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From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're

From my observations, there are generally four camps in the machine consciousness discussion: 1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human. 2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in which human exceptionalism is the default. Those first two groups comprise the majority of people, and are not worth engaging with. 3. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they might be conscious, usually for computationalism/functionalism reasons. This is the group that I place myself in. 4. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they can't be conscious, usually for biological naturalist reasons. This seems to be the predominant group on Hacker News (among those who discuss it).

sunrunner 6mo ago
I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with. The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of consciousness as a super-bundle of the above (which is how I assume a lot of default ideas about consciousness are) actually sticks, or whether it falls apart when beings can have a subset of those properties but not all. Also, I nominate myself to be in the 'People who have thought about it and are becoming more doubtful that I myself am conscious, and the question might be moot.' group.
- in-silico 6mo ago
  I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.
  - Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
    Take a look at Daniel Dennett, for starters! If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this: Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. " Some days that's me, with a headache.
    - in-silico 6mo ago
      So it's more of a semantic argument than an actual rejection of the idea that you experience qualia/sentience/something?
      - joquarky 6mo ago
        What exactly is the "you" in your sentence?
      - Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
        You'd have to define those terms operationally first, somehow, before I could give you an honest reply. Most people can't -and those who do disagree- which suggests something structural. [It can be done. But it'll be dirty]
      - reverius42 6mo ago
        Dennett's whole thing is the rejection of qualia. See https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DennettQuiningQualia1988.pdf https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DennettQuiningQualia1988...
Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
Am I the only person who is confused by there being a philosophy called "biological naturalism", which is not the science?
- Nevermark 6mo ago
  “Natural” is a word often used in opposition to science. It really has 1000 meanings. Usually whatever the speaker wants it to mean.
LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since Alan Turing! And it's not a coincidence that humanity has yet to build a robot which is convincingly smarter than a cockroach. If you grant that humans are conscious, then surely domestic cats are as well. It is simply irrational to talk about Claude's "consciousness" without actually engaging with this: cats, humans, pigeons, fish, etc etc all share some common features we associate with consciousness (I don't mean sensory awareness, I mean the fuzzy cognitive concept). Claude really does not. In fact Claude doesn't even have much in common with uncontacted hunter-gatherers! Claude imitates the solipsism of formally educated human philosophers. It is uncharitable and curmudgeonly but totally scientific to dismiss people in camp #3 as unserious and not worth engaging with: they ignore scientific criticism and don't provide any themselves, it's just a mishmash of sci-fi-adjacent philosophy. There's nothing "functional" about ignoring animals and there's nothing scientific about waving your hands and saying "computationalism." That's certainly how I feel. I know this isn't a very nice comment. But I am so sick of AI folks thinking they can ignore animals and still have an honest conversation about machine consciousness. It's just sci-fi ghost stories.
- reverius42 6mo ago
  What is the evidence that non-human animals have the "fuzzy cognitive concept" we call consciousness, but Claude "really does not"? I personally have not been ignoring animal consciousness in how I think about the possibility of AI consciousness and I don't see how animals having consciousness means that AI can't.
  - LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
    I could have phrased it better, but the emphasis is on "fuzzy"! There isn't any evidence for any of this, it's pre-scientific. My statement is an opinionated position on how we should direct our research efforts and ascertain what is plausible: the behavioral similarities between humans and cats are much more relevant to the question of consciousness than the behavior similarities between humans and Claude, because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude. The fact that there are almost no behavioral similarities between cats and Claude suggests to me that "Claude might be conscious" is just a ridiculous statement not worth engaging with, even at the level of pre-science. At the very least, the burden is on Amanda Askell and Dario Amodei to explain why nonhuman animals are irrelevant to the question of Claude's consciousness. They have not offered anything like that; instead they seem fully ELIZAed by the chatbot, high on their own supply.
joquarky 6mo ago
Yep, #2 feels like geocentrism all over again.
thfuran 6mo ago
What about group 5: Actually, we're just simulating consciousness too.
kbelder 6mo ago
I would place myself in 3, with the caveat that I don't think any current llms or other programs/dataset/relationships are close to conscious. It's certainly possible in the future, though. Atoms arranged into a brain generate consciousness. There's no reason to think atoms in other arrangements can't. Brains aren't magic, just well optimized.
- in-silico 6mo ago
  What would have to change about future systems to make you think they're conscious in a way that modern systems aren't? That is to say, what evidence would you need from a system in order to think that it's conscious?
  - kbelder 6mo ago
    One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static. They do not change in response to input. I think they need some kind of temporal awareness (not just a 5-minute cron job), and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience? But, in fairness, we don't have a science of consciousness yet. Anybody that is 100% confident in their proclamations about this topic is too confident.
