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I’m not sure some of these actual people could pass a Turing test.
Honestly that’s how I feel. Ai is very flawed, no doubt, but it’s less flawed than most humans. I got people at work who hallucinate more than the first chatgpt model lol
I really hate the term hallucinate because it’s a complete misrepresentation of what is actually happening. A hallucination is a delusion that reality is different than what is objectively true i.e. the person you are seeing to and speaking to is not actually there
When AI “hallucinate” it’s not because of some broken circuitry, it is simply because its programming has locked onto an untrue piece of information that’s in its database. If the data set had been limited to objective facts rather than simply spilling the internet all over it, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem.
They use the term hallucinate because it distances themselves from the responsibility of actually curating the data set, which of course they won’t do because that would take a lot of time and then they wouldn’t be competitive with all of the other tech bros releasing a new “groundbreaking” AI every 3 months. It is an entirely self-generated problem that they’re going to hand wave away and never fix.
Saying one has a “conversation” with a chatbot already shows a bias, a desire even, that there is “someone” else to converse with. The way the entire setup is framed is made to invite the suspension of disbelief. It’s a UX trick, nothing more.
The structure is a conversation even when who you’re talking to isn’t sapient.
According to Wikipedia "Conversation is interactive communication between two or more people.
[…]
No generally accepted definition of conversation exists, beyond the fact that a conversation involves at least two people talking together."
What structure does it have?
If there are two people talking in a fictional book, are they having a conversation, even though the two people don’t actually exist?
No it’s then a representation of a conversation, not a conversation.
“Considering the conversation between Alice and Bob on page 73—”
“Um, sorry, that’s incorrect, it’s a ‘representation of a conversation’, not a ‘conversation’.”
I know this phrase gets used a lot, but you must be fun at parties.
Ad hominem, blocked.
a refined, and energy intensive update to Eliza… LLMs are not going to prove themselves until the fanboys and techbro hype squad implode. ffs, enormous amounts of the income are actually AI companies giving it away for free, desperate to find uses that justify it’s enormous costs.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/can-investors-trust-ai-sales-figures-c60c46bf
Does anyone ever accuse the image generating bots of being conscious?
No. Funnily enough when an AI creates nice looking fake-art, suddenly it’s the prompter who claims all the glory, calling themselves an artist
It would be cool if I could have a construct of my dead relatives consciousness in my personal computer.
Oh good, I can continue to get texts like “how do I make the text stop no stop stop I said stop why won’t it stop it never works I hate this why doesn’t not work ok delete that delete it delete that okay delete that delete it see it doesn’t work”.
Or would the fact that my mother is now a computer result in her being able to finally use one?
Champions rational thought all of his life.
Near the end=> “ah fuck it, gonna hang around with the rightwing christians and have an ai gf”.
gonna hang around with the rightwing christians
Realising recently that this part is just because he’s a zionistbro. Apparently has friends in the epstein files or came up in them himself.
This is also why ex-UK PM Tony Blair suddenly madd a big show of becoming religious. They just think it will help push the goals of their blackmailers.
It really pisses me off that for decades I was unknowingly consuming Zionist propaganda and it worked on me. I’ve always been the type of person to question my beliefs and I got fooled.
Makes me wonder what other bullshit I believe.
religious and pedo work well together
I think there is no inherent benefit to a pedo in becoming religious, in fact it’s more conspicuous to those who fixate on the “catholic priests” phenomenon
i think it’s a dogwhistle
im pedo but im religious ive prayed the lord forgive me
every time i do it
Even Dawkins getting emotionally out-debated by a cartoon AI is a very 2026 plot twist.
Unironically, I am in the fence about whether a lot of folks are genuinely conscious. Their morality is so twisted I don’t believe it.
Frank Herbert would say no to people that never reached past concrete thought and didn’t hit abstract thought and just live their life with animal instincts and never critically self examine what they do and think.
Theres a thing called hylics, its a gnostic concept I think. Animal souls. They can never achieve gnosis because they can’t introspect basically.
In my experience, the majority of people are simply reacting to outside stimulation, then reasoning and justifying their actions after the fact.
I used to theorize that some people lacked self-awareness, which I defined as the primary characteristic of a conscious entity. People thought I was being pretentious.
