The New AI Consciousness Paper • Hacker News Board

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#101

Post by yannyu » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:10 PM UTC

yunyu wrote: post #47

yannyu wrote: post #21

Let’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…

I agree, I'm sure people have put together things like this. There's a significant profit and science motive to do so. JEPA and predictive world models are also a similar implementation or thought experiment.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#102

Post by jquery » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:11 PM UTC

robot-wrangler wrote: post #87

> Phenomenal consciousness is crazy. It doesn’t really seem possible in principle for matter to “wake up”. > In 2004, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi proposed that consciousness depended on a certain computational property, the integrated information level, dubbed Φ. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson complained that thermostats could have very high levels of Φ, and therefore integrated information theory should dub them…

I think this is one of the more interesting theories out there, because it makes "predictions" that come close to my intuitive understanding of consciousness.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#103

Post by yannyu » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:13 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #73

yannyu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coherence here isn't about legible text, it's environmental coherence where you can deduce truths about the world through hypotheses and experimentation. Coherence isn't about a consistent story narrative, it's about a persistent world with falsifiable beliefs and consequences.

Peoples interior model of the world is very tenuously related to reality. We don't have a direct experience of waves, quantum mechanics, the vast majority of the electromagnetic spectrum, etc. The whole thing is a bunch of shortcuts and hacks that allow people to survive, the brain isn't really setup to probe reality and produce true beliefs, and the extent to which our internal models of reality naturally match actu…

I don't think it's brief at all. Animals do this experimentation as well, but clearly in different ways. The scientific method is a formalized version of this idea, but even the first human who cooked meat or used a stick as a weapon had a falsifiable hypothesis, even if it wasn't something they could express or explain. And the consequences of testing the hypothesis were something that affected the way they acted from there on out.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#104

Post by andai » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:13 PM UTC

Has anyone read Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop?

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#105

Post by jbrisson » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:13 PM UTC

Consciousness implies self-awareness, in space and time. Consciousness implies progressive formation of the self. This is not acquired instantly by a type of design. This is acquired via a developmental process where some conditions have to be met. Keys to consciousness are closer to developmental neurobiology than the transformer architecture.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#106

Post by advisedwang » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

zkmon wrote: post #92

I don't see why it matters so much whether something is conscious or not. All that we care about is, whether something can be useful.

> All that we care about is, whether something can be useful

Anybody that thinks it's wrong to murder the terminally ill, disabled or elderly probably disagrees with you.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#107

Post by armchairhacker » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

My philosophy is that consciousness is orthogonal to reality.

Whether or not anything is conscious has, by definition, no observable effect to anything else. Therefore, everything is "maybe" conscious, although "maybe" isn't exactly the right word. There are infinite different ways you can imagine being something else with the consciousness and capacity for sensations you have, which don't involve the thing doing anything it's not already. Or, you can believe everything and everyone else has no consciousness, and you won't mis-predict anything (unless you assume people don't react to being called unconscious...).

Is AI conscious? I believe "yes", but in a different way than humans, and in a way that somehow means I don't think anyone who believes "no" is wrong. Is AI smart? Yes in some ways: chess algorithms are smart in some ways, AI is smarter in more, and in many ways AI is still dumber than most humans. How does that relate to morality? Morality is a feeling, so when an AI makes me feel bad for it I'll try to help it, and when an AI makes a significant amount of people feel bad for it there will be significant support for it.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#108

Post by andai » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

The substance / structure point is fascinating.

It gives us four quadrants.

Natural Substance, Natural Structure: Humans, dogs, ants, bacteria.

Natural Substance, Artificial Structure: enslaved living neurons (like the human brain cells that play pong 24/7), or perhaps a hypothetical GPT-5 made out of actual neurons instead of Nvidia chips.

Artificial Substance, Natural Structure: if you replace each of your neurons with a functional equivalent made out of titanium... would you cease to be conscious? At what point?

Artificial substance, Artificial structure: GPT etc., but also my refrigerator, which also has inputs (current temp), goals (maintain temp within range), and actions (turn cooling on/off).

The game SOMA by Frictional (of Amnesia fame!) goes into some depth on this subject.

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#109

Post by advisedwang » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:20 PM UTC

This article really takes umbridge with those that conflate phenomenological and access consciousness. However that is essentially dualism. It's a valid philosophical position to believe that there is no distinct phenomenological consciousness besides access consciousness.

Abandoning dualism feels intuitively wrong, but our intuition about our own minds is frequently wrong. Look at the studies that show we often believe we made a decision to do an action that was actually a pure reflex. Just the same, we might be misunderstanding our own sense of "the light being on".

Re: The New AI Consciousness Paper

#110

Post by catigula » Fri, Nov 21, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #98

catigula wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW I have gone from not understanding the problem to understanding the problem in the past couple of years because it's not trivial to casually intuit if you don't actually think about it and don't find it innately interesting and the discourse doesn't have the language to adequately express the problem, so this is probably wrong.

I’ve sort-of gone the opposite way. The more I introspect, the more I realize there isn’t anything mysterious there. It’s true that we are lacking good language to talk about it, as we already fail at successfully communicating levels of phantasia/aphantasia.

It’s not so much that there’s anything mysterious you can discover through intense introspection or meditation. There might be, but I haven’t found it.

It’s fundamentally that this capability exists at all.

Strip it all down to I think therefore I am. That is very bizarre because it doesn’t follow that such a thing would happen. It’s also not clear that this is even happening at all, and, as an outside observer, you would assess that it isn’t. However, from the inside, it is clear that it is.

I don’t have an explanation for anyone but I have basically given up and accepted that consciousness is epiphenomenal, like looking through a microscope.