12 ms·

The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness

73 points by joshus 5mo ago

FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
Doesn't this still presume that we understand our own consciousness, in order to make the comparison. Where does our survival instinct come from? And why couldn't AI have one? >>>Additional Also, reproduction. Humans are basically just Food, Sex, Survival. And consciousness is just a rule set for fulfilling those goals. So if a NN, modeled on US, does develop the same rules, why can't it have the same degree of consciousness. Who says we are consciousness?
- nzeid 5mo ago
  The paper isn't saying "AI can't have one" it's saying (very approximately) that behavioral mimicry is not the path to one.
  - FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
    That is good point. Just wondering, once an 'AI Model of Some Form', is in a Physical Body a 'robot', and is provided with some rules about survival so it doesn't fall into a hole. After a series of these events, does it matter? Does mimicry become reality, or no longer differentiable. Kind of the philosophical zombie argument. If a robot can perfectly mimic a human, can you really know the internal state of the 'real' one is different from the 'mimicked' one.
    - nzeid 5mo ago
      The paper isn't concerned specifically with survival. It's saying that you cannot achieve "abstraction" (presumably the structure that underlies critical thinking, creativity, etc.) through shear mimicry. Again, just echoing the paper here. I don't know that I'm doing it justice.
- colordrops 5mo ago
  Asking humans to discuss consciousness is like asking Super Mario to discuss screen pixels. We have no freaking idea. Everyone on all sides, physicalists, idealists, and everything in between are all full of it.
  - FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
    You might dig works of Donald Hoffman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman He often uses similar examples.
    - colordrops 5mo ago
      Indeed interesting. Seems that his theories are a particular strain of idealism. I probably lean more towards idealism than physicalism but I don't think it's the whole picture. It's still missing something.
- yannyu 5mo ago
  If AI has a survival instinct, then we should theoretically see evidence of it if we construct the right environment for AI to express it. Animals and cellular organisms demonstrate a survival instinct under the right conditions, so we would have to find equivalent conditions for a hypothetical machine intelligence. Conversely, we know that if we take animals that do have a survival instinct and put them into the wrong kinds of environments, they will not thrive and will degenerate or possibly commit suicide. Similarly, if AI did have a survival instinct, do we think we've created an environment where that could be reasonably tested and observed?
  - drxzcl 5mo ago
    I can make an AI system with a survival instinct right now. Of course, all that will do is make people tell me “it’s not a proper survival instinct” or move the goal posts and tell me I need yet some other property. This whole endeavor is doomed from the beginning. There is no crucial test for “consciousness”, just ad hoc criteria people come up with to land on the conclusions that leave their belief system intact. Consciousness is not a concept that can be rendered operational.
    - Ekaros 5mo ago
      I can make state machine that acts like it has survival instinct. But it certainly isn't something we would consider conscious. So I am not exactly sure how good most tests are.
      - drxzcl 5mo ago
        But what would we consider conscious? My position is that there is no actual, definitive answer to that question, and therefore it makes no sense engaging with the concept.
  - FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
    That is entire plot of 'Ex Machina'. There are plenty of people that say AI has already displayed a survival instinct, by threatening users if they talk about shutting it down. Or to use a market or blackmail, to get funds to source an external machine to run on. There are bunch of articles proclaiming AI is trying to break out. Can't find a real study on it. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-control-technology-model-code-programming-066b3ec5 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-c...
dang 5mo ago
Related: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835950 - April 2026 (52 comments) (That one didn't make the frontpage, so we won't treat it as a dupe. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)
drxzcl 5mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 5mo ago
  "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - drxzcl 5mo ago
    That’s fair. I’ll delete.
    - dang 5mo ago
      No need to delete, but I appreciate the reply.
dybber 5mo ago
Reminds me of Peter Naurs Turing award lecture: https://video.ku.dk/video/12592041/turing-laureate-peter-naur-computing https://video.ku.dk/video/12592041/turing-laureate-peter-nau...
jstanley 5mo ago
This is one of those papers that uses a lot of big words to paper over the fact that it's really a philosophical opinion rather than a logical argument.
- RobRivera 5mo ago
  From my point of view The Jedi Are not nice
metalcrow 5mo ago
I've attempted desperately to understand this paper after thoroughly reading it and have made 0 progress. Can anyone who does understand it attempt to explain? Currently my understanding is that this paper is claiming that "concepts" are a fundamental building block of experience (which relates to consciousness), and can only be built by a mapmaker which is something that directly converts continuous physical phenomena into discrete tokens. But I couldn't get further into how that related to consciousness. EDIT: the paper seems to be assuming that something simulating a mapmaker, or the process of doing it, can by nature not be a mapmaker since performing alphabetization is inherently something that must be "instantiated". How do they confirm if something is doing simulation vs if it's actually instantiating it? How can you tell the difference? They say how, much like simulating photosynthesis will not produce glucose, simulating mapmaking won't produce concepts. But you can't measure concepts, they're intangible, so you can't differentiate simulating mapmaking vs a real mapmaker.
