Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

Post by nomel » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:21 AM UTC

doctoboggan wrote: post #509

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

In fact, the only example of consciousness we have is itself emergent, arising from a "simple" substrate of neurons. So we shouldn't be surprised if it emerges from another simple substrate of weights. It's even less surprising given the fact that we were explicitly trying to replicate human intelligence when designing that system.

Post by tasuki » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:22 AM UTC

musebox35 wrote: post #521

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

Not understanding the whole does not completely remove an ability to analyze. An interesting direction is individuality and having a notion of self. It is difficult to demarcate the individual for a model given how much the system prompt and the fine tunes / distills affect the behavior. So with computational intelligence in its current form either we can not talk of an individual or we can have a nearly infinite set…

Post by operatingthetan » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

gizajob wrote: post #611

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

Why do you have no inkling that your spreadsheet or terminal emulator is conscious, yet when that same machine is running an LLM all of a sudden we’re debating its consciousness? Anthropic seems to have chosen their in-house philosopher well - one who’ll be amenable to getting confused in their favour.

Post by danw1979 » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:23 AM UTC

starbugs wrote: post #602

sega_sai wrote: post #425

When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. And here in particular the reasoning behind the argument is bizarre. Decomposing the complex activity into simple steps like 'predicting the next word' and claiming that surely can't have consciousness. A similar argument would be -- there is no way that movements of e…

> When the consciousness itself not understood and well defined in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if something is or isn't conscious. That's like saying if matter itself is not understood and well defined (which it isn't) in the first place, it is pretty pointless to debate if jumping from a skyscraper is or is not deadly. A lot of practical aspects of life do not need to be properly defined as lon…

Post by amelius » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 8:25 AM UTC

brap wrote: post #228

overgard wrote: post #154

Obviously we don't know what makes for consciousness, but it seems extremely likely that it requires some sort of persistent internal state and continuous experience. LLMs don't do either of those things after training.

Is our own experience really continuous? Or maybe we just perceive it as such?