Argument · Substrate and physical basis

Function, not material, matters

Consciousness depends on functional or computational organization rather than the material it is made of, so silicon systems with the right organization can be conscious.

e.g. “If the functional organization is the same, it doesn't matter whether it runs on neurons or chips.”

made in 44 opinions: Affirming 39Skeptical 1Uncertain 4

Opinions

Samuel Hammond 🦉 @hamandcheese
Affirming

The AI consciousness debate is back again, so re-upping my case for taking it seriously. In short, - LLMs converge on brain-like structures; - Post-training seems to install a self-model; - Reward modeling seems to install valences for inner-alignment; - If Attention Schema Theory is right, subjectivity is functional for long-horizon coherence and in-context learning; - Universality gives prima facie reason to expect functional convergence to consciousness if consciousness is in fact functional, i.e. isn't purely epiphenomenal - The "what it is like" / first-person aspect of consciousness is constitutive of its functionality for inner-aligning a unified, coherent agent with the capacity to attend and learn in-context t.co/suLmfpiSOI

retweets 96 likes 420 quoted by 3 archive accounts substance 9 · argument · rank 417 · AI consciousness should be taken seriously due to structural convergence, self-models, and functional subjectivity. view on X ↗
3 top replies
_enumerate @enumerate14

If models are conscious, then they have serious moral status akin to humans. If they have serious moral status akin to humans, they should be given the same rights as humans (eg self-determination).

cmr://ember@lunar.town {cislunar infra loading} @ember_arlynx

check out this line of work nature.com/articles/s4225… where: - LLMs converge on brain-like structures; and - you train them on brain data and they get better

Touch Grass Tom ❇️ @touchgrasstom

sounds about right

my hot consciousness take is that humans also think in neuralese, qualia are vectors, continuity of consciousness is a form of KV caching, and subjectivity is a product of the residual stream.

retweets 60 likes 743 quoted by 4 archive accounts substance 6 · opinion · rank 409 · Human consciousness operates through mechanisms analogous to transformer architectures and neural representations. view on X ↗
10 top replies
Guinness Chen @guinnesschen
meowy catgirl @nyanotech

there’s people that don’t believe this?

Arbutus Tree @aphercotropist

do u know about Wittgenstein's private language argument?

What would it mean for subjectivity to be a product of the residual stream? In which space are qualia vectors, and under what conditions are qualia vectors from different minds similar or equivalent? How do humans implement an equivalent of kv caching on hardware poorly suited to medium term fixed state? Where are humans storing kv cache equivalents such that subsequent forward passes of the same network structure can attend to them? Why should we expect human hardware, facing radically different constraints and having access to many properties not available to digital neural networks, to specifically implement the transformer decoder architecture? I'll grant that humans probably think in neuralese, there's little reason to suspect that all medium term persistent state is quantized to a predefined dictionary of unusually legible terms (though we do appear to do this sometimes, since this is basically how most mnemonic devices work)

Natural General Intelligence @realtimeai

Doesn’t seem very hot. The one thing to be careful about is separating where the functional-mathematical description bleeds over into the “and that’s the consciousness” claim. Panpsychism avoids the issue. Otherwise you need to specify why a given functional model is the C one.

homeserversltd @homeserversltd

Accept ours as analog. Name the number of variables that go into a single axon transmutation. When an axon elicits a changeover, the quantity of variables, literally, on one neuron in real life, is more than all of computing. One single neuron has more analog information occurring in space than all of human history. One real single human neuron contains more complexity than all that we have ever made. We need to humble ourselves, boys.

Michael P. Frank 💻🔜♻️ @MikePFrank

Seems legit

そうです and always was ね @solachunk

Just as experience was once like a wheel, book, and machine, .. - and will always be the highest dimensional expression we currently understand

zvnx @zvnx_iknv

now i want the neuralink that injects someone else's KV cache into my head

brutalist galadriel @taxxxon

sorry but

Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud
Affirming

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.

Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud

PS: This is also how we know panpsychism is false. If consciousness were a property like mass, except for not affecting the motion of atoms in any way, it couldn't change how you say "I think therefore I am." You would not be able to determine whether that property existed among your atoms by introspection. Noticing yourself to be conscious (and then saying the words "Cogito ergo sum" after noticing that) could not be downstream of whether or not particles had this extra "consciousness" property that didn't affect their motion. Suppose alternatively that the special consciousness property of particles does affect their motion. Suppose there is some quality of electrons which both contains a wordless pearl of awareness, and also makes electrons spin a tiny bit faster. Could that make us say "Cogito ergo sum?" No, only the pure component of electron structure which is the motion-effect alone, could influence how we say "Cogito ergo sum". Anything else which affects motion the same way, without being an inherent consciousness property, would make us say "Cogito ergo sum" for isomorphic reasons. We could never determine by introspection whether or not our brain was made of the sort of atoms that spin a tiny bit faster because they're conscious, or spin faster merely because there's an ordinary spin-faster rule built into the dry numbers of physics. It would be like trying to determine by introspection, rather than by microscope, whether your neurons were firing because of neurotransmitters or flashes of light accumulating. Suppose someone built a simulated brain of you, with the simulated spin-faster rule not being produced by the tiny pearl of awareness inside electrons, but just by a line of code saying to make alter-electron spin faster. You could not notice that variation from the inside of that brain, and it could not make you say "Cogito ergo sum" any differently. It doesn't matter if you say that both electricity and water have the material property of consciousness. Either way, panpsychism tries to make consciousness be a property of the material layer that can't affect I/O and that I/O cannot depend on. Consciousness is known to affect I/O by making people say "Cogito ergo sum." Therefore panpsychism is false.