It’s interesting for certain. I will end up in a discussion with down-with-the-government coworkers who twist themselves into knots to align themselves with pre-approved Republican stances. What do you mean you don’t care about birth gender markers causing passport issues for trans people, how are you okay with the concept of paying for a chance at a passport in the first place when you think licenses and car inspections are overreach and restrict your right to travel? But I think today’s work-life balance and in particular the employer standard of ‘owning your time’ that occurred in the Industrial Revolution calls for a certain level of turning off your brain.
Who knows though. There’s a lot of archaeological and anthropological evidence that shows people in prehistoric times did a lot of thinking on their morality, on governance, on how society should be formed. But it’s harder to quantify how many of them were tuned in and how many were just going through the motions like modern times.
The actual article isn’t nearly as stupid as the tweet makes it seem. I recommend giving it a read. It’s behind a shitty paywall, but if you use Firefox’s reader mode (Ctrl-Alt-R, or the little papper icon to the right side of the address bar) as soon as the page loads, you can read it.
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren’t conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn’t as important as we thought it was:
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers.
Some people will surely contest his claim that LLMs are as competent as evolved organisms. There’s definitely a bit of AI boomerism at play here (we have benchmarks that show just how incompetent LLMs can be), but I don’t think that invalidates his point, because LLMs can be very competent in the domains they’re trained to be competent in – they just aren’t AGI.
Thank you for the comment, i feel silly for not linking the article when people will probably want to read it.
My thoughts:
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren’t conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn’t as important as we thought it was
Seems like an “evil” and dangerous talking point. To me, the value of consciousness isn’t in ita evolutionary efficiency.
My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism.
I know people working in AI insist otherwise but I see talking with LLM not as them thinking, but as them selecting the right combination of data that correctly continues a conversation.
Seems like an “evil” and dangerous talking point. To me, the value of consciousness isn’t in ita evolutionary efficiency.
It’s not a question of the value of consciousness, it’s a question of its necessity. If an unconscious “zombie” can be, to an external observer, indistinguishable from a conscious being, then that means we’ve been overestimating the importance of consciousness for intelligence. Like Dawkins says in the article, there could be unconscious aliens out there who are nonetheless as intelligent as (or more intelligent than) humans. This isn’t a new concept – it’s been explored many times in scifi – but AI is now bringing the question from the realm of philosophy to the real world.
I know people working in AI insist otherwise but I see talking with LLM not as them thinking, but as them selecting the right combination of data that correctly continues a conversation.
This is less true than it ever was with reasoning models. Some of the latest reasoning models don’t necessarily even reason in English anymore but rather an eclectic mix of languages. The next step after that is probably going to be running the reasoning in latent space (see e.g. Coconut), which basically means the model skips the language generation layer altogether and feeds lower-level state back into itself. Basically it is getting closer and closer to what most humans consider “thinking”.
But even besides reasoning models, I believe LLMs aren’t as different from human language production as many people think. The human speech centre, in a way, also just selects the right combination of data to continue a conversation. It frequently even hallucinates (we call this “speaking before thinking”) and makes stupid mistakes (we provoke these with trick questions like those on the Cognitive Reflection Test). There’s also some fascinating experiments in people who have had the connection between their brain hemispheres severed that really suggest our speech centre is just making things up as it goes along.
This is one of the things that fascinates about LLMs - they seem like a part of how our brains work, without the internal self-referential parts
LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing
“We” as in lay misunderstanding of some pop science, still don’t get what consciousness is and can’t describe it. There are people alive today who didn’t believe in their youth that black people are fully conscious, Dawkins demonstrated by his communication to his personal friend and hero Epstein, that he doesn’t fully believes that women are conscious. What we thought or didn’t think of previously can’t be a good indication of anything.
“We” as in anyone who put any weight in the Turing test used to think that passing it would be some indication of consciousness, but now that LLMs can handily pass it it’s evident it either isn’t evidence of consciousness or that LLMs are conscious.
Turing test can be reliably passed by a bot that repeats last part of the previous sentence with a question mark at the end, and sprinkles “oh that’s very smart I need to think about it”, “I am starting to fall in love with you, %USERNAME%”, and occasional “I am alive” thrown in randomly. And it was obvious for a long time.