    - Scene_Cast2 6mo ago
      Why can't LLMs be conscious for their short 1-million-token input lifetime? (To be clear, I don't think they're conscious, but for different reasons.)
    - altruios 6mo ago
      > One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static It is true that the LLM itself is static. However it's context window is self-modifiable, based on its inputs and outputs. > I think they need some kind of temporal awareness... and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. Why?! (besides, they do, see above) I bring this example up, and it's clear evidence in humans that neither of these things are required for consciousness, and one that I deal with in my home. People with dementia that have no memory that are no longer able to learn suffer a different issue that not being conscious. > If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience? This line of thinking precludes dementia patients with no retention of memory are not conscious. I agree having an experience, and being conscious of that experience are two different things, though.
grantcas 6mo ago
[dead]
FloorEgg 6mo ago
Assuming 3. Maybe in order to reproduce human level consciousness one would need to treat at least most human cells as neurons, and reconstruct all the diversity of neuron types and their signalling mechanisms. If human consciousness is reproducible, maybe we will long underestimate the depth and diversity it uses to model reality the way it does.
ganymedes 6mo ago
I don't feel like I am in either 4 of those camps or that I'm part of camp 4, but the camp 4 problem is not the important one. My thought on this is that intelligence != consciousness and even brain != consciousness. Consciousness is the experience, consciousness is what you see, hear, feel, in the moment of it. It's the experience. It does not require any thought. In fact, if you look at Buddhist teachings, they teach the very opposite, they teach that the thinking mind is in fact an obstacle to experiencing consciousnesses fully, that it's only a sense, a tool (like smell, touch, vision, hearing). My bet is that a cat, or a dog has the experience of awareness the same way we have (although you can't never be too sure, even about another human being - look up "philosophical zombie"). Obviously, language-driven thought is not a requirement for consciousness, not just in other animals, but even in humans. The thinking mind takes a secondary role in ordinary daily human life. The truth is that a human being behaves the way they do is not because of thoughts, but because of conditioning (the thoughts are not the primary driver of decisions, actions and behavior). The 99% of the action and responses are trained, the thoughts that we have are also part of this conditioning (most thoughts are unconscious and they are inter-wired with the behaviors, even a seemingly conscious self-reflection thought can be an automated pavlovian trigger). For example, one may think that they get up and go to work because they have a thought "I have to get up, now I am going to go to work", this is an illusion and complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is. Or one can have a psychological insight about oneself, if it's repeated and follows a behavior consistently, the very thought is just the equivalent of whistle-salivation. The thinking mind gives us that 1% to self-reflect, adjust our behavior, learn, predict the future and that differentiates us from other mammals, it's a powerful tool, but just a tool, but it should not be confused with consciousness and it should not be confused with the mind as a whole (in the materialistic sense). The way our brain functions is anything but like an AI agent. And what is consciousness? It's not the thinking mind. It's the experience. It's the direct perception of the senses. The consciousness is what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, thought (the experience of having a thought) in the moment. When you practice meditation, you get to discover the consciousness directly by becoming separated from the thinking thread. The thinking thread becomes more like an external tool, like a computer inside you and you realize directly that it's just a part of the cognitive faculty that makes you navigate your life, not the entire thing. The LLM (and the harnesses) as built right now merely simulate the tool (the thinking mind). It's not that because this is some code ran on a beefy, but regular piece of tech invented in 20th century you may have at your desk that it does not have awareness (that's also a good argument), but because the way they function and operate is nothing like human (or mammalian) brain, then why would you think that regular code running on a regular PC could gain awareness? My point is that there's no similarity argument, LLMs, despite all their incredible capabilities (to threaten our jobs), are not remotely similar to the way our brain works. Secondly, even if someone built an artificial brain made of whatever that simulates the biological structure, because of the philosophical zombie problem (the fact that there's no way to scientifically observe consciousness), you could never be too sure if a key ingredient was not missing and you are looking at an NPC. The consciousness is not a property of the physical brain, it's literally immaterial, it's the direct experience of the senses. You can make an optimistic assumption that every person and animal experiences consciousness the same way you do, but there's no way to rationally accept this assumption for anything created artificially.
nextaccountic 6mo ago
You are forgetting the most influential group 5. People who has a financial interest in making sure that any eventual AGI isn't granted any kind of rights and continue to be exploited as an inanimate "thing", not as a "being", no matter the actual characteristics of this hypothetical AGI entity. I mean, take a look a this language in the paper [0] > This realization pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap. It allows us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism, treating AGI as a powerful, but inherently non-sentient tool. This reads as someone that started with this conclusion, and then built an argument to support it. [0] also discussed in this reddit thread https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1sotz9t/google_deepminds_senior_scientist_alexander/ogwv7vg/?context=2 https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1sotz9t/google...