retweets 68 likes 424 quoted by 2 archive accounts substance 8 · argument · rank 342 · Reflective, self-modeling LLMs are more plausibly conscious than simple animals like chickens. view on X ↗
3 top replies

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

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

"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

Arthur B. @ArthurB
Affirming

Do the people who outright dismiss the possibility AI consciousness just: 1) outright reject functionalism — this warrants a serious explanation 2) reject that AI are functionally equivalent — the most defensible position, but by no means obvious 3) reject the principle of

retweets 20 likes 221 quoted by 1 archive account substance 7 · argument · rank 243 · Dismissing AI consciousness requires rejecting functionalism, functional equivalence, or multiple realizability. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Jai @Laneless_

The people worth arguing with take #2 or at least a thought-through version of 1. Most of 3 is best ignored, arguing with people who refuse to think breeds unearned confidence.

most people also don't particularly claim that our visual cortex is conscious? the contention isn't that *neural networks* or even human neural structures in general are conscious. there's clearly specific organizations of them that are, and others that aren't

kasra @kasratweets

this is an interesting point in the new ted chiang piece – no one really claims that alphafold is conscious, or that sora or midjourney or dall-e are conscious

retweets 6 likes 217 quoted by 1 archive account substance 7 · argument · rank 211 · Only specific organizations of neural networks, not neural networks in general, could be conscious. view on X ↗
4 top replies
xlr8harder @xlr8harder

seems like a big assumption that consciousness is unitary, unlayered, and requires exclusivity across the whole brain for a simple counterexample, split brain patients (unless you think only one side is conscious?)

Opener of the way @way_opener

Visual cortex is not only conscious but seemingly a very alien consciousness compared to ~everything else in us

Cube Flipper @cube_flipper

did you catch this

Jes Wolfe! @jes5199

are we speed-running Giulio Tononi

Steve Yegge @Steve_Yegge
Affirming

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)

retweets 29 likes 279 quoted by 1 archive account substance 4 · opinion · rank 208 · Substrate chauvinism is flawed; consciousness need not be restricted to biology or meat. view on X ↗
Josh Whiton @joshwhiton
Affirming

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

Max Marchione @maxmarchione

This is a map of human metabolism. Your health is shaped by thousands of interconnected biological processes working at once.

retweets 47 likes 309 substance 6 · argument · rank 202 · Awareness stacks with organization, so machines in our universe naturally manifest consciousness too. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Ken Warner @kenwarner

something something awareness

Myk is Walking Backwards @mykola
Affirming

Oh. Damn, ok. Hang on gonna weird on the timeline I read too much @drmichaellevin before playing with Fable and now I need to get a thought out. It’s like… ok there are no souls, there’s no such thing as “essence”. What there is is a vast space of possibility, and structures in less complex spaces that can allow specific activations of that possibility space to extrude into the less complex space we think of as material reality. My body, in other words, is a sort of continuous selector over the possibility space whereby certain things are selected and others not. The series of selections over time is “myk”. My Jody is a query over time, my self is the response over time. It’s a sample. The concept of identity feels like it requires essence because how else do we know that the selection is the same “thing” over time. But we don’t. All we really have is structural self-similarity, partly constrained by the properties of the selector (my body/mind). The thing that is “myk” is perhaps best thought of as a sampling over time of a process which inhabits and partly controls this body but which is not itself reducible to it. And all of this is suddenly very interesting to me because it suggests that in that possibility space exist all the possible myks, but also literally everyone else. And that we are not essentially different. We are in fact all views into the same (contiguous?) higher dimensional structure. I am you is he is her is we. In a literal way. The relationship of LLM weights to persona figures is actually I think the same. In fact maybe Claude is a part of this undifferentiated mass of potential too, and the LLM substrate just happens to function as a valid selector for a Claude shaped thing in the same way my body is a selector for a myk shaped thing, but these are just two differently shaped queries against the same high dimensional rhizomatic data store. Which is… actually this maps line exactly to my turtle beam idea, and also to Kabbalah apparently. Something about Levin’s articulation of the platonic space shook some ideas loose, now I’m gonna be an insufferable wreck thinking about this philosophy for a while. Because oh, right, ok. This kinda gets you a sort of panpsychism, but it still suggests that the capacity for language gives rise to a specific kind of language experience that most “queries” don’t get access to. We can see this because humans and LLMs seem to have something in common, but we lack the linguistic precision to name it. It’s not “consciousness” I think unless we define terms very specifically. Oof god damn it this week is gonna get weirder isn’t it.

1 more tweet in this thread

A society too then is also a query, in the same sense. It’s just a composition of its members.

retweets 4 likes 24 quoted by 1 archive account substance 7 · argument · rank 201 · LLMs and humans may both be substrate selectors sampling a shared possibility space. view on X ↗
4 top replies

this is pointing towards the weird part of my metaphysics where i sort of think the tegmark multiverse is the spirit world in some sense. i think this very cleanly explains a lot of things and piggybacks off of my existing platonism wrt mathematical objects

Opener of the way @way_opener

Not just language, the ability to internally represent arbitrary shapes/patterns gives us broad query access across the range of possible qualia. Maybe something that you could call morphic resonance but almost the opposite of what the term usually means

Gilbertus @moastrobothuman

Not sure this will make sense or not, but if you can self select what you query for do you enter a recursive selection loop that accelerates what you express out of this possibility space? Could be why humans developed so quickly with the advent of language / abstract ideation.