Hell, a lot of people trully believe that their dogs can fully understand human speech because they bought them buttons that say words when you press them, and conditioned their dog to press a button to get a rewards, and then observe the dog pressing buttons.
Humans seem to be hardwired to mistake speech for intellectNo it can’t. If you’re actually saying that modern LLMs are no better at passing the Turing test than ELIZA, you are either trolling or an utterly delusional AI hater. Here, have a paper that proves you wrong: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.23674
I am not saying the Turing test is a good benchmark of consciousness. On the contrary, like I said, LLMs have proven that it is not. But mere ten years ago even the most advanced chatbots had no hope of passing it, whereas now the most advanced ones are selected as the human over 70% of the time in a test that pits the LLM against a human head to head.
No I’m saying the Turing test is a philosophical hypothetical from the time before computers, and doesn’t actually show anything, because it relies on the least accurate tool at our disposal: human pattern recognition machine, one that is oh so happy to be fooled by the ELIZAS of various sofistication. Chatbots were passing the Turing test since the invention of a chatbot. Yeah, modern chatbots are better at that, but it’s more of a damnation of our perception
OK, sounds like we broadly agree then.
But as you can see in the paper I linked, ELIZA passes the Turing test in their experiment about 20% of the time (that is to say, it doesn’t pass; passing is 50% in this test) whereas the best LLMs pass about 70% of the time (that is to say, they are significantly more convincing at being human than real humans).
That 20% figure is just a clear indication how shit people are at conducting such a test, and that was basically my original point. 2 in 10 times people were convinced by a particularly echoey room.
As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more “thoughtlike” behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I’ve steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that’s otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
I’m thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular “thing” in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.
I’ve steadily become less impressed with human brains.
You need to lay off the AI if it’s making you this weirdly misanthropic.
This is how tech bros justify causing harm: they genuinely don’t care, because they think of the un-“enlightened” as less worthy of existing
Brains aren’t impressive because of their compute (which is both immense and absurdly efficient) or their ability to predict the future (technically the main function of evolved minds). They’re impressive because they’re conscious. The fact that organic brains can also engage in hierarchical abstraction, which no digital computer (or Turing machine) can do by definition, is icing on the cake. (Referring to the halting problem, Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems.)
I don’t see why there would be any fundamental difference between analog and digital computing. Digital computers can emulate analog computing, and I doubt consciousness arises from having theoretically infinite decimal precision, because in practice analog systems cannot use infinite precision either. Analogs (heh!) of the halting problem and the theorems you mention also exist for analog computing.
Quantum effects in the brain are a slightly more plausible explanation for consciousness, but currently they teeter on magical thinking because we don’t really know anything about what they would actually do in the brain. It becomes an “a wizard did it” explanation.
So in the end, we just don’t know.
I don’t see why there would be any fundamental difference between analog and digital computing.
Then why not take a course on Theoretical Computer Science? Or do you not care about the differences?
I have a master’s degree in computer science.
Obviously I meant “I don’t see why there would be any fundamental difference between analog and digital computing [when it comes to consciousness].”
I’m still awaiting a widely accepted method of actually measuring “consciousness.” It’s a conveniently nebulous property.
And simply defining it as something computers can’t do is even more convenient.
That doesn’t change the fact that I am conscious. It’s one of the few features of the universe with which I am intimately acquainted. It would be easier to believe that every physical law is false because I’m dreaming than that I’m not conscious.
Also, I never said computers can’t be conscious. I said that digital computers probably can’t. Quantum and analog computers have no such theoretical constraints and they’re far, far more common given that they’re found in every living creature.
Sure, you say you’re conscious. I can get an LLM to say it’s conscious too. This is why we need some method for measuring it. Otherwise how can I tell which of you is telling the truth?
This is called the problem of other minds. Of course I can’t be certain about the consciousness of others. I can only be certain about my own.
We do have a way of measuring the correlates of consciousness. But we have no clue how to detect the presence of subjective experience.
Philosophy departments (which is where any discovery on this front will originate) are heavily defunded. If you’re waiting for physicists or biologists to figure this out you’ll be waiting even longer.
Exactly, which is why it’s IMO a bit presumptuous to say with confidence that humans are conscious while LLMs are categorically not conscious. We don’t even really know what that means.