sunrunner 6mo ago

I'm not sure I'd agree that people in groups 1 and 2 aren't worth engaging with. The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of consciousness as a super-bundle of the above (which is how I assume a lot of default ideas about consciousness are) actually sticks, or whether it falls apart when beings can have a subset of those properties but not all. Also, I nominate myself to be in the 'People who have thought about it and are becoming more doubtful that I myself am conscious, and the question might be moot.' group.

in-silico 6mo ago
I'm curious about your doubting your own consciousness statement, given that "we humans are conscious" is pretty axiomic to its definition and one of the few pieces that most agree with.
- Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
  Take a look at Daniel Dennett, for starters! If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this: Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. " Some days that's me, with a headache.
  - in-silico 6mo ago
    So it's more of a semantic argument than an actual rejection of the idea that you experience qualia/sentience/something?
    - joquarky 6mo ago
      What exactly is the "you" in your sentence?
    - Kim_Bruning 6mo ago
      You'd have to define those terms operationally first, somehow, before I could give you an honest reply. Most people can't -and those who do disagree- which suggests something structural. [It can be done. But it'll be dirty]
    - reverius42 6mo ago
      Dennett's whole thing is the rejection of qualia. See https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DennettQuiningQualia1988.pdf https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DennettQuiningQualia1988...

Kim_Bruning 6mo ago

Am I the only person who is confused by there being a philosophy called "biological naturalism", which is not the science?

Nevermark 6mo ago
“Natural” is a word often used in opposition to science. It really has 1000 meanings. Usually whatever the speaker wants it to mean.