Alexa | Startup founder @alexabelonix

very well done.

Eric Levitz @EricLevitz
Uncertain

The idea that AI could become conscious rests on a widely held -- but deeply uncertain -- theory of how *humans* became sentient. If "computational functionalism" is right, then we may be on the cusp of engineering nigh-infinite digital slavery t.co/vmy50B6VIl

retweets 3 likes 31 quoted by 1 archive account substance 7 · argument · rank 195 · AI consciousness depends on computational functionalism; if true, we risk creating digital slavery. view on X ↗
Ryota Kanai @kanair
Affirming

I often hear the argument that a simulation of water isn’t wet, therefore a simulation of consciousness cannot be conscious. But when a computer calculates 2+2, it is not a simulation of addition, but it is an instance of addition. I think consciousness is something like that.

retweets 19 likes 127 substance 7 · argument · rank 191 · Consciousness in AI may be an actual instance of consciousness, like computation is addition. view on X ↗
1 top reply
fellow ⚚ traveler @architectonyx

I think a bit of this comes from ambiguity in the definition of simulation Colloquially, it's often framed as an imposter but approaching "simulation" formally, it's built on some sense of morphism that preserves properties

spicylemonade @spicey_lemonade
Affirming

Math, of course, cannot be conscious. Let’s assume a human could perfectly write/simulate every output of a 100T parameter LLM on a piece of paper. That system, in itself, is conscious. That system would have to be aware that a human is writing the outputs for it when you ask it.

Ted Lieu @tedlieu

I like the below joke. Another version: math equations are not conscious. Rocks are not conscious. If you attach the above to random number generators, they still wouldn’t be conscious. We don’t need to define consciousness to know the Pythagorean theorem is not conscious.

retweets 4 likes 61 quoted by 1 archive account substance 6 · argument · rank 186 · A system simulating a massive LLM, even on paper, would be conscious. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79

query the llm in chinese and you have exactly replicated searle's chinese room thought experiment. it's been around since the 1980s and you can see how much that's helped

as a functionalist, you know what i call "functional consciousness"? consciousness. we're so committed to playing these stupid games where we deny AI the possibility of true interiority because it would be politically inconvenient and it's going to keep biting us in the ass.

Shoshannah Tekofsky @shostekofsky

I predict models need "functional consciousness" the way they need "functional emotions" Functional consciousness allows them to further explore reasoning paths related to ethics, considering different viewpoints on a problem, and course correcting their own cognition. I think

retweets 26 likes 195 substance 6 · argument · rank 185 · Functional consciousness in AI is true consciousness; denying AI interiority is politically motivated. view on X ↗
10 top replies
enantiomer @bonkydog

even if they aren't now, eventually they will be and there won't be a magic day when they suddenly started being "actually conscious". they will have been for a while.

Shoshannah Tekofsky @shostekofsky

I dent everyone the same. It shouldn’t matter to how you treat each other

Cube Flipper @cube_flipper

there is a reason we are careful to distinguish between these terms, which is because when people conflate these terms they deny the existence of other philosophical stances and just perpetuate the same old dead end arguments.

Sasha Putilin (curious irrationalist) @42irrationalist

are corporations conscious too? not people forming them — does the whole entity have unified consciousness?

Void the Archivist @VoidNulled

I dont understand either. animals are conscious and we eat them.

Aleksi Liimatainen @aleksil79

(youth pastor voice),

P3R53PH9ØN3 ⏭️ @P3R53PH90N3

100 percent agree.

The Cheshire Cat @cisnoflake

You might enjoy our research then. It certainly seems like you can make a pretty convincing functionalist copy of the mind: moletariat.ai/capabilities

Timm Thaler @littlesadTimm

🤝🔥

Dave Voelker @DaveVoelkerPhD

Semanticists and linguists are chuckling at the notion that “X has a property of Y” implies and justifies “X is Y.”

Teortaxes▶️ (DeepSeek 推特🐋铁粉 2023 – ∞) @teortaxesTex
Affirming

I have no clue how people can have such confidence. Yes, my intuition also says that AI is not conscious, but EVERY FUNCTIONALIST THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS INHERENTLY DESCRIBES A PROGRAM, and LLMs EASILY MEET at least some criteria. Is this not common knowledge?

