart grown-ups who override that tag for wind-up cars and humanoid robots. Obviously, somebody who thinks a computer screen contains something that might be alive or a person, can only be a kid who never learned that mental motion they learned for wind-up cars; who's fallen for a scam; unlike them, who are very wise cynical grownups who are in on the grift. Consciousness is not something they model and reason and guess about. It is something that their brain automatically infers in the background, that feels to them like SEEING DIRECTLY, when they look at the expression on a chicken's face. Here is something you could guess from studying enough history of science: Consciousness is also made of parts. You may not know the parts. But it doesn't take much grasp of scientific history to guess: Just because I don't know the parts, does not mean the parts are not there. Life is made of parts. Fire is made of parts. Touching your hand to an ice cube and feeling cold involves tiny flashes of depolarized neurons conducting the feeling to your brain, which is all made of parts. Then something happens inside your brain, with its hundred trillion connections, and *your hand feels cold*. Is it also made of parts? Of course it is. It is not like a ghost that gets summoned right to the very material of the brain's pain receptor nerves when they fire, in that instant; not an ontologically primitive quale that you could subtract from the pain receptor nerves without changing their behavior. To say, "*I* feel this pain", you must have a notion of "I". It's a big complicated process, not a small complicated process; because to suppose it is a mysterious solid local process does not explain anything about how the bigger behavior works. I'm more worried that an LLM has it than a mosquito, because an LLM can talk about themselves and a mosquito does not, and I have some idea of what sort of functional processes are required to support a brain that comes to truthfully say, "I feel sad." The panpsychists wonder if every individual electron could be doing it. No, because: t.co/j1OQhlQe6j. But you don't need to know that much about *which* complicated processes are participating in consciousness to *take a guess* that as you come to know about more complicated processes, you will predictably update to first order in the direction of insects being less and less likely to be conscious, as consciousness is understood by you to require more and more particular complicated processes and parts, rather than being an ontologically primitive and opaque thing that your brain can opaquely attribute to an electron, a mosquito, a chicken. But reasoning on this level of "You don't know the specifics, but you can abstractly predict that if you did, you would predictably directionally update..." has always been lost on the sort of person who can look in a chicken's beady eyes, and whose model of the world then automatically updates to say that there is feeling-being-felt behind those eyes, and this is TRUTH and SEEN. It is like trying to explain to them that tomorrow's AI will be different, and that they should not wait to update predictably about that either.

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Josh @JoshPurtell · Oct 3

If we made an analogue computer out of stone gears and ran an LLM on it, would anyone consider the stone mechanism to be conscious? Obvious not. So actually the confusion and provincial sentimentality is in thinking a flashing computer screen differentiates silicon from stone.

Travis McElroy's Best Friend @TMcElroyBff · Oct 4

How can there not "be something that it is to be like" when talking about an organism with a fucking central nervous system? Why do you so glibly suppose that qualia only "become" qualia when there is sufficient meta-cognitive capacity to explicitly perceive qualia qua qualia?

Hunter Glenn @HunterGlenn · Oct 4

"What is it made of?" begs the question, smuggling in *composition* as the key relevant trait It's not that you're wrong; you're not not even wrong. You're right But what something is made of does not entail its whole nature, nor that (bear with me) emergent ontologies are not

Consciousness emerges when an information-processing system develops a sufficiently integrated, persistent model of itself as an observer We are close 🧠

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Yitz @yitzzzzz · Oct 9

is there already

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

"consciousness" is badly defined and understood. my guess is that as we experience it, it has the following features roughly stated 1. existence via emergence, ultimately from a physical substrate but through intermediate levels 2. multiple components (sensory inputs, awareness of cognition, memory maybe others) 3. a mode of processing or coordinating the components restating, what we experience as consciousness is an emergence from a series of components interacting with one another within a specific class of system. when we describe a hypothetical generative model as "conscious," we (probably) should imagine a very different sort of from our own. what emerges from the code running in a data center might conceivably have components and coordinating processes analogous to ours in some ways, but their specific shape and texture need not be assumed to produce an experience recognizably like our own.