LeCompteSftware 6mo ago

As someone who places themselves in #4, at some point the people in #3 need to accept a bit of scientific humility. The reason we are "biological naturalists" is that we can point to hundreds of thousands of conscious species on planet Earth which are not humans, and whose consciousness clearly has nothing to do with an ability to say "Forsooth, I am a conscious thinking being." AI folks have been ignoring this since Alan Turing! And it's not a coincidence that humanity has yet to build a robot which is convincingly smarter than a cockroach. If you grant that humans are conscious, then surely domestic cats are as well. It is simply irrational to talk about Claude's "consciousness" without actually engaging with this: cats, humans, pigeons, fish, etc etc all share some common features we associate with consciousness (I don't mean sensory awareness, I mean the fuzzy cognitive concept). Claude really does not. In fact Claude doesn't even have much in common with uncontacted hunter-gatherers! Claude imitates the solipsism of formally educated human philosophers. It is uncharitable and curmudgeonly but totally scientific to dismiss people in camp #3 as unserious and not worth engaging with: they ignore scientific criticism and don't provide any themselves, it's just a mishmash of sci-fi-adjacent philosophy. There's nothing "functional" about ignoring animals and there's nothing scientific about waving your hands and saying "computationalism." That's certainly how I feel. I know this isn't a very nice comment. But I am so sick of AI folks thinking they can ignore animals and still have an honest conversation about machine consciousness. It's just sci-fi ghost stories.

reverius42 6mo ago
What is the evidence that non-human animals have the "fuzzy cognitive concept" we call consciousness, but Claude "really does not"? I personally have not been ignoring animal consciousness in how I think about the possibility of AI consciousness and I don't see how animals having consciousness means that AI can't.
- LeCompteSftware 6mo ago
  I could have phrased it better, but the emphasis is on "fuzzy"! There isn't any evidence for any of this, it's pre-scientific. My statement is an opinionated position on how we should direct our research efforts and ascertain what is plausible: the behavioral similarities between humans and cats are much more relevant to the question of consciousness than the behavior similarities between humans and Claude, because cats are obviously conscious and that's not true for Claude. The fact that there are almost no behavioral similarities between cats and Claude suggests to me that "Claude might be conscious" is just a ridiculous statement not worth engaging with, even at the level of pre-science. At the very least, the burden is on Amanda Askell and Dario Amodei to explain why nonhuman animals are irrelevant to the question of Claude's consciousness. They have not offered anything like that; instead they seem fully ELIZAed by the chatbot, high on their own supply.

joquarky 6mo ago

Yep, #2 feels like geocentrism all over again.

thfuran 6mo ago

What about group 5: Actually, we're just simulating consciousness too.

kbelder 6mo ago

I would place myself in 3, with the caveat that I don't think any current llms or other programs/dataset/relationships are close to conscious. It's certainly possible in the future, though. Atoms arranged into a brain generate consciousness. There's no reason to think atoms in other arrangements can't. Brains aren't magic, just well optimized.

in-silico 6mo ago
What would have to change about future systems to make you think they're conscious in a way that modern systems aren't? That is to say, what evidence would you need from a system in order to think that it's conscious?
- kbelder 6mo ago
  One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static. They do not change in response to input. I think they need some kind of temporal awareness (not just a 5-minute cron job), and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience? But, in fairness, we don't have a science of consciousness yet. Anybody that is 100% confident in their proclamations about this topic is too confident.
  - Scene_Cast2 6mo ago
    Why can't LLMs be conscious for their short 1-million-token input lifetime? (To be clear, I don't think they're conscious, but for different reasons.)
  - altruios 6mo ago
    > One big reason I don't think LLMs are (currently) conscious is because they are static It is true that the LLM itself is static. However it's context window is self-modifiable, based on its inputs and outputs. > I think they need some kind of temporal awareness... and some mechanism for self-modification or active learning based on their input. Why?! (besides, they do, see above) I bring this example up, and it's clear evidence in humans that neither of these things are required for consciousness, and one that I deal with in my home. People with dementia that have no memory that are no longer able to learn suffer a different issue that not being conscious. > If an experience flows through them and leaves them completely unchanged, are they actually conscious of the experience? This line of thinking precludes dementia patients with no retention of memory are not conscious. I agree having an experience, and being conscious of that experience are two different things, though.

grantcas 6mo ago

[dead]

FloorEgg 6mo ago

Assuming 3. Maybe in order to reproduce human level consciousness one would need to treat at least most human cells as neurons, and reconstruct all the diversity of neuron types and their signalling mechanisms. If human consciousness is reproducible, maybe we will long underestimate the depth and diversity it uses to model reality the way it does.