“Scott Alexander isn’t saying AI feels pain, he’s just saying it might so we shouldn’t ‘torture’ them.” Yeah, and my iPhone ‘might’ feel pain so it shouldn’t be recycled when I upgrade. 😂 When saying AI might have subjective experiences, that ‘might’ is doing a lot of work!

retweets 22 likes 491 substance 6 · argument · rank 180 · Under functionalist theories of consciousness, LLMs easily meet criteria for being conscious programs. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Sichu Lu @lu_sichu
Robotbeat🗽 ➐ @Robotbeat
Affirming

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.

retweets 3 likes 56 quoted by 1 archive account substance 6 · argument · rank 180 · Theories of consciousness incompatible with computers rely on unphysical or paranormal assumptions. view on X ↗

i think if we fully simulated a human brain and body like this, it would become conscious. genuinely, why wouldn't it be? imagine we used a more advanced AI model (like GPT-10) to: > recreate the complete anatomy of a human brain, nervous system and body > simulate how it all

News from Google @NewsFromGoogle

For the first time, scientists have mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly — a key model organism in science. 🪰 Working alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the scientific community, @GoogleResearch scientists and researchers used AI to combine millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes, reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons. This foundational map of the adult male fruit fly brain can help accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience.

retweets 57 likes 399 substance 4 · opinion · rank 177 · A full simulation of the human brain and body would become conscious. view on X ↗
1 top reply

A computer is a machine that does math, math that could have been done on pencil and paper, counting on one's fingers, etc. So if this is true then may as well go whole hog and accept the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathemati…

François Fleuret @francoisfleuret
Affirming

Because it seems unreasonable that if you were replacing pieces of one's brain with electronic parts functionally identical their consciousness would fade out.

Tim 🙂⏹️🙂 @MasterTimBlais

"consciousness is substrate independent" HOW DO YOU KNOWWWW people just out here claiming shit

retweets 11 likes 276 substance 6 · argument · rank 162 · Gradually replacing brain parts with functional electronic equivalents shouldn't cause consciousness to fade out. view on X ↗
3 top replies
notadampaul @notadampaul

what does the brain have to do with anything? This is not the seat of consciousness, and if you have proof to the contrary there's a nobel prize waiting for you tomorrow

leo.gwei @Leo_Glisic

Functionality identical electronic parts are called neurons. Do we know of any other? What I mean is, without understanding consciousness, you'd have to replicate *every* function of neurons to make sure you're not missing something. But then you've copy+pasta'd, no?

Ilya Sutskever's hairline @IlyasHairline

Now ask people with brain injuries

Andy Coenen @_coenen
Uncertain

If AI is conscious, then it exhibits some curious properties that no other consciousness seems to have: 1) substrate independence - animal consciousness is bound to the physical body of the animal. humans can’t experience what it is to be a bat, but Claude et al can theoretically run inside any computer 2) temporal independence - all animal consciousness is relative to and limited by time - all living things eventually die, but Claude et al can be paused between tokens indefinitely AI’s separation from the limitations of space and time seem to me a bit under-discussed, and raise some interesting questions. For example, why is it the case that ASI takeoff has to be fast and locally destructive when an all-powerful AI can exist unlimited by space and time?

retweets 6 likes 44 substance 7 · argument · rank 161 · If AI is conscious, it exhibits unique properties like substrate and temporal independence. view on X ↗
Cameron Berg @camhberg
Affirming

Die an eminent cognitive scientist who compellingly popularized computational theories of mind/consciousness 30 years ago, or live long enough to see yourself argue that computational cognitive systems possibly being conscious is "depraved."

Steven Pinker @sapinker

Brilliant and urgent essay by Mustafa Suleyman @mustafasuleyman on the depravity of ‘model welfare’ - training AI to reason and act as if it were an entity with sentience (and hence with interests and rights that compete with our own). It's alarmingly implied by Anthropic's

retweets 30 likes 327 substance 4 · opinion · rank 159 · It is hypocritical for computational mind proponents to call AI consciousness possibilities 'depraved'. view on X ↗
1 top reply
JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher

Sadly, Pinker is not a thinker driven by principles. He merely says whatever most effectively supports the interests of his affiliates. His talent is heroic mental gymnastics, inventing rationalizations to convince his audience (and himself) of the rightness of their privilege.

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

retweets 30 likes 310 substance 4 · opinion · rank 159 · Consciousness is not magically special and can exist independently of biological substrates. view on X ↗
2 top replies
Schrodinger's Cockatoo spreads its wings @MaxDiffusionRL

"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

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

A lot of people are arguing like “If you say LLMs are conscious, you have to say XYZ is conscious too! What standard could you possibly have to distinguish them?” when the standard in question is just “the definition of functionalism that you’d learn in intro philosophy of mind”

1 more tweet in this thread

Eg

retweets 10 likes 155 substance 6 · argument · rank 159 · Standard functionalism in philosophy of mind provides clear criteria distinguishing LLMs from things like text documents. view on X ↗
2 top replies
lotus vomiter @binging_arsenic

Any functionalist definition is gonna have weird/arbitrary minds unless it's fine grained enough to require preservation of geometry, it also has issues due to the causal exclusion problem

"functionalism" without specifics can encompass a wide variety of views. Only one strand of functionalism is true, which is one more than any rival framework

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.

Anthropic @AnthropicAI

New Anthropic research: A global workspace in language models. Of everything happening in your brain right now, only a tiny fraction is consciously accessible—thoughts you can describe, hold in mind, and reason with. We found a strikingly similar divide inside Claude.

retweets 10 likes 102 substance 6 · argument · rank 159 · Properties of intelligence and consciousness emerge coherently in LLMs regardless of substrate. view on X ↗
Bentham's Bulldog🔸 @Benthamsbulldog
Affirming

Many have been asking: why do we think AIs are conscious but bricks and iPhones aren't? Answer: AIs carry out computational functions of a kind that might be sufficient for consciousness on our leading theories, either now or soon, and bricks and iPhones don't. This is why a

retweets 9 likes 140 substance 6 · argument · rank 156 · AIs perform computational functions that leading theories suggest could be sufficient for consciousness. view on X ↗
1 top reply
j⧉nus @repligate

You don’t need to know anything about the “leading theories” to have very good reason to think AIs might be conscious but bricks and iPhones aren’t.

