We just perceive it as such, and this should be fairly hard to argue against with all the scientific advances we have made up to this point, at least as long as you assume consciousness involves biology and physics at least somewhat.
Otherwise, you can't explain e.g. smooth perceptions of low FPS stimuli, delayed reaction times, and must ignore obvious limits on various biological and neurological rhythms, or other possible limits on continuity (e.g. quantum stuff) and rates generally.
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
I think this is the main point. Most articles conflate consciousness with intelligence or awareness. Without clarifying their definition of it.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
The major error made by most people in this thread is thinking it is possible to give a single definition of consciousness that is coherent and matches common usage. The folk concept of "consciousness" couldn't be a more clear definition of a family resemblance category, so discussions using the folk concept are an utter waste of time.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).
Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious.
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
> modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness
Can you elaborate on this? What are the specific "stronger and most core aspects of consciousness"? And why are you certain that they are stronger and "more core"?
If you are interested in some serious discussion, see https://lossfunk.com/papers/ai-consciousness.pdf, especially the early section "Consciousness as Family Resemblance". I suppose another is Ned Block on consciousness being a "mongrel concept", and the distinction between access vs. phenomenal
The first paper picks out e.g. arousal/wakefulness, phenomenal quality / qualia, unity (how we feel sensory inputs and qualia as a unified scene), access consciousness (instrumental self-observation and modification broadly), meta-cognition and self-modeling, emotional valence (e.g. pain/pleasure).
One might also include intelligence (abstract reasoning / argument, information integration and abstraction, attention) broadly, and also agency / desires / drives / will. Insofar as these are aspects of consciousness, yes, AI (and simpler algorithms and mechanistic structures) demonstrate aspects of consciousness. But insofar as embodiment, self-reflexivity and qualia (phenomenal consciousness) are the more mysterious and more obviously unique aspects of consciousness, current LLMs very clearly are lacking these things in most ways (whereas animals are much less clearly lacking, especially when you get to mammals and primates).
Seriously, just ask an AI this stuff, you'll get very detailed responses, nothing I am saying here is new or obscure.
I've gone back and forth with AI on this stuff quite a bit, and there are many, many theories of consciousness, which is why when you were vague about the "more core" concepts, I asked for which ones specifically.
And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.
Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.
Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.
Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.
In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.
All these policies actually sound good, SSRIs should not be first-line, as there is extremely limited evidence of meaningful effectiveness for anti-depressants generally.
Mmeta-analytic assessments of effect sizes show the observed effects are usually below what is required to count as a minimal clinically important difference, and antidepressants only target generally the "positive" symptoms of depression (sadness, anxiety) while doing little for the "negative" ones (anhedonia, lack of meaning, lack of motivation). They also have some serious side-effects, like emotional blunting and severe sexual dysfunction, the latter of which can persist for months even after stopping to take the drugs.
Even the usual excuses people make for these drugs ("Sure, the average effect is small, but they really help some people" and "Eventually the doctor finds the right one for you") are generally not supported by actual studies addressing these claims either.
There absolutely should be more monitoring and less careless prescribing of SSRIs and anti-depressants generally.
I'd prefer more proof / context than GP gave, but I personally find it very useful to see people making judgements about AI-assistance of articles. Almost no such articles are worth my time, and the more HN people saying it, the more I know not to click past the HN headline.
Requiring years of schooling that is essentially worthless / provides credentials with no information also has disparate impacts, possibly worse than just properly failing people and letting them sort themselves / be sorted into positions that are actually suitable for them and allow real growth. Schooling is a huge percentage of a modern person's life now.
> Could you prove the disparate impact is random and your pass criteria isn’t racist?
Can those in favor of grade inflation and meaningless credentials prove their decisions also don't have disparate impact and aren't racist? Based on some recent US Supreme Court decisions re: affirmative action, it would seem unlikely this case would be any different. The hard questions about long-term harms to students and society are simply not being asked seriously enough.
In this hypothetical you’re a teacher, not world emperor, so you’re limited to pass/fail decisions of a particular class at a particular school.
I personally have grave concerns regarding the poor education of the youth and think education should be far more stringent, but unfortunately I don’t get to make those decisions. If I was a teacher I’m not sure I would be willing to fall on that sword. I avoid the issue by not being a teacher.
This is a big component of why we have objective grade level standards. They are a strong but imperfect defense against racism at the teacher level.
If I am the teacher and I fail your kid but your kid crushes the blind rigorous and as objective as we can make it standardized test then your lawsuit just got stronger.
The issue is people decided to weaken the standard or call standards themself racist (which IMO is actually racist).
There's no hypothetical here IMO, this is a real-world problem, and also you aren't limited to pass/fail decisions as a teacher, except in exceptional cases of borderline grades. Otherwise, there is a passing grade / requirements, and grades can be determined by objective tests (all students get the same difficulty tests). Also you have something like an average of many courses over many years to make the pass/fail decisions, ultimately, if we are talking about getting a diploma and/or graduating high-school here.
Also, it depends what you see the discussion as. If laws are supposed to do the right thing, then "pass everyone always" is really starting to look like the wrong thing, even where the intentions are seemingly "good" because they avoid "disparate impact" (in the short term on very narrowly-chosen metrics). Then if your argument is "yeah well we can't do the right thing because lawsuits", well, yes, I agree, practically, but then these lawsuits are basically also evil and/or misguided.
The thing is, I have memory disabled. So is this an internal prompt just being exposed ("Does the user have any memories that are relevant? No, [because they don't have any].") or does it mean they are in fact keeping hidden memories / context and using these to inform responses, but didn't find anything relevant for this particular question?
While I suspect the former, the possibility of the latter concerns me somewhat.
Then the targets become the launch pads. Those space-based datacenters will need constant resupply and maintenance. Destroy launch capability, and their orbits will decay and all that computing capacity will burn up in the atmosphere.
We are so so so far away from self-sustaining machinery in space that it's not even funny.
There is no such thing as a self-sufficient version of any industry in space, and you should expect this to remain the case for approximately the next 10,000 years. Until then, everything that happens in space will have a supply chain rooted on Earth.
Otherwise, you can't explain e.g. smooth perceptions of low FPS stimuli, delayed reaction times, and must ignore obvious limits on various biological and neurological rhythms, or other possible limits on continuity (e.g. quantum stuff) and rates generally.
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