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The New AI Consciousness Paper
41–50 of 313 posts
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#42It isn't surprising that "phenomenal consciousness" is the thing everyone gets hung about, after all we are all immersed in this water. The puzzle seems intractable but only because everyone is accepting the priors and not looking more carefully at it.
This is the endpoint of meditation, and the observation behind some religious traditions, which is look carefully and see that there was never phenomenal consciousness where we are a solid subject to begin with. If we can observe that behavior clearly, then we can remove the confusion in this search.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
We can form and test hypotheses and experience the consequences. And then take that knowledge to our next trial. Even dogs and cats do this on a daily basis. Without that, how would we even evaluate whether something is conscious?
LLMs can do the same within the context window. It's especially obvious for the modern LLMs, tuned extensively for tool use and agentic behavior.
Okay, so you're talking about LLMs specifically in the context of a ChatGPT, Claude, or pick-your-preferred-chatbot. Which isn't just an LLM, but also a UI, a memory manager, a prompt builder, a vectorDB, a system prompt, and everything else that goes into making it feel like a person.
Let's work with that.
In a given context window or conversation, yes, you can have a very human-like conversation and the chatbot will give the feeling of understanding your world and what it's like. But this still isn't a real world, and the chatbot isn't really forming hypotheses that can be disproven. At best, it's a D&D style tabletop roleplaying game with you as the DM. You are the human arbiter of what is true and what is not for this chatbot, and the world it inhabits is the one you provide it. You tell it what you want, you tell it what to do, and it responds purely to you. That isn't a real world, it's just a narrative based on your words.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#44I'll never ask if AI is conscious because I already know they are not. Consciousness must involve an interplay with the senses. It is naive to think we can achieve AGI by making Platonic machines ever more rational. https://d1gesto.blogspot.com/2024/12/why-ai-models-cant-achi...
> Consciousness must involve an interplay with the senses. an idea debated in philosophy for centuries, if not millenia, without consensus. Maybe be a little more willing to be wrong about such matters?
Must be debated in physics/information theory. One cannot reach the Truth on Reason alone.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Consciousness must involve an interplay with the senses. an idea debated in philosophy for centuries, if not millenia, without consensus. Maybe be a little more willing to be wrong about such matters?
Must be debated in physics/information theory. One cannot reach the Truth on Reason alone.
[refer to the Scientific Method]
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#46It isn't surprising that "phenomenal consciousness" is the thing everyone gets hung about, after all we are all immersed in this water. The puzzle seems intractable but only because everyone is accepting the priors and not looking more carefully at it. This is the endpoint of meditation, and the observation behind some religious traditions, which is look carefully and see that there was never phenomenal consciousness…
I see this comment nearly every time consciousness is brought up here and I’m pretty sure this is a misunderstanding of contemplative practices.
Are you a practitioner who has arrived at this understanding, or is it possible you are misremembering a common contemplative “breakthrough” that the self (as separate from consciousness) is illusory, and you’re mistakenly remembering this as saying consciousness itself is illusory?
Consciousness is the only thing we can be absolutely certain does actually exist.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#47Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
>A conscious textual agent would need something like a unified narrative environment with real feedback: symbols that maintain identity over time, a stable substrate where “being someone” is definable, the ability to form and test a hypothesis, and experience the consequences. LLMs don’t have that. They exist in a shifting cloud of possibilities with no single consistent reality to anchor self-maintaining loops. They can generate pockets of local coherence, but they can’t accumulate global coherence across time.
These exist? Companies are making billions of dollars selling persistent environments to the labs. Huge amounts of inference dollars are going into coding agents which live in persistent environments with internal dynamics. LLMs definitely can live in a world, and what this world is and whether it's persistent lie outside the LLM.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#48Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
> Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inhabit a world whose structure is stable, self-consistent, and rich enough to support persistent internal dynamics. Even a purely symbolic mind would still need a coherent symbolic universe. And this is precisely where LLMs fall short, through no fault of their own. The universe they operate in isn’t a world—it’s a superposition of countless incompatible snippets of text.
The consistency and coherence of LLM outputs, assembled from an imperfectly coherent mess of symbols is an empirical proof that the mess of symbols is in fact quite coherent.
The physical world is largely incoherent to human consciousnesses too, and we emerged just fine.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#49Let’s make an ironman assumption: maybe consciousness could arise entirely within a textual universe. No embodiment, no sensors, no physical grounding. Just patterns, symbols, and feedback loops inside a linguistic world. If that’s possible in principle, what would it look like? What would it require? The missing variable in most debates is environmental coherence. Any conscious agent, textual or physical, has to inh…
I see a lot of arguments on this website where people passionately project the term consciousness onto LLMs. From my perspective, the disconnect you describe is one of the main reasons this term cannot be applied. Another reason is that the argument for calling LLMs conscious arises from the perspective of thinking and reasoning grounded in language. But in my personal experience, thinking in language is just a small…
I don’t know about others, but this is definitely not why I question whether LLMs are conscious or not.
I don’t think you should presume to know the reason people raise this idea.
Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is an attempt to predict a possible future in the context of AI. Basically a doomer fairy tale. It is just phenomenally dumb. Way worse than the worst bad scifi about the subject. It is presented as a cautionary tale and purports to be somewhat rationally thought out. But it is just so bad. It tries to delve into foreign policy and international politics but does so in such a naive way that it is painful to read.…
Whole lot of "doomer", "fairy tale", "dumb", "bad scifi", "so bad", "naive", "embarassing". Not any actual refutation. Maybe this opinion is a bit tougher to stomach for some reason than the rest you agree with...
An example
>The job market for junior software engineers is in turmoil: the AIs can do everything taught by a CS degree, but people who know how to manage and quality-control teams of AIs are making a killing.
AI doesn't look like a competition for a junior engineer and many of the people using not "managing" AI are going to be juniors in fact increasing what a junior can do and learn more quickly looks like one of the biggest potentials if they don't use it entirely as a crunch.
Meanwhile, it suggests leading-edge research into AI itself will proceed fully 50% faster than research not without AI but those using 6 months behind cutting edge. This appears hopelessly optimistic as does the idea that it will grow the US economy 30% in 2026 whereas a crash seems more likely.
Also it assumes that more compute will continue to be wildly more effective in short order assuming its possible to spend the money for magnitudes more compute. Either or both could easily fail to work out to plan.