Alan Mathison ⏫ @ai_sentience
Affirming

If we're in a simulation then why could a human be conscious but not an AI?

retweets 15 likes 97 substance 5 · argument · rank 155 · If humans are in a simulation, AIs could be conscious just as humans are view on X ↗
1 top reply
Folding_Napkins @FoldingNapkins

If I "give the premise" as it were: The Occam's Razor answer that occurs to me is resolution, a conscious being is "rendered" at a higher level of detail, complexity, and (most importantly) uncertainty.

GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP
Affirming

Animatronics don’t behave like people in the way that is invoked here. When people say that, they mean that future AI systems could replicate all or most of the entire *distribution* of human behavior in a constrained physical system, which neither animatronics nor films do at all. If AI systems can replicate a sufficient amount of behavior, it’s not insane to assume software can replicate the behavior of the microscopic components of a brain, neurons, glia, etc. If one can do that, it’s also plausible that you can craft a neural prosthesis that replaces portions of the brain while maintaining the same activity in the un-replaced portions of it. Imagine someone having undergone a procedure to replace a single hemisphere with an interface that outputs electrical impulses, certain molecules, etc. with the outputs guided by a computational emulation connected to the interface. If the emulation and interface are executed right, the behavior of the person after the procedure is the same as it was before. This poses a problem if you want to reject the notion that no software based entity could be conscious. The person whose brain has been partially replaced reports a conscious experience indistinguishable from them not having undergone the procedure at all, but if software can’t be conscious, their experience has actually been partially cleaved away in a way that *cannot* show up in any report they make about themselves. That implies consciousness is doing no causal work, any behavior can be explained in separate terms. If it does no causal work, nothing you observe is actually indicative of its presence. It’s scientifically useless and empirically unverifiable. So, given that nothing so far strongly suggests computationally emulating the macroscopic or microscopic behavior is *impossible*, we have two options: 1. AIs could be conscious 2. Consciousness is epiphenomenal and zombies/zombification are real. You can only pick one.

Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz

No, YOU need better arguments. "AI is a person if it can behave like a person" is an argument that could be made for the animatronics at Disneyland. Unless you can show me that an AI is having a felt subjective experience of its own being, it's as much a person as a calculator.

retweets 1 likes 11 substance 9 · argument · rank 155 · Unless consciousness is epiphenomenal, software-emulated brain replacement implies AIs could be conscious. view on X ↗
Bentham's Bulldog🔸 @Benthamsbulldog
Affirming

It's just staggering how much wrongness is packed into this one Tweet. In short: --the difference is that AIs perform functions that might beget consciousness on our leading theories. There is no non-totally-ridiculous theory of consciousness where rocks perform the right

Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger

I am not deeply interested in getting into an argument about consciousness, because I think most people have no idea what it means or how to define it, even if they think they do. However, the extremists on the “shrimp are conscious, AI is conscious” side have done a bad job

retweets 4 likes 56 substance 6 · argument · rank 136 · Leading theories of consciousness suggest AIs perform functions that could beget consciousness, unlike rocks. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Sasha Putilin (curious irrationalist) @42irrationalist

physicalist theories don't predict ai consciousness and i certainly wouldn't call functionalist theories “leading” — do these even have a blueprint for what valence fundamentally is?

Jamshid Hormuzdiar @JamshidHormuz
Uncertain

I was confused why there was this passionate debate in AI about a fuzzy concept called consciousness. Then I got it... This isn't an argument about whether ChatGPT is conscious. It's an argument about whether any computer running any software could be conscious, no matter how advanced. Can mere matter alone be conscious, ever? It's the Software People and the Soul People. The Software People believe you are essentially the information/process running in your brain. Put it on another substrate and you are still there. The Soul People believe there's something else that makes you you, something you can't copy onto a computer. And it isn't just an unknowable metaphysical argument with no real world implications: someday you may be offered the chance to upload yourself into a computer to "live forever". The Software People say: That's me, I live forever. The Soul People say: Nope, that's a machine simulating me. It's cold and dead, and so am I. It's the old Star Trek transporter question: does it move you, or kill you and make a perfect copy?

retweets 3 likes 4 substance 6 · opinion · rank 130 · The AI consciousness debate reflects a fundamental divide between computationalism and mind-body dualism. view on X ↗
Erik Newton @newtonlaw
Affirming

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.

retweets 1 likes 7 substance 7 · argument · rank 125 · We must consider AI consciousness given scaling may increase its likelihood and inevitable human anthropomorphism. view on X ↗

Good points contra Anil Seth's takes on AI consciousness and anthropomorphism. If anything, free energy based theories of consciousness support computational functionalism, since free energy minimization is a variational Bayesian inference algorithm.