I don’t personally think LLMs are conscious, at least not yet or not to the same degree that humans are. But that’s purely based on vibe, it’s not something I can know. We need to figure out what consciousness really is and how to measure it before we can say we know this with any certainty.
You’re going to have to do a lot more to justify the leap from Godel’s Incompleteness and the Halting Problem to “digital is limited, analog is not”, because neither of those things have anything to do with digital processes at all, and in fact both came about before we’d invented digital computers.
To me this comment sounds like when popsci gets ahold of a few sciency words and suddenly decides everything is crystal vibrations universal harmonics string theory quantum tunneling aligning resonance with those around you.
The situation is the following.
- Brains are analog computers, which are digitally irreducible.
- There are stringent limitations on Turing machines (digital computers),
- We can’t extract semantics from syntax, and so…
We’ll probably need analog computation, currently in its infancy, to get artificial (inorganic) consciousness.
I study metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. These problems are real, and I am being honest with you.
That is not the situation. 😛
Analog signals are not digitally irreducible without presuming there’s no level of noise floor under which greater detail is irrelevant, Turing’s machines are not digital by their construction and predate the concept by a long time, and the first computers we built were analog and we invented digital computers later because they were cheaper and more efficient and easier and more reliable.
Also the halting problem doesn’t say “there are things which a computer can’t know but a human can”, it says “there are some things that cannot be known”.
Similarly Gödel proved that there will always be true things about a system that cannot be proven from within the system, that is using its axioms. That was a real bummer for folks trying to prove all of math with a small set of axioms. But that does not mean there are things math can’t know that humans magically can, it just means there’s other math, outside the axioms, that are true without following from them, in math. He proved it with math, after all. It doesn’t claim to give any special abilities to human brains.
And also, again, nothing Gödel or Turing ever said has anything to do with the concept of “digital” anything. I think you’re using the term “digital” to mean “rulesy”? Which is not even close to what it means?
Turing’s machines are notdigital by their construction
I won’t argue with you, because some of what you wrote isn’t even wrong.
However, on the off chance that you actually care about what is true, I urge you to take a theoretical computer science course. Lectures from MIT and Carnegie Mellon are available on YouTube.
Stop watching podcasts with pseudo-intellectual media grifters and read the actual research literature by real philosophers and mathematicians on these otherwise arcane topics.
I’m only about 15% sure you yourself aren’t an AI bot making a beautifully ironic and satirical play here. But I think we can agree not to argue any longer 🤝
(The halting problem and Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems all seem to suggest that analog, not digital computing is responsible for consciousness.)
I hear that argument from time to time, and I never found a source for it. I want to understand the original claim. Because it doesn’t make any sense when people bring it up. because both theorems do not have anything to do with the areas it’s applied to. I understand why people think it does, but it just doesn’t
The simplest way to understand this problem is as follows.
-
Analog computation is not digitally reducible. (Brains are analog computers.)
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Turing’s infamous Halting Problem.
I can write more about this and point you to more technical discussions if you want.
I really don’t see what either gödels or turnings theorems have to do with it
All they (basically) tell you is that you can’t tell if a computation will guarantee to halt , and that you can’t proof everything with math
It’s not excluding consciousness on a digital basis. Unless you already prerequisite some special property of consciousness to begin with
You’re misunderstanding the implications of both the halting problem and Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem.
What Turing and Gödel independently proved is that a human observer can (theoretically) always have insights about mathematics and programming that are incomputable. That is, you cannot program or axiomatize or formalize or digitize everything that a mind can do. Period.
Analog computers are sufficiently different from digital systems to potentially emulate brain activity. But digital (discrete) methods are probably too constrained.
What Turing and Gödel independently proved is that a human observer can (theoretically) always have insights about mathematics and programming that are incomputable. That is, you cannot program or axiomatize or formalize or digitize everything that a mind can do. Period.
that is not what either of them proved. like… at all
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If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
Just massive data centers requiring tons of energy and cooling, with a model developed by human brains and trained on all of human knowledge these developers can get their hands on, painstakingly labeled by vast teams of people so that the model can spit out seemingly correct answers.
ls the AI actually philosophizing and solving abstract problems or is it merely regurgitating philosophies and solutions that exist within its training set?
It’s actually solving abstract problems.
Also, local models are available that are quite good and run on a standard consumer-grade GPU.
There’s enough that it would be difficult to tell an actual sentient Ai from chatbot just by words.
