Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang • Hacker News Board

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#351

Post by dpark » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:10 AM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #305

krupan wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do." But the machine doesn't have to understand humans to do that. It gets trained on a whole bunch of sentences and then it is able to complete text. You could maybe claim that it "understands" the text but even that's a stretch.

It can't even natively understand how many letters there are in words - how will it understand the meaning?

This is kind of a like assuming someone with bad spelling is stupid.

Counting letters in a word seems to have little to do with understanding the word. Young kids can’t spell or count well at all but no one says that means they can’t understand.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#352

Post by ludston » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

qarl wrote: post #247

It's becoming painfully evident that no one really understood the argument behind the Turing test.

If nobody understood the argument, then it was either weak or unclearly communicated.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#353

Post by calf » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:11 AM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #324

calf wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His intention is irrelevant, as is "trying to highlight a fact" as if it were the final say: all Chiang is doing here is using fancy white-collar words to argue the same argument leveled against Hinton and others regarding next-token prediction. And his audience, who have even less technical understanding, lap it all up unawares. Chiang is a writer and needs to stay his own lane, not RP as an expert; or, if he wants…

Chiang has, in fact, written on this topic before - see "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", and has speculated about sentience in AI, etc. This is not a "one-off", "I need money" type of article. I dare say he has thought about this much more than most people here. From Wikipedia: In 2023, Chiang was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in AI.

That's the problem, he's a writer. He's not a research scientist like Hinton. If a writer uses his skills and stature to rehash a well-known argument about next-token prediction, then it is performative of his status and influence and doesn't contribute to shedding actual light on the debate/confusion.

Indeed it isn't a one-off. His last infamous article compared AIs to Xerox machine image compression. He convinces a certain type of crowd that is not technical enough to poke holes in his posturing.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Post by krapp » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:13 AM UTC

felipeerias wrote: post #344

IMHO the sane position is essentially the Aristotelian one. Hylomorphism: body and consciousness are intrinsically linked. The nature of that link is an open metaphysical question. Virtue ethics: even if LLMs are not conscious, we should not abuse or mistreat them them because cruelty practised on anything trains one's disposition toward cruelty.

>Virtue ethics: even if LLMs are not conscious, we should not abuse or mistreat them them because cruelty practised on anything trains one's disposition toward cruelty.

This is the same argument used by people who claim violent video games cause real-life violence but there's no scientific evidence supporting it.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Post by emrehan » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

There is no definition of consciousness and this piece by Ted Chiang does not move the needle forward.

My current conclusion is there is an experience of consciousness in my locality (refraining from using “I” for room for “no-self” worldview). This conscious experience of the reality with other humans and animals sharing biological substrate gives me enough justification to assume there are other consciousness as well, preferring to err on this side not to hurt potential consciousnesses.

If it feels as there are artificial consciousnesses as well, it makes sense to extend the definition to them as well.

This view has liberated me with agency after I went deep on this question and came up empty handed.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Post by D-Machine » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:14 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?

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.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Post by _carbyau_ » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

K0balt wrote: post #333

It doesn’t matter. It will act as if it is. Embodied in a robot, that carries real consequences. Whether it’s “real” or not is almost without consequence.

I thought a LLM will have exactly the same output if you give it exactly the same inputs. But inputs are roughly prompt+randomSeed. As so the random bit means it seems to vary each time.

I don't know of an intelligence that will behave so precisely. But then, maybe intelligence needs to be better defined.

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#358

Post by dahinds » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:14 AM UTC

hn_acc1 wrote: post #298

Nevermark wrote: post #194

> My intention is to highlight the fact that LLM conversations are cleverly disguised examples of sentence continuation Regardless of bigger issues, this kind of statement reveals a deep misunderstanding. Problem type does not limit problem complexity. Nor does problem type limit solution complexity or power. If a machine has to learn to understand humans to complete text, then that is what it has to do. And there is…

I would maybe agree with you if the entire realm of human existence was limited to words. There are many human experiences that transcend text, and indeed can hardly be adequately described using text. Sure, it's the best we have online, but that does not make "the internet" the sum of all human experience. To reduce all of humanity down to the text on the internet is reducing us to the level of machines to fit the r…

I don't think they're asserting that all of human existence can be subsumed as text, though? Just that "consciousness", or "understanding", in some meaningful sense could be exhibited by a system that can only interact with the world through text?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

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Post by oidar » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

overgard wrote: post #302

oidar wrote: post #15

A person can certainly be conscious, but can they also be not-conscious? I think that most of our cognitive time is spent in activities that don't require consciousness and consciousness itself isn't needed for the majority of activities that people do. I would go so far as the a non-trivial part of people's time is spent in a not-conscious state.

Amusingly, I think Ted Chiang actually wrote a short story about this very concept (it involves people committing a form of suicide that removes their conscious experience but they still act and live in society as some kind of psychic zombie. I’m pretty sure it was him anyway, can’t recall the story name

Maybe “What's Expected of Us”?

Re: Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

#360

Post by trescenzi » Thu, Jun 04, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #341

cauch wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, for me, the thing is that when you do basic ML, you discover that ML will very often find data pattern that fit the goal but does not correspond to a real mechanism. So, I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is probably…

> I think there is a flaw in the logic of saying that human text have a pattern of "consciousness mechanism" and therefore LLM will learn "consciousness mechanism" in order to return sentence continuation that is convincing. There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake. Evolution learns various solutions to optimization problems, and so if co…

> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake.

> There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.

We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or cannot be conscious a priori can’t be done.