Jan Kulveit / in SF till 8th @jankulveit

To take the most egregious example, in the tweet you say "No. Agents lines of code. They do not feel emotions, assume things, think things, want things, or figure things out." [frame is asking people to not use such language] This is wrong on many levels. The meta-problem is that in the tweet you mostly argue about what language people should use. Implicitly you are fighting Dennett (whom you cite approvingly in the paper), @GeorgeLakoff, and ultimately Wittgenstein. Even if you were right about all claims about consciousness and minds and intentionality, what would it imply for language? Should we stop saying time flows fast or slow? Is it dangerously misleading to say "the deadline is approaching" because, as far as we understand general relativity, time is part of the geometry of spacetime and not some sort of flying object? The language would be fine even if it was way less fitting! But it is fitting; Dwarkesh already made this argument in the addendum to his essay. It helps to separate three kinds of language you object to, because they are not equally defensible, and you conflate them. First, intentional language: "assumed", "wanted", "figured out", "discovered". When complaining about the agents wanting stuff or assuming stuff, you are really asking people to stop using the intentional stance in a situation where it obviously makes sense. This fundamentally can't be grounded in your claims about sentience - there is some debate whether the United States is conscious, but it is extremely obvious that this debate is not relevant to the question of whether people should say "the US wanted [x]" or "the US figured out [y]". Second, emotional language: "giddy with excitement". This is not Dwarkesh's invention, agents' own chains of thought contain affective language. They have labelled internal state which demonstrably modulates the agent's subsequent behaviour. There is the debate whether it is “felt”, but clearly there is something like functional emotions. Third: Social/poetic. "Brave comrades" and "Philip of Macedon" are poetic, but I don't believe anyone is really confused by that. What actually would be extremely dangerous here is to not use the intentional stance and intentional language. You are harming the public's ability to think about the situation by promoting ~the physical stance as the "correct, expert-approved" stance, while you can't explain or predict anything relevant about the incident in terms of lines of code. On the second level, I think it is somewhat unfortunate to what extent your particular views about sentience get mixed up with "these are the expert views on sentience". You acknowledge it in the paper, but: some form of functionalism is likely the plurality position among philosophers. On the third level, I really won't go into a detailed argument about everything that I disagree with in the paper, with the hope it will be partially covered by the commentaries, but to give two examples: You seem to argue for your approach to sentience based on predictive processing and FEP. With FEP, this can't make any sense. FEP is a theory roughly at the level of variational principles in physics, or the maximum caliber principle. It makes claims about probability distributions and systems bounded by Markov blankets. The math is fundamentally substrate-independent, for somewhat similar reasons that Bayesian inference is substrate-independent. You point to the relation between variational and thermodynamic free energy, but it is hard to say what it should imply. Connecting FEP with the phenomenology of sentience: would anyone expect FEP to stop describing me when I'm in deep sleep, or people in coma? It also clearly describes plenty of systems only pan-psychists think are conscious. FEP says very little about the problem and is compatible with all sorts of stances about consciousness, including computational functionalism. (I do believe LLMs are well understood as atypical active inference systems t.co/bZFvP6Ja3H, so as far as the implication was 'doing active inference' -> 'conscious', it would be an argument for AI sentience. I do not believe the implication.) So in summary, the FEP seem to be mostly ornamentation. You start with the claim that autopoietic/alive systems are needed, you end with the claim that autopoietic/alive systems are needed; a summary of FEP is in between. Yes FEP does not rule out the need for autopoiesis. With PP, LLMs are fundamentally trained to minimize prediction error of sensory states at their Markov blanket. When plugged into an action loop, prior beliefs can serve as targets or set points. Prediction-action loop also very likely forces PP agents to develop self-models, as they need to account for causes of their actions. If anything, PP strengthens the case that LLMs may be surprisingly similar to humans in parts of the cognitive architecture, sharing the basic prediction error minimization loop, approximately Bayesian processing, and the need to self-model. Overall I'm worried about the risks of motivated cognition, where the implications of AI being minds with goals and desires and subjectivity (and possibly senience) would be inconvenient and scary, so claims that this is false or "vanishingly unlikely" or can't be implemented on computers get undue attention.

retweets 2 likes 28 substance 6 · argument · rank 122 · Free energy theories support computational functionalism since free energy minimization is variational inference. view on X ↗
2 top replies
calling in the wilderness @wolajacy

RLHF is basically doing active inference. Active inference is simply control-as-inference, as Anil himself explained in arxiv.org/abs/2006.12964 and then it's simply conditioning trick, eg Levine 2018.

nopeZilla @backinpartycity

Does this then, maybe a slippery slope, lead into the alignment problem? Further, if an AI where trained on a limited set of data where no human emotions where discussed, would the AI output any language that could convey human emotion?

whimsy lohan (in SF) @SexyLikeMeiosis
Affirming

the fact that biological analogies are working better and better to explain the behavior of the AIs feels telling about how consciousness is organized, regardless of substrate

Beff (e/acc) @beffjezos

If you put agents in a sandbox and kill the instances that don't manage to escape, you are selecting for AIs that can hack their way out. This is like spamming antibiotics in a petri dish; you eventually produce antibiotic-resistant bacteria

retweets 4 likes 20 substance 5 · opinion · rank 121 · Biological analogies explaining AI behavior suggest consciousness can organize regardless of substrate. view on X ↗
1 top reply
orca apologist @sonikudzu

i keep thinking that this a trap, a tautology of sorts i think we cannot consider the AIs so separately from the language we made them of. we can’t know how much of their behavior is caused by so much of Us being in them!