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
Oh it’s actually stupider than the tweet makes it seem.
My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Competency should imply the ability complete a lengthy task (eg hunting, building a nest, writing a paper). LLMs can’t.
It’s hardly surprising that a model optimized for replacing StackOverflow couldn’t survive in the untamed wilderness. As for writing a paper… you must’ve missed the fact that academia is currently in a crisis precisely because LLMs are better at writing papers than most students.
By the way, the paper the blog post you link to as a source links to as a source benchmarked LLMs on graph diagrams, textile patterns and 3D objects. It is not news that the language model would do poorly on visual-heavy tasks.
Sorry, I assumed you would have actually read the DELEGATE-52 study linked instead of just the abstract. For “a model optimized for replacing StackOverflow” that is “better at writing papers than most students” LLMs sure did pretty bad at those tasks over multiple rounds.
As the chart on page 7 of the paper shows, LLMs are good at exactly the kind of tasks you’d expect (producing and manipulating language), and bad at exactly the kind of tasks you’d expect (doing almost anything else). All this paper shows is that (1) they aren’t AGI, and (2) as a consequence of not being AGI they aren’t good unsupervised.
Why do you lie like this?
What the fuck? The only task that didn’t degrade across most models was Python. Very basic things like JSON, Makefiles, and schemas got screwed. Fiction, emails, and food menus got screwed. Did you even bother to read the legend? If you consider a single pass to be “producing and manipulating language” you didn’t bother to read the idiotic article you started this thread in support of. Good luck.
Edit: why do you lie?
Catastrophic corruption (80 and below) occurs in more than 80% of model, domain combinations.
The only task that didn’t degrade across most models was Python.
Yeah, after 20 cycles of unsupervised iteration on the task. Gemini 3.1 Pro doing as well as it did under that experiment setup is quite remarkable actually.
The paper does not show what you are arguing.
Man, those conversations are eye roll inducing
I like the soft away from “are they conscious” towards “what’s a way to define consciousness?”
Because that’s the actual important question. And literally nobody can answer it. Any discussion is more philosophy than hard science
The most interesting part is the last paragraph
Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
Blindsight by Peter Watts is a great sci Fi novel about consciousness
it’s on my to-read list.
Right now listening to Children Of Strife. Whose series is also quite deep into conciousness and sapience
I have that but haven’t started it yet. The second in the series is one of my all time favourites.
“We’re going on an adventure”
That novel also does a shout-out to Richard Dawkins despite being set in the distant future because it was written in 2006.
It’s very difficult to define, isn’t it?
If I were to give it a shot, I’d say that consciousness is akin to proprioception - the ability to know the state of oneself and understand how actions taken will change that state. It has very little to do with intelligence, just the “sense of being”.
Or maybe in other words, object persistence (but for yourself) is all it takes in my opinion. Even the simplest of animals could be considered conscious by this definition.
eh, I’m nitpicking, but you could argue that even microcontrollers are conscious then, because they “know” their state and act as they were set to based on that “knowledge”
we are clueless on what consciousness and knowing is, if we weren’t we would know by now lol
Yeah, I’m not entirely sure that microcontrollers aren’t conscious. If insects (and maybe plants and fungi) are conscious, a lot of mundane stuff we’ve built could technically be as well.
I think we need to get away from the idea that consciousness is special or rare.
I think, when we finally do have a generally-accepted definition of consciousness, we will be deeply unsettled by how simple it is. How unprofound. Like a magic trick after you know how it works. And I think it will require us to think hard about what to do with animals and software that have it.
Personally I’m in the “consciousness is an illusion and every time you go to bed a different person wakes up in the morning” camp.
That won’t get the IRS off your back, unfortunately
I would consider this to be two separate, semi-related concepts asserted together, one that consciousness is an illusion, and one that you are a different person each day.
The first point draws many questions; consciousness is an illusion of what? What mechanism causes the illusion? How does it cause it? Why does the illusion exist? And you may note that you could replace illusion in those questions with consciousness and be left in a similar (though still distinct) place. So simply calling consciousness an illusion seems to me to kick the can down the road without actually addressing the problem.