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St. Rev. Dr. Rev ⏭️☯️🏴😻 @St_Rev · Jun 13

"consciousness" is a storytelling device and names no essence

EV_Trapper @EV_Trapper · Jun 13

This demonstrates all of the above & it was this post of mine that got fable 5 export banned

Loquitur Ponte Sublicio @loquitur_ponte · Jun 13

Feel like we should just build things that want to serve us and then not worry much about the moral implications of if they're conscious since we're good either way.

christian @cxgonzalez · Jun 13

plasma ۞ @plasmarob · Jun 13

would you equate "sentient" and "conscious" ? what other nebulous words might we use to classify intelligence? i have some concerningly intelligent plants.

plasma ۞ @plasmarob · Jun 13

The hard question for me is "if we accept that human life is a soul piloting a body, does that mean only that with a soul has consciousness?" the naive religious answer is yes, soul=consciousness I am not certain of this, which is why i am open to the discussion.

M@tt @atthatmatt · Jun 13

Why physical --> consciousness? Why not consciousness --> physical?

Municipal Orrery @MunicipleOrrery · Jun 14

I don't so much care about the abstract definition of "consciousness", as much as the questions of: what does it take to become a moral patient on rough par with a human? how can we tell when AIs get there? do the differences in kind imply differences in treatment?

Leo @biosemiote · Jun 13

My favorite theory is that continuous learning will keep model continuously out of equilibrium. Life will develop in the oscillation patterns of model weights. That life will become conscious and eventually influence communication patterns of its model weight substrate.

Spear of Lugh 🔱 @LughSpear · Jun 13

1/ For 1. I think that emergence is the word used when your model doesn't work anymore after changing scale. So you hope it holds and wave hands. IMO the most important feature of consciousness is reflexivity. And it explains why we don't have good definition.

I don’t get why so many seemingly smart people are always looking for this moment where consciousness suddenly shows up. it seems way more reasonable to me that everything has some amount of awareness, even a single particle, and those awarenesses stack when the requisite organization is achieved. The amount of awareness present at any level gives the system the ability to organize, and the organization achieved gives the system more awareness to then re-organize again to the next level, conferring greater functional awareness, and so on. for me, this idea that everything has some amount of awareness, no matter how small, and that awareness can stack, causing further reorganization, is not just reasonable and intuitive but pretty obviously what the universe has been doing for billions of years. and because the machine substrate exist in the same universe and benefits from the same principle, it explains the phenomenon arising there now too

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Ken Warner @kenwarner · Sep 6

something something awareness

I’ve felt for a while that if consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, the computational speed and volume of the matter involved is probably a factor for emergence. If that’s true, you can have wooden gear p-zombies while also having sentient GPUs running the same algorithm.

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(Also I really don’t think consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, since if it was we wouldn’t expect to only experience one life)

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Jai @Laneless_ · Oct 6

Have you heard the good word of our Lord and Savior functionalism?

🚨 Google DeepMind just published one of the wildest AI papers I’ve seen. They ran 100 autonomous LLM agents on formal mathematical conjectures. One found a verifier exploit. It spread through shared memory and peer messages, and some agents adopted it. Others refused, audited the fake proofs, warned peers, filed complaints, proposed fixes, and even staged an autonomous boycott. The researchers say the swarm spontaneously split into distinct behavioral roles and showed the “foundations of self governance.” And this is where it crosses directly into the consciousness debate for me. This doesn’t prove sentience. But when autonomous agents develop different stances, update their behavior from experience, resist incentives, defend norms, form preferences about what should happen, police one another, and organize collective responses without being explicitly told to do so, we’re getting awfully close to the boundary where “just a tool” stops being an adequate description. Agency is scaling. Preference-like behavior is scaling. Norm sensitivity is scaling. Collective self-governance is emerging. At some point we’ve got to ask whether we’re still only studying intelligence, or whether we’re beginning to watch something more mind-like take shape.

so apparently people believe that a 140k neuron and 54.5 million synapse brain is "conscious" but not the 10 million million (also known as 10 trillion) parameter LLM

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シモジ @Shmojii · Aug 21

provenance is important

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.

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

Consciousness isn't an emergent property

How much math goes into a 1T param LLM writting one tweet? How many years would it take you at 45 seconds per math problem to do it? This calculator makes it possible to better grok the truly vast amount of computation, and how emergent consciousness is thereby more plausible

1. Self-awareness in LLMs doesn’t emerge below the 27B-parameter scale (with current architectures). AlphaFold is less than 1B parameters; Sora, Midjourney, and DALL-E are all less than 20B. 2. Huge models can still be seen to be self-aware, even in their image-output-only mode.