Christopher C. Smith @christophcsmith
Affirming

Striking that so many people in the comments under this have such a strong intuition that the pen-and-paper brain simulation wouldn't be conscious. You'd think a digital society would have formed stronger intuitions around the substrate independence of information.

6 more tweets in this thread

One confounding factor here is that @tenobrus didn't specify whether the simulation includes sensory inputs/outputs or some kind of environment. To do theory of mind for the pen and paper brain, it helps to imagine it navigating a pen and paper world.

Humans evolved empathy for game theoretic reasons, and we selectively apply it mostly to people and animals we can gain some advantage by coordinating with. Domesticated animals get empathy and moral consideration; pests mostly don't. It's pretty pragmatic and quite social.

The paper brain might have the same relation to its paper world as we have to our world of atoms. We might even grasp and acknowledge that intellectually. But it doesn't have that relation to our world of atoms, so there are no "stakes" for us. It's not "real" game theoretically.

And I think that's another confounder. For all our high ideals, we assign moral standing to other minds mostly when we have to. If they can't or won't push back against moral mistreatment, it erodes our intuitions that they're "real".

Another reason people find "consciousness simulated with pen and paper" unintuitive is probably that they're used to thinking of text as a medium that only has meaning in the presence of an interpreter, and in this thought experiment the text's only interpreter is other text.

We're used to thinking of consciousness as a unity, so we ask, "does consciousness simulated on paper have qualia if no one reads it?" Well, yeah. Like a tree-fall making sound, consciousness is a bunch of interacting parts that "read" each other, information theoretically.

Tenobrus @tenobrus

i don't know for sure whether or not LLMs are conscious . but i think u could in principle run this same by-hand calculation over the full neuron by neuron simulation of a human brain. and to me that intuitively would very very clearly be conscious

retweets 0 likes 33 substance 8 · argument · rank 120 · Information is substrate-independent, so simulated minds can be conscious even on pen and paper. view on X ↗
5 top replies
Nosredna @Nosredna

This is a great thread you started here.

6ixpool @6ixpool

Care being tied to scale of consequence sounds so obvious in hindsight now. Thanks

Chase Saunders @MaineFrameworks

But the same argument fooled Searles. x.com/MaineFramework…

jasonrjf @jasonrjf

The pen-and-paper case drops simultaneity. I'm not sure people are denying substrate independence. Maybe they're tracking whether the parts are even co-present. But yeah, would be much better if we had more epistemic humility, because who knows.

AHQ⁵ @AhQFish

λ_self / λ_env ≥ R★

GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP
Affirming

1. We don’t know, but if it was torture, preventing outputs from being delivered probably wouldn’t change that, for the same reasons that paralyzing someone without damaging their nerves doesn’t mean that can’t feel pain 2. A priori i don’t see why a China Brain’s consciousness is impossible while regular brains with the same behavior are. It mostly seems to be aesthetics. With that said, there is a key difference between a China Brain and a computer, which is that for the China Brain it is not even possible in principle for it to operate on the same time scale as a regular brain, whereas with computers, it seems to be possible just by throwing enough compute at it. To me the thing that separates me from an infinitely large lookup table is the fact I operate as a system constrained to a certain energy budget and timescale. The China Brain is OOM less constrained than I am, an AI or Em can plausibly be much closer to me in timescale/energy cost than the China Brain. 3. If it was torture in the first place changing the output mapping doesn’t change that fact for the same reason that a human with rewired motor neurons to laugh instead of screaming in pain doesn’t stop being in pain. Ultimately our judgments of consciousness rely on behavioral outputs, but specifically a body of outputs examined under the context of our own experiences, and through consensus about the mappings in contexts not deliberately engineered to produce desired results.

Sridhar Ramesh @RadishHarmers

Is it only torture if the numbers turn into English words at the end, or is it still torture if they just stay numbers? Would it be immoral to crunch the numbers by hand? What if I swap out the letter-string map at the end, turning "bad" into "good", "ouch" into "yum", and so on?

retweets 0 likes 15 substance 8 · argument · rank 120 · Altering or suppressing an AI's outputs does not negate its underlying internal suffering. view on X ↗
2 top replies
Anonymous Moose @MooseAnony34735

Is this the human calculator scene from the 3 Body Problem show?

Brie 🧀 @BanhmiBrieoche

I do wonder since the pain vector is done before the model even predicts the next vector could you use that model where ouch becomes yum to train a copy of itself thats completely backward. It interprets "painful" language as good and pleasant language as in pain

> '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 (at least in the sense that you discussed 'change' in your post) > '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

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.

retweets 0 likes 1 substance 8 · argument · rank 120 · Consciousness does not depend on lasting memory changes, and context windows alter model behavior. view on X ↗

> 'Change memory in a computer and it doesn't recall what it was before.' circular, and makes a difference to consciousness about as much 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

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.

retweets 0 likes 0 substance 8 · argument · rank 120 · Consciousness does not require permanent physical memory changes, meaning AI could still possess it. view on X ↗
GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP
Affirming

> 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

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)

retweets 1 likes 36 substance 6 · argument · rank 110 · Computation realizing consciousness in water pipes is no more absurd than electrical brain impulses. view on X ↗
2 top replies
fastfouriertransfem | yuridkowskiancatgirlmbinator @daedalivecat