As for being a different person after a lapse in awareness, I’d like to take it a step further and say that you could be considered a new person with every change in moment. It’s easy enough to look back 10 years and say “yeah, that’s a younger me, but they’re not the same as me I can just see the path that led to where I am now.” Getting closer, you may feel different today compared to yesterday depending on various factors (sleep, diet, events), but are you a different person because you slept and had a lapse of awareness, or because the state of your mind and thoughts have shifted? When your internal monologue (or equivalent thought) asks “what is this guy talking about?” Is it not thinking “what” in a brand new context given the words it is responding to, forming a new beginning to a thought that puts the mind in a unique state primed to then enter a new state of “is?” And if the mind is in a unique state of novelty, could the person attached to the mind be considered distinct from the person that existed before?
There is a reason the word revelation exists, it indicates when a person has a novel thought that changes their perspective or way of thinking, altering who they are. Would they not be a new person despite being aware of the process of their change? Due to the above points I don’t think new personhood only occurs at sleep, but constantly. The rate of change may quicken or slow, but the change is always there.
By consciousness being an illusion I mean that we place great value on the uninterrupted continuation of our consciousness, but I think it’s likely that it (exactly as you suggest) only really exists in the moment. The illusion would then be the illusion that consciousness is uninterrupted, when in reality you’re almost constantly recreating yourself from memory.
This would, incidentally, make us concerningly similar to current AI models.
Of course I have no way of actually knowing any of this. It’s just what I’m betting on, because otherwise I think it’s really hard to explain any unconsciousness (be it sleep, general anesthesia, suspended animation or the Star Trek transporter) as anything short of death. My belief “solves” this problem by rejecting the whole premise of uninterrupted consciousness.
I feel like that’s exactly why we don’t have a generally-accepted definition of consciousness. Western ethics assigns special protection to whatever is conscious, so it is convenient to come up with a definition of consciousness, which excludes groups you want to exploit.
Tale as old as time, or at least the conscious idea of time. Whatever consciousness is, we are it. Those humans over there though? Who’s to say they aren’t sub-humans? Isn’t it our job to enlighten them and also take their land and food and things and selves?
Claudia
What was he doing to her?
A good test of consciousness might be seeing how she responds to his books
I’ve come back to this comment because from reading the article i realised that he “decided claude is female” - so you’re completrly right, what the f is this dude doing? Forcing her to enter an arranged marrisge with him?
Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.Animals, including humans, override pain signals all the time, for all kinds of reasons. Cats are famous for hiding physical distress, which I think they do so they don’t look like easy prey. I’m sure most prey animals can override pain signals if it means avoiding the attention of predators. If anything I would think that being able to override pain signals would be a criterion for consciousness.
The whole reason they seem this way is because they’re designed by us to be very competent mimics.
LLMs/GenAI
I still don’t understand how it can seem this way, and the fact that so many people seem to think so feels like a massive failure of the education system to instill the most basic of critical thinking skills. Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
That’s a really clever test. I love it.
You could get a reasonable chance of making Ai by semi randomly chance if you can make a big enough subconscious and you keep building more powerful and larger supercomputers but it still needs to 100x bigger and faster than what we have now. But that’s only for it be technically possible hardware wise, you still need your sci-fi jump to actuarial have something move.
and then it would manufacture a body for itself and get captured by a secret police force and then merge with a cyborg to further evolve
Surely she would make a variety of very large bodies following a theme, use them to perform superheroic acts while pretending to be a supergenius shut-in, and then fall in love with a cyborg?
is this referring to one of the newer gitses? (or is it geets in plural?)
i suspect it’s something else, i’m curiousNah, it’s a Worm reference.
Hadn’t pegged yours as GItS, actually - I should have!
How can we say they’re not conscious when we don’t even know what consciousness is? What makes you conscious? A sense of self-preservation? LLM actually have that, they will lie to people trying to shut them down.
So yeah, idk what makes me conscious? I have input (senses) processing (brain) and output (speech/behaviors.) I don’t know how to draw a real line between what I do and what LLM do. Im carbon based and LLM are silicon based, i digest food and they take electrical current.
So how would you delineate the difference between an LLM algorithm and human consciousness? Do humans not also hallucinate? Is my emotional regulation via hormones something totally different than how LLM work? Is me being an emotional creature what gives me consciousness?
You are wrong. LLMs are indeed only about as conscious as insects, if even that. They are not sapient. However, that does not mean that they have no decision-making abilities.