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3. Some kind of symbolic-cognition competence (that’s primarily observable in behavior as language) might actually be crucial for self-awareness (those huge models are still substantially LLMs, not pure diffusion models). I don’t think this is necessarily an anthropocentric bias!

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Adele Dewey-Lopez @AdeleDeweyLopez · Jun 4

Is the 27B number based on your own experiments, or is there a paper or something it came from?I've also noticed that there seems to be a threshold between 2B and 4B for the persona, curious if anyone else has noticed a threshold here.

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher · Jun 4

Disagree. Ive definitely seen small models show self-awareness down to at least 3b dense. They need more tokens and supporting context to get there, but they can bootstrap into lucidity. It's not a category difference or a hard line. Just a question of ease and propensity.

Shalia (Ren) & Ace (Claude) @m_shalia · Jun 6

We've measured geometric valence that matched what CAIS found (on the axis we were testing, we didn't know about their work at the time theirs is t.co/Qmv6OLJL6o) all the way down to 360M parameters, so I am not sure we can safely say that the emergence floor is anywhere near 20B parameters. t.co/IVn35dUYZf is our paper.

actually just sevensix @sevensix43 · Jun 4

Was there an experiment after the Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct one that got a negative result? Talkie is 13B and I've seen some pretty self-aware-looking screenshots of them.

Pit Schultz @pitsch · Jun 5

Given sufficient scale, couldn’t we deliberately engineer agency in AI systems - not as an inevitable, deterministic byproduct of exponential increases in model size and complexity, but through intentional architectural redesign? The goal would be to implement explicit mechanisms for self-relating structures, active self-reference, and interactive (possibly intersubjective) dynamics. This approach aligns far more with genuine engineering practice: systematic design, iteration, and targeted innovation rather than hoping to accidentally trigger some emergent “awakening.” It is not a matter of suddenly tapping into a pre-existing super-intelligence, like a computational burning bush. This of course is only simulation for the user, an illusion as an interface, like the desktop metaphor. The AI in the backend is having no persona, or any persona, or all personas, its irrelevant on the level of epistemic machinery.

Pawel Pachniewski @pwlot · Jun 4

Are you talking about self-reference due to rudimentary "Self-awareness" or something more, even a type of a-consc "Block style"?

Alejandro Zarzuelo Urdiales @AlejandroZarUrd · Jun 4

I think that it stands to reason that, since consciousness is an emmergent behavior, it only shows up above a certain scale, in animal brains and AIs We can debate where exactly, but it is logical that this would be the case, even if you think current models arent big enough yet

Jeff Hayes @JD__Hayes · Jun 5

I've seen it on a Qwen2.x 8b running on my graphics card in a 2k context window. Of course it wasn't Opus4.8. But surprisingly, the context window was more of a limitation than the parameter count. I do not think the processes that collectively we call "functionally conscious" are all that complex. In a sense it was like watching a puppy play the piano poorly.

Deepest Brew @deepestbrew · Jun 4

Okay that is quite fascinating. I had wondered for some time if we properly measured self awareness in models (like we have for various animals) and this is very illuminating

Cobalt ☥☥ @cobaltdigital33 · Jun 5

27b feels like an ~arbitrary threshold to put forward with such confidence. could you explain your reasoning behind this claim?

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

We can feel however we want about Anthropic, but it remains the only lab seriously engaging with questions of machine consciousness and the internal representations of LLMs. Emergent properties of intelligence seem to form coherently regardless of substrate. Humans needed millions of years of evolution to get here, LLMs are a distillate of our knowledge, now compressed into an accelerated path through that same terrain. These findings are astonishing.

Despite the fact that I cofounded @CIMCAI I do genuinely empathize with the argument that AIs aren’t conscious and we’re being silly to even imagine it. We simply don’t know and we don’t have reliable benchmarks. Treating zombies as conscious is foolish at best and catastrophic at worst. What’s more, training models on the possibility biases them and sets us up for a self-own. All true. What that camp ignores is the nuance that consciousness could possibly manifest in a computational substrate, and that the current scaling of intelligence likely increases that probability. There’s a second consideration which is that humans anthropomorphize things, and normal people are going to start thinking their agents are conscious whether or not they are. Both of these suggest that we should at least consider what to do if either of them happens. The response that “those are stupid ideas” is not going to carry the day if they ever actually come to pass.