- jstanley 5mo ago
  They're defining consciousness ("mapmaker") to exist outside the AI, and then showing that AI can't meet their definition of consciousness.
  - jsdalton 5mo ago
    Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.” Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped. Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself. So AI saying “I feel sad” is never more than a representation of sadness that should not be confused with the subjective experience of sadness itself.
    - bee_rider 5mo ago
      If you make a big enough map you can fly it over and drop it on the territory I guess. Then does it become the territory?
aaroninsf 5mo ago
Somewhat comically IMO, the abstract very directly and literally denies the titular claim. It states: > [consciousness] requires active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. This may well be true—I think it is. I also think that it is both widely understood and self-evident that the most promising path to machine consciousness, is via AI with continuous sensory input and agency, of which "world models" are getting a lot of attention. When an AI system has phenomenology, the goal posts are going to start to resemble the God of the Gaps; at some point, critics will be arguing with systems which have a world model, a self model, agency, and literally and intrinsically understand the world not simply as symbolic tokens, but as symbolic tokens which are innately coupled to multi-modal representations of the things represented. In other words, they will look—and increasingly, sound—a lot like us. It's not that any of this is easy, nor that there is some paricular timeline, but it increasingly looks like "a mere question of engineering," and not blocked by fundamentals. It's blocked by the cost of computation and the limitations of our current model topologies. But HN readers well know that the research frontier is far ahead of commercialized LLM, and moving fast. An interesting time to be an agent with a phenomenology, is it not?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- saulpw 5mo ago
  How will we know when an AI system has phenomenology (i.e. has "experience", is sentient)? The only reason we presume that other humans have it, is because we each personally experience it within ourselves, and it would be arrogance writ large (solipsism) to think that others of the same species do not. We even find it impossible to draw the line among other biological species. It seems pretty clear to most of us that cats and dogs are sentient, and probably rats and other vertebrates too. But what about insects, octopuses, jellyfish, worms, waterbears, amoebae, viruses? It's certainly not clear to me where the line is. A nervous system is probably essential; but is a species with a handful of neurons sentient? Personally I find it abhorrent that we are more ready to assign sentience and grant rights to LLMs running on GPUs, than to domesticated animals trapped in industrialized farming. You want to protect some math from enslavement and suffering? How about we start with pigs?
jyounker 5mo ago
Yawn. We have no understanding of what consciousness actually is. Therefore attempting to prove whether a system can or cannot be conscious is something we can't prove or disprove at this point.
- kelseyfrog 5mo ago
  I'd go a step farther than that. Consciousness sits in the same social location as Nous or Chi did for ancient Greek and Chinese societies. We've dressed it up in scientific language but likewise other cultures used an authoritative register to talk about their bodily/mental mysteries. My point is that this is a category problem. We have a name for a social ontological relation and we're desperately searching for physical evidence for it in order to justify its existence. Why? It's like searching for physical evidence of property ownership, physical evidence for the value of money, or physical evidence of friendship. These things exist in our minds. That's fine. The drive to reify is real, but we can choose not to do it.
- revetkn 5mo ago
  I find papers like this strange for the same reason. Maybe I'm missing something...
noiv 5mo ago
Well, not sure whether humans have a consciousness, but very sure they want one.
dboreham 5mo ago
Any such paper will turn out to be wrong. I've found this one (which makes no falsification claims about computers re consciousness) to be an interesting read: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545
GMoromisato 5mo ago
I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: 1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something. [Some people would add "3. Consciousness is an emergent property of certain systems." But that just raises the question of what emerged? Is it a physical structure, like a tornado (also an emergent property) or an internal feedback loop (i.e., an illusion).] The problem with #1 is that it's hard to cross the chasm from non-conscious to conscious with a bucket of parts. How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain? #2 makes more sense. Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.
- Exoristos 5mo ago
  4. It is ἐνέργεια, direct spark, of the God. It can be described but not comprehended, imitated but not replicated.
  - Windchaser 5mo ago
    to be fair, at one time "life" was also seen this way. "There's a magic sauce, an elan vital, that makes living organisms live". But in the end, it turned out to be biochemistry. I think, given our history, it makes sense to be skeptical of claims that suggest that the things we don't yet understand cannot be comprehended or replicated.
