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.
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.
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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.
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?
"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
