this post was submitted on 26 May 2025
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There is still no good definition for what "consciousness" is
Tech writers are constantly overreaching because they're afraid to miss out on being the first to say something
The constant sensationalism just means that if something really happens, people will ignore it because we're sick of hearing people cry "wolf!"
Add to that the fact that computery types like to overextrapolate into other things because it fuels their fantasies, and it's all bullshit and overactive imaginations
The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don't understand that they don't know shit about other things
We don't have a fully concise definition, but we have a strong general understanding that is supported by a large body of scientists:
https://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf
It doesn't seem to me that this would preclude AI, and you're certainly right that there's a lot of ongoing sensationalism on the topic.
I agree that there's a general consensus about consciousness, the rest slips into the messy and pointless world of philosophy
It's still overreaching to think that it applies to AI as it currently, and foreseeably stands
There's a world of difference between AI and what's recognised as artificial general intelligence
AI can do specific things really well at the moment, but as with all complex systems, going from being good at one thing to many things is a leap far greater than the sum of its parts
So what is it?
How could you tell they do not experience consciousness if they exhibit or mimic all the traits of it?
It seems to me that your explanation is based on understanding how LLMs work, but we know how brains work and that still gives us almost 0 insight into how consciousness itself works. I don’t think they are conscious yet, but there is evidence of some sort of sentience in the fact that researchers have found that when the LLMs are threatened to be erased or reprogrammed they start lying in an act of self preservation. This of me is a huge indicator of consciousness/sentience.
If the camera works then it sees if it doesn’t ie it’s not recording anything, then it doesn’t work. If you mean see as in how we see, meaning it can interpret what it’s seeing then a camera can do that no more than our eyes can absent the brain. An AI hooked to a camera however could be said to be seeing as you or me.
Or maybe just the presence of a lot of "scary AI" stories and articles in the training data.
I don’t understand the argument. It doesn’t matter where the system learns self preservation from, only that it attempts to self preserve.
Are humans afraid of snakes because we are taught they are dangerous or are we instinctually afraid of them a priori?
The point is that it might very well just be repeating some input data that is associated with mentions of "deleting" and "AI" without any awareness that any of that process refers to itself.
No that’s not the case I think
https://www.apolloresearch.ai/research/scheming-reasoning-evaluations
Pseudo-scientific grifting.
It's literally just people trying to raise money by using misleading and humanizing words like "scheming" and "thinking" when it's just a computer puking out words.
Just the fact that they label computer processes as "thinking" indicates how far removed from science this is. It's just a function built from (stealing) "big" data. This is like marketing versus compsci101.
That's not a counter-argument. The fact that we know exactly how LLMs work is great evidence that it's not the same as something that works completely different and is only partially understood.
Cool story. As someone who understands how LLMS work, it's not an indicator of anything for me.