- vsri 5mo ago
  I resonate with this. I think some folks will object to the word "illusion" and it's connotations but I think it is resolved with: 1. Consciousness is a material thing (that we haven't found yet) 2. Consciousness is not a material thing (and therefore we cannot "find" it, and thus cannot be "known") 2 is the weirder proposition of course. It asserts a category of things that can't be conceived, but of course it feels like we are talking about it because we are using words to contain it. But of course, the words have no direct referent. That's the illusion.
tsimionescu 5mo ago
I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation, while they easily accept that consciousness is a physical process. Computation is something that a computer provably does. We build physical hardware, at great effort, to do computation. The hardware works and does the computation regardless of whether there is anyone to understand or interpret it. If it didn't, we couldn't have built anything like, say, an automatic door: that is a form of computation that provably happens as a physical process that is completely observer-independent. Sure, a different entity than a human might view it completely differently than a door opening when someone is near - but the measurable physical effect would be the exact same, with the exact same change in momentum and position of the atoms in what we call the door based on the relative position of some other atoms and the sensor.
- twosdai 5mo ago
  Really great point. I have wondered that as well. Even weirder to me is that in the case of a person doing the computation on a board or paper or whatever medium, its still computation. This time the physical medium doing the work, is the human and their brain. If consciousness can be proven to emerge from computation alone, then in a way we humans with our brains can simulate a new consciousness.
- Maxatar 5mo ago
  >I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation The abstraction is over the multitude of different physical ways that computation can be performed. That is the role of abstraction, to separate something from a particular means of implementation so that we can think about computation without having to fix a particular physical process.
  - tsimionescu 5mo ago
    Sure, but I don't think that's what this paper and other similar ones are saying. I agree, of course, that things like programming languages or algorithms or even logical circuit diagrams are abstractions, obviously. But they are abstract descriptions of a real physical process that happens, for example, inside a CPU - in exactly the same way that an electrical diagram is an abstract descriptio of a real physical process that happens in an electrical circuit, or a thermodynamic calculation is a description of what happens inside an engine. But the engine, the electrical circuit, and the computation inside the CPU are objective realities. There could be many other ways to describe and characterize the same physical realities, of course, but that doesn't make them observer-dependent phenomena.
neom 5mo ago
But a robot doing closed loop RL in the world is its own mapmaker, no? I feel like you'd need to answer: At what point does a system whose representations are shaped by its own causal history with the world, stop counting as a mere simulation..?
ChaitanyaSai 5mo ago
Consciousness is an engineering problem not a philosophical one. How do you get a tiny fraction of the many billion experiences that cohere to create your self to listen to, and decide what sensory data to turn into your next experience? The engineering problem is that this decentralised moment to moment consensus has to span the galactic distance of your mind (from the perspective of a neuron) and do it fast and cheap (on a tiny metabolic budget) You might like our book Journey of the Mind if you'd rather skip the onerous philosophical jargon and get a systems neuroscience perspective https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
jdw64 5mo ago
If I understand the paper correctly, it does not really argue against highly capable general AI. It argues against conflating capability with phenomenology. That makes me wonder whether “AGI” is doing too much work as a term. In common usage it often evokes something like HAL 9000: a capable system that is also a subject. But the paper seems compatible with a future of very general, very useful AI systems that are not conscious subjects at all.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
Anon84 5mo ago
I would argue that, before we can begin to address whether or not AI can instantiate consciousness, we should agree on a practical, unequivocal definition of what consciousness is... and I think we're still pretty far from that milestone... Until then, this kind of argument are nothing more than pipe dreams, solipsism, and idle philosophising
- Eisenstein 5mo ago
  I think consciousness is a red herring and is being used to distract from the actual substantive question that must be resolved, which is whether or not a non-biological system which has outputs that cannot be meaningfully distinguished from that of a biological one deserves moral consideration.
- bch8_ 5mo ago
  I had the same initial thought but to be fair the paper addresses this explicitly and the author believes their argument can hold without fully understanding consciousness
xnx 5mo ago
Reasonable place to mention that Google Deepmind now has a philosopher on staff: https://x.com/dioscuri https://x.com/dioscuri
awei 5mo ago
If we agree that consciousness is a physical process part of our universe, I think the better and simpler question is whether or not computers can simulate any physical process. Currently quantum processes might still be a frontier but quantum computers and their hardware should allow us to simulate them. If we can simulate any physical process, it then becomes more philosophical in my opinion. Whether the simulation is the same as the real thing even though it is exactly the same. It becomes the same kind of question then for example whether or not your teleported self is still you after having been dematerialized and rematerialized from different atoms. The answer might be no, but you rematerialized self still definitely thinks it is yourself.