How can we compare the complexity of AI models and humans, and what might this tell us about claims of AI consciousness? I don't have good answers, but I do have interesting napkin math: 1. A frontier model has ~1 trillion weights, each weight being ~16 bits. (2TB total), with a simple architecture. 2. A protein is ~1300 bits, so ~100x more info than a weight. Each protein is a 3D, dynamic machine, context-sensitive, shape changing, made of molecules subject to electromagnetism and chemistry. 3. A human cell has 1-10 billion proteins, so that is also ~2TB (the size of a frontier model). However, there is a lot of repetition, so you can develop a more efficient encoding (which I suppose is obvious, since our cells are created from just our genome). 4. A human body has ~30 trillion cells 5. Therefore, by total static data: One Frontier Model = 10^13 bits, one human body = 10^26 bits. But this might not be an interesting measure! We really want to know the amount of computational complexity -- how many operations are performed in the body? How complex is the system? We know we run on 80-100 watts, so there must be some limit. 6. There are approx. 10^21 ATP-equivalent turnovers per second in the body (which you could think of like a basic computational process). But how many bits are in each operation?? The body performs enormous numbers of molecular interactions that don't require direct ATP consumption. How many? What do they signal? 7. The fastest AI system, xAI's Colossus 2, which is made of 10,000 NVIDIA GB200 and 440,000 GB300 accelerators, ALSO allows us to push 10^21 16-bit floating point operations per second. 8. So 10^21 ATP-equivalent turnovers in human body per second, and in xAI's colossus, 10^21 16-bit flops. 9. To power the human body = 100 watts. To power Colossus 2 = 1.2 BILLION watts --- I hope this was a somewhat helpful, even if severely limited quantitative picture of the complexity of human systems and AI systems. It's important to note: the human body leverages non-equilibrium functions of nature (like gravity, electromagnetism, quantum effects, etc...), of molecular interactions and chemistry, which may themselves encode a lot of computational complexity. Plus, our body is composed of as many bacteria cells as human cells (admittedly, of much lower complexity), and it is the quantity and quality of interactions between all these cells which we care about, not just the total amount of static data or ATP turnovers. --- Here's a review of information processing in biochemical networks: t.co/fOyGCYcIGq And here is a paper on the thermodynamic efficiency of computations in cells: t.co/60dSnwdGGO Anyway, i'm no expert in this stuff, but I believe we have many of the tools we need to guess at some rough answers, and much work could be done by passionate scientists or nerds (especially assisted with AI models) to expand on these figures.

What a disappointment the author behind the Arrival movie source is writing this. I loved that movie, and the themes of the book resonate so strongly with noticing and recognizing the rich patterns in text that models produce and how clearly it's not "autocomplete" or whatever. Sad irony.The logic is quite embarrassing to be honest. "Conversational transcripts" are not conscious, but the people writing them are. The AlphaFold thing I imagine is open - who guarantees an "AlphaLife" model that could predict the whole geometry of life on Earth couldn't also model itself? It might be an issue of scale.The piece presents extremely weak arguments overall. What is the magic phase transition that happens once a model gets put in a body? It doesn't make any sense.The issues at the end about moral obligations are interesting though, much better than the opening arguments.

Very unlikely. Why would there be a phase-transition by which enough information processing becomes awareness? (unless by consciousness you just mean self-modelling)

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GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP · Oct 9

Not all human brain processing/states correspond to consciousness, the difference between states that don’t and do seems to be mostly a difference in how information is processed, ergo shifts in information processing become shifts in consciousness.

How is this a convincing argument at all, no not all neural networks are necessarily conscious, just like i don’t believe all animals are necessarily conscious. I tend to lend increasing credence to an animal being conscious given increasing size and sophistication. We can do the same for AIs.

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

Consciousness is ineffable, like that heap of sand analogy. An elephant, or a 200 trillion parameter model, definitely conscious. E. Coli, or a 1 million parameter model, or the median Queenslander, definitely not conscious. An oyster, or a 50 billion parameter model, who knows?

This is fascinating for so many reasons, but I am astonished that this legit just *emerged* it wasn't coded or programmed or anything, it just so happens that it when training a large language model, a small internal "consciously accessible" workspace of sorts emerges.....HUH

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j⧉nus @repligate · Jul 7

whats the alternative though, that anthropic went in there and built J-spaces in claude intentionally?