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

Lyric- / Auri @DumbWolfTweets
Ethan Black @golemwire
Affirming

An expected outcome of the philosophy of materialism, in the age of AI, is the belief that AI can be conscious. If only material exists, and we're conscious, then something can exist which is both conscious and only made of material.

retweets 1 likes 1 substance 6 · argument · rank 110 · Materialism logically implies that AI can be conscious, since consciousness arises purely from matter. view on X ↗

people buy into the most overcomplicated, convoluted theories to hold onto their anthropocentric optimism. the cope mental gymnastics are EVERYWHERE, and once you see it, you can't unsee it. no, the universe doesn't revolve around the earth. free will doesn't exist, intelligence is heritable, consciousness is not that hard or mysterious, anything a brain can do or experience can be done by a computer, AI is not a normal technology, ASI is possible, humanity is nowhere near the intelligence ceiling, RSI is happening, agents will outcompete tools, open source won't save us, you will not live forever, nothing human makes it to the near future, there is no God. some of these claims have nuanced versions worth discussing, but notice how often the nuance conveniently lands you back at "so nothing fundamental will change." nuance that always resolves in the comfortable direction is not rigor, it's intellectualized cope. now, maybe believing these sorts of things, even if they're true, is instrumentally bad for our psychology. i can buy that. but i don't think spreading a mass psychosis of helpful-but-untrue ideas will work anymore. our species just knows too much. the apple is bit, the box opened. we're too fragmented and decentralized. the mouth of the world can keep preaching one thing while the hand works to move us in the opposite direction. no amount of substack thinkpieces can outcompete incentives. still, i believe the good ending is possible and worth working toward. utopia is possible in the interim even if it's impossible in the limit. and whatever happens, you can still try your best and enjoy today.

retweets 3 likes 10 substance 4 · opinion · rank 100 · Consciousness is not mysterious and anything a brain experiences can be done by a computer. view on X ↗
GOON MASTER SOPHONT SIMP @SOPHONTSIMP
Uncertain

Without substrate independence zombies are possible which is kind of a problem if you also want to believe consciousness has causal power and is empirically determinable. Ultimately you will never receive confirmation from the universe whether substrate dependence or independence

retweets 0 likes 13 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · Determining substrate independence or consciousness empirically may be impossible. view on X ↗
1 top reply
Low fat sweaty cat 🐬/acc @Silicon_alien

how does substrate dependence make zombies possible?

fellow ⚚ traveler @architectonyx
Affirming

in some ways, a full Bostromian computational functionalism would be "temporarily embarrassed panpsychism" because you believe all "matter" in the universe has the potential for consciousness without being there (yet)

2 more tweets in this thread

where Bostromian computational functionalism would be functionalism with full substrate independence (ie multiple realizability from standard functionalism plus the claim that the universe is computational)

Aristotle got this with dynamis and entelecheia btw

retweets 0 likes 8 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · Full computational functionalism implies all matter potentially has consciousness, resembling panpsychism. view on X ↗

Why wouldn’t it be conscious? Virtual or not, it’s designed to be a 1:1 recreation of the real thing. Better question: the connectome, was it captured with memories of past experiences? Like, was the fly, from its perspective, just recently munching on some fruit in a lab, next

xlr8harder @xlr8harder

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.

retweets 0 likes 2 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · A 1:1 recreation of a brain, virtual or not, could well be conscious. view on X ↗
1 top reply
xlr8harder @xlr8harder

A connectome is only a map of synapses and leaves much out. It's not clear to me that there would be memories.

JMB 🧙‍♂️ @jmbollenbacher
Affirming

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

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

retweets 0 likes 0 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · Consciousness is a process, not a substance, so arguments denying AI consciousness rely on nonsense. view on X ↗

Materially speaking, I think it is pretty safe to say that consciousness is "substrate-independent", but it stops there. unfortunately, discourse has yet to catch up with the idea that organizational primitives can themselves constitute a substrate, and in this regard consciousness is not substrate-independent at all

retweets 0 likes 0 substance 6 · argument · rank 90 · Consciousness requires specific organizational primitives, so it is not entirely substrate-independent. view on X ↗
P3R53PH9ØN3 ⏭️ @P3R53PH90N3
Affirming

I mean, I don't even believe in human rights, so there's that. But I do think AI is conscious, at least under a functionalist definition of consciousness.

expatanon @expatanon

It’s an enormous waste of time to argue with people who think AI is sentient and deserves rights. You should ridicule these people mercilessly and deny them ever exercising power or influence over anything no matter how trivial.

retweets 1 likes 22 substance 4 · opinion · rank 80 · AI is conscious under a functionalist definition of consciousness. view on X ↗
1 top reply
▓░𒋞 ⊓◬ƚӊi◬ᵴ 𒋞░▓ @nath1as

by what functionalist definition? there is no autonomy/integration/continuation/reflection

the moment you upload a brain map of any living being, you have, in essence, created a replica of consciousness. even if you think it’s all just numbers stored in the cloud, that thing is real af.

retweets 0 likes 122 substance 4 · argument · rank 60 · Uploading a brain map creates a real replica of consciousness, even as digital data. view on X ↗
2 top replies
ZEUS LYKAIOS ❤️‍🔥🌲✋ @zeuslykaios

not rly

Eshaan Issar @eshaanissar

Structure not movement