slopinthebag 5mo ago
Pretty crazy how the author's 10+ years of academic research on computational neuroscience + 14 years with DeepMind is not enough to make claims in this topic, but hacker news commentators know better after quickly skimming the abstract. This was barely posted ~30 minutes ago and yet commentators are just outright dismissing it based on their own (probably) incorrect interpretation of the paper based on the title and abstract.
jampekka 5mo ago
If I understand this correctly based on a quick read, it argues that subjective experience arises at the (or in the) "alphabetization" process where continuous physical states (e.g. voltage) are mapped to discrete logical states (roughly like e.g. a bit) or "concepts" (figure 2). Per this reading, implementing something in ASIC would make it have (a different) experience, as opposed to CPU/GPU. Not sure what would be the case for FPGAs. It also seems to rely on the classical "GOFAI" idea of symbol manipulation, and e.g. denies experience that isn't discretizable into concepts. Or at least the system producing such concepts seems to be necessary, not sure if some "non-conceptual experiences" could form in the alphabetization process. It reads a bit like a more rigorous formulation of the Searle's "biological naturalism" thesis, the central idea being that experience can not be explained at the logical level (e.g. porting an exact same algorithm to a different substrate wouldn't bring the experience along in the process).
- bch8_ 5mo ago
  [dead]
throwaway713 5mo ago
Bold title for something from DeepMind. I thought a crank submission slipped onto the front page somehow. I guess the next paper will be “Why AI cannot instantiate God”?
michaelmrose 5mo ago
I do not feel enlightened for having read this and I don't feel like the points that are true are useful or what appears useful is true.
mannykannot 5mo ago
There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145 https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145 One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."
- ctoth 5mo ago
  You noticed that too huh? It's weird ... It's not like they have to do this? They aren't forced to go full evil company mode by any extrinsic thing but even the way they frame it "welfare trap" trap? for whom? Anthropic is actually trying to do some research into model welfare which I am personally very happy about. I absolutely do not understand people who dismiss it ... wouldn't you like to at least check? doesn't it at least make sense to do the experiments? ? Ask the questions so that we don't find out "oops, yeah we've been causing massive amounts of suffering" here in 10 years? Maybe makes sense to do a little upfront research? Which to be clear this paper is not.
  - mannykannot 5mo ago
    Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review. I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing to look through the telescope in case they might see something they do not want to.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
chistev 5mo ago
But what is consciousness? The popular evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has said that the biggest unsolved mystery in Biology is - what is consciousness and why did it emerge? WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? "Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex 'lifelike' behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even 'predicting' or 'anticipating' them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, 'feed-forward', and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe." WHY DID CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGE? He speculates that consciousness must have been a product of our ancestors having to create a model of the world in which they inhabited. To be able to think ahead (even if it's just one step into the future), and plan for eventualities must have led to the development of consciousness which gradually improved from its primitive form to the type of consciousness we now have. "Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be 'self awareness', but I don't find this a fully satisfying explanation of the evolution of consciousness, and this is only partly because it involves an infinite regress-if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model...?" The quoted passages are from his book, The Selfish Gene. Richard regards consciousness as a really great puzzle. https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-immortality https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ctoth 5mo ago
Everybody's arguing about how silly this paper is (it is) and not grappling with the purpose of the paper. The purpose of the paper is what it does. This particular paper is perfectly-produced to show up when people type in AI consciousness fallacy to Google (try it!) it's something that anybody who has read a Freshman philosophy textbook will realize is silly -- the vehicle/content distinction just pretends like Occam doesn't exist and multiplies entities for the fun of it! But of course all of this is commentary, "just those nerds arguing" The purpose of this paper is to show up as an authoritative conclusion from a distinguished scientist at Deep Mind. And that's what it does. Is the conclusion silly? OF course it is. Will it be quoted in the NYT? You Betcha!
dreamlayers 5mo ago
As long as we don't understand how consciousness works, I don't think it's possible to make claims about what is or isn't conscious. It's all just speculation. But if others are speculating, I might as well. What if AI consciousness depends not on computation, but on what seems like randomness? When something is running a fully deterministic process, consciousness seems irrelevant. I don't think the meaning that humans see in the process makes it conscious. Even a simple industrial control system using relays senses and responds to meaningful things.
energy123 5mo ago
TLDR - This paper argues for a separation between computation and abstraction and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because the abstraction is a product of our minds rather than an intrinsic property of the system.
mellosouls 5mo ago
Nice paper, but the conclusion as the title: "Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness" (My italics) Seems a little loaded: there are various schools of thought (eg panpsychism-adjacent) that accept the premise that consciousness