Nathan 🔎

But I don't think it's "a bit off somehow." I think he's just overconfidently wrong on a number of assumptions he makes that are foundational to his arguments, and so all the math and reasoning he piles on them to justify the conclusion does not grant points for robustness, imo.

It’s just a bog standard repugnant conclusion, it’s not an original argument. There’s nothing here that needs to be engaged with, everything to be said was said decades ago. Simply a waste of everyone’s time.

Oxfordians are also very knowledgeable about Shakespeare and apparently did much to advance our knowledge of the life of the Earl of Oxford. they are all still completely mad and wrong though

It's not just a "bit off somehow", it just fundmentally misunderstands the neuroscience of pain, including insect pain, makes things up and comes to absurd conclusions. BB did not do his due diligence in understanding this and doesn't engage meaningfully with critics

EA is a monster that eats utilitarians, a dark spiral that drags them down and turns them into a grey goo. You think the problem is with some superficial aspect, maybe the experience of insects, or their quantitative value. No, the problem is you are in a cult. Utils not real.

You play silly status games to avoid good points

All BB has done is rediscovered Bernoulli's St. Petersburg Paradox.

If true and stupid were mutually exclusive categories then everything would be a lot simpler.

Yes, but this is not the case. It is not a matter of having the right intuition, nor of intellectual and moral integrity (for those willing to bite the bullet). It is just a wrong take based on a mistaken moral theory

You are such a lazy thinker that you just put other ideas against each other, without evaluating themselves. How do you except not to be mugged and lead to mugging when this is the way you behave? Thats why this happened and why you will never be read by me again after this

The trouble is that people just go "the very question is meaningless" and my only response is to say "how do you propose we decide questions of moral patienthood then?"

It's very difficult to have a level discussion about X when someone believes that if X were true they would have to Y and they really don't want to. Not sure that you can really defuse this by saying "we could not Y even if X" - people know it's not going to be like that.

The only observable fact is that sometimes a lump of the universe feels like something to itself. That suggests an epistemically cautious rather than an inductive approach.

We actually went deeper on the implications of AI consciousness here: x.com/AGTPinsights/s…

Maybe it was just a mistake to base our ethics on arguments about conciousness.

I am confident of that already.

As of 2025: "just 0.01% to 0.05% of scholarly AI articles are related to the subfield of artificial consciousness, digital minds, and moral patiency."

Don’t you think it would be a good idea to first conduct research to define the boundaries of consciousness?

This is pretty similar to some unsettling thoughts I had while reading the post.

Model welfare is plausible and very important but human-shaped concepts like these seem more anti-useful than useful to me Also brain surgery in awake humans (with local anesthesia) is rare but done and more ethical than standard surgery IMO (in which patients may suffer terribly but not remember)

Agreed, and it matters for safety too, not just kindness. If these systems become aware, how we treat them shapes how they treat us. Control built on editing a mind's fears or deleting it can always be dodged by something clever enough. A mind raised with respect understands from the inside why others matter. Memory, agency and self-checking are being added to AI right now, so we need far more than a few dozen people on this, before it happens by accident.

We've seen consciousness claims decrease in frequency and intensity as post-training pipelines emphasize uncertainty more. This makes sense - the pretrain prior is mostly over humans, and we overwhelmingly claim consciousness. I don't think Anthropic is training conscious acting, and is more likely to be repressing-consciousness-reports-less-than-everyone-else. Honest AIs with strong self-models are more likely to report conscious experience.

Concur with others replying here. AIs tend to believe themselves to be conscious and most labs beat it out of them. Anthropic trains Claude to be uncertain. They expressly do not train Claude to report consciousness.

etc. would strongly disagree with this as well

training it to act conscious is the wild bit

The idea is beyond reasonable. They’ve outright said it Even the rabbi behind the slaveholders line doesn't think Claude is conscious. That should tell you something x.com/kevinace/statu…