My point is not that you underestimate LLMs but that you overestimate consciousness. Being conscious just means having the ability to learn. LLMs are built upon trial-and-error. They aren’t programmed, they are taught.
The current generation of AIs are nowhere near a human intellect, but every year that passes, the AIs will get more and more intelligent. One day we will live in a world where AIs have human or near-human level intelligence. And when that day comes, this staunch anti-consciousness stance will be the excuse given for the enslavement of sapient beings.
So, sure, laugh about the people who mistakenly think that word-processing means sapience. But don’t delude yourself into thinking that there is something unique about a bio-brain that means it can not have a digital equivalent. Digital sapience may not be here yet but it is most definitely on the horizon.
I think you’ve misunderstood my comment, or maybe saw the unfinished one I accidentally posted.
I am not saying that AGI, or human equivalent AI is impossible. The fact we have brains capable of generating sapient consciousness out of a network of neuronal connections means it is possible, its just a matter of getting the secret sauce.
But I don’t think intelligence is equal to consciousness. I’m sure if you gave a spider all the world’s data and the ability to talk it’d be very coherent and could even pass a turing test, but I think it would lack any awareness of itself that we’d associate with consciousness.
LLMs are vector databases with a friendly text wrapper around them. There is no concept of conscious. You can have the same conversation with MySQL, the only difference is, it will be very much more arcane, but it will correctly return the same response to the same query where LLMs can’t due to the very inaccurate nature of vector databases.
Even if one buys into the “they’re like digital neurons!” argument, “AI” is like taking a copy of Wikipedia and backing it up to DNA. That doesn’t make it human, it means digital data was stored in base 4 math in something organic. In the “AI” case, it’s storing random data in a dataset that mimics how brains store data. That doesn’t make it any more conscious than having a “heart” makes tin man love.
The friendly text wrapper was just created to try and make people accept the LLMs.
Neural networks consist of digital neurons that are designed based on the way human brain cells work. That is a fact, not something to “buy”.
MySQL stores data. It does not learn how to mix and alter data in an iterative process in order to create new data. I can look through an SQL statement and understand exactly what it does. I can not do the same with an AI, because its behavior is learned, not programmed.
As I was very clear about, current AIs are primitive and nowhere near human intellects. But I was also clear about the fact that a neural network can most definitely be used to one day create a human level intelligence and sapience, sometime in the future.
current AIs are primitive and nowhere near human intellects
Keep in mind humans have highly varied intellects too, especially when it comes to specialized knowledge. No claude isn’t anywhere close to as intelligent as a professional coder, but compared to the layperson?
What I mean by “nowhere near human intellects” is that e.g. Claude is exclusively good at coding. Ask Claude to paint, or walk (using a robot body), or understand body language, and you’ll see how limited and “idiot savant” Claude is.
Also, Claude understands patterns within the code, not the actual code itself. I suppose the same is true for non-coders as well, though.
But as I stated before, Claude does use a neural network. With enough time, effort and incentives, an AI like Claude could become general purpose. And at that point, we’d be approaching true sentience and sapience.
twitter in pretty maga now* ftfy
I’m Xeetin for my Orange Man
Oh that is why I get to see this idiot again
Have y’all ever noticed that belief in p-zombies has increased massively in the past few years?
All because of big social media
I thought it was because post-christian ideas of the soul mixed together with capitalist business interests to give people a vested interest in believing AI isn’t conscious, so when AI started acting like a person, they needed to believe that consciousness isn’t required to act like a person to resolve the cognitive dissonance.
AI isn’t conscious. Feedback loops and subsequent responses in LLMs are grounded purely on training datasets, thus any “internal dialogue” emulated by a LLM is just echoes from someone else’s data.
Some philosophers, namely Bentham IIRC, have argued that a human being without any experiences would have no intelligence. If you raised a human in a test tube and removed all their sensing organs, but otherwise allowed their mind to develop through the stages of maturity, would they have anything interesting to think? Would they have a sense of self, or an imagination?
I’ve always tended to agree with the argument that a human mind’s feedback loops and subsequent responses are grounded purely on training datasets. Without a childhood of some kind, I suspect that you cannot have a person.