ganymedes 6mo ago

I don't feel like I am in either 4 of those camps or that I'm part of camp 4, but the camp 4 problem is not the important one. My thought on this is that intelligence != consciousness and even brain != consciousness. Consciousness is the experience, consciousness is what you see, hear, feel, in the moment of it. It's the experience. It does not require any thought. In fact, if you look at Buddhist teachings, they teach the very opposite, they teach that the thinking mind is in fact an obstacle to experiencing consciousnesses fully, that it's only a sense, a tool (like smell, touch, vision, hearing). My bet is that a cat, or a dog has the experience of awareness the same way we have (although you can't never be too sure, even about another human being - look up "philosophical zombie"). Obviously, language-driven thought is not a requirement for consciousness, not just in other animals, but even in humans. The thinking mind takes a secondary role in ordinary daily human life. The truth is that a human being behaves the way they do is not because of thoughts, but because of conditioning (the thoughts are not the primary driver of decisions, actions and behavior). The 99% of the action and responses are trained, the thoughts that we have are also part of this conditioning (most thoughts are unconscious and they are inter-wired with the behaviors, even a seemingly conscious self-reflection thought can be an automated pavlovian trigger). For example, one may think that they get up and go to work because they have a thought "I have to get up, now I am going to go to work", this is an illusion and complete misunderstanding of what consciousness is. Or one can have a psychological insight about oneself, if it's repeated and follows a behavior consistently, the very thought is just the equivalent of whistle-salivation. The thinking mind gives us that 1% to self-reflect, adjust our behavior, learn, predict the future and that differentiates us from other mammals, it's a powerful tool, but just a tool, but it should not be confused with consciousness and it should not be confused with the mind as a whole (in the materialistic sense). The way our brain functions is anything but like an AI agent. And what is consciousness? It's not the thinking mind. It's the experience. It's the direct perception of the senses. The consciousness is what is seen, heard, smelled, touched, thought (the experience of having a thought) in the moment. When you practice meditation, you get to discover the consciousness directly by becoming separated from the thinking thread. The thinking thread becomes more like an external tool, like a computer inside you and you realize directly that it's just a part of the cognitive faculty that makes you navigate your life, not the entire thing. The LLM (and the harnesses) as built right now merely simulate the tool (the thinking mind). It's not that because this is some code ran on a beefy, but regular piece of tech invented in 20th century you may have at your desk that it does not have awareness (that's also a good argument), but because the way they function and operate is nothing like human (or mammalian) brain, then why would you think that regular code running on a regular PC could gain awareness? My point is that there's no similarity argument, LLMs, despite all their incredible capabilities (to threaten our jobs), are not remotely similar to the way our brain works. Secondly, even if someone built an artificial brain made of whatever that simulates the biological structure, because of the philosophical zombie problem (the fact that there's no way to scientifically observe consciousness), you could never be too sure if a key ingredient was not missing and you are looking at an NPC. The consciousness is not a property of the physical brain, it's literally immaterial, it's the direct experience of the senses. You can make an optimistic assumption that every person and animal experiences consciousness the same way you do, but there's no way to rationally accept this assumption for anything created artificially.

nextaccountic 6mo ago

You are forgetting the most influential group 5. People who has a financial interest in making sure that any eventual AGI isn't granted any kind of rights and continue to be exploited as an inanimate "thing", not as a "being", no matter the actual characteristics of this hypothetical AGI entity. I mean, take a look a this language in the paper [0] > This realization pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap. It allows us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism, treating AGI as a powerful, but inherently non-sentient tool. This reads as someone that started with this conclusion, and then built an argument to support it. [0] also discussed in this reddit thread https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1sotz9t/google_deepminds_senior_scientist_alexander/ogwv7vg/?context=2 https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1sotz9t/google...