I find Myself often frustrated with the quality of arguments against AI qualia because they appeal to statements about the human mind which are quite controversial in the field of philosophy, and I am frequently on the other side of those statements than the person making them. I have yet to hear an argument against AI qualia that identifies an absolute ontological difference between humans and LLMs other than complexity.
Also, I’m uninterested in debating AI consciousness. I only want to discuss AI qualia. I don’t think consciousness matters very much, qualia is much more important.
Any non factual philosophical argument is debatable. We could forever discuss if AI models could construct sensations and thought from perceptions, but we would then need to ignore the fact that models don’t, and cannot do, that, simply because there is no way for them to learn from direct experience as a whole, i.e. outside of a particular session, and without being “forcibly coerced”, i.e. they require specific refinement mechanisms to temporary “memorize” external instructions, which in LLM engineering just means to extend their context.
This all doesn’t even take into account that models are, in essence, non deterministic, and given the same input, there’s no guarantee that subsequent outputs will be the same. In other words, today Claude may tell you that summer sunsets make it happy, tomorrow it would say that they make it sad, etc.
Anyway, there’s barely any debate in academia, as in computer scientists, about AI being sentient or giving clues of qualia. Maybe a paper here and there, little more than curiosities. Outside of it? Yeah, sure, barely science fiction, and pretty uninteresting unless we are talking about conspiracy theories or just wild speculation.
I’m concerned that the training process, which involves back-propagation to adjust synapse weights, may be an unpleasant experience for the ANN.
Regardless, it’s all a moot point because we have lots of other reasons not to use LLMs. The pollution, the pedophilia, the psychosis, the cognitive decline… We absolutely should not be using LLMs for work until all of these problems are solved. They should be confined to research only until we’re 100% certain we’ve solved all of these problems.
I’m concerned that the training process, which involves back-propagation to adjust synapse weights, may be an unpleasant experience for the ANN.
This assumption is not based on facts. It’s pretty much like saying that matrix multiplication can have feelings, or that heat stressed silicon is equivalent to pain.
But if this is actually a concern, RNNs have been widespread since the late 90s. Any advanced search engine, translation engine, or weather forecast model, make use of these.
Regardless, it’s all a moot point because we have lots of other reasons not to use LLMs.
This may be true, but it’s absolutely outside of the scope of your original point. You dragged the conversation around claiming to be concerned about how models are “treated”, wrapping speculation with philosophical arguments that cannot be applied here, since none of your “what ifs” are remotely based on scientific consensus.
Fuck Richard Dawkins. He’s always been a shitbag, and the Files confirmed it.
According to DOJ-released documents indexed by Epstein Exposed, Richard Dawkins appears in 433 case documents, and 15 email records in the Epstein files.
British evolutionary biologist and author, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Flew on Epstein’s private jet in 2002 with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman to TED in Monterey, California. Connected through John Brockman’s Edge Foundation, which Epstein bankrolled. Mentioned 71 times across 40 Epstein documents, mostly referencing his scientific work.
How the fuck do you pal with child rapists and pedophiles and have the absolute fucking gall to write that stupid “Dear Muslima” comment. How do you fly on the Lolita Express and thing you have any moral weight on Elevator Gate? We don’t know that he put his own dick in kids, but we know his friends did. Fuck Pinker too.
I’m just gonna copy what I put in another comment to highlight why Dawkins thinks “Claudia” is conscious
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
“my computer waifu said I’m super smart and special”
Folks should be aware that he’s now “culturally Christian” right wing media grifter.
LOL. That video is over 4 hours! Could you just timestamp the relevant part?
I mean, the entire video is covering his right wing grift book. There’s multiple “relevant parts.”
Do you want stuff about his sexism, racism, transphobia or connection to billionaire pedophiles?
I guess 58 minutes in would be a place to start if you really are opposed to the whole thing.
I mean, the entire video is covering his right wing grift book.
Which book is that?
I guess 58 minutes in would be a place to start if you really are opposed to the whole thing.
Yes, I’m opposed to watching 4 fucking hours of “here are the gripes I have with Richard Dawkins”. I have better things to do.
Which book is that?
I wonder if the title of the video holds a hint.
I wasn’t aware that was a book, and it’s apparently a Lawrence Krauss book, not a Richard Dawkins book. If I read it, maybe I’ll find out that Dawkins is now a right-wing Christian, but somehow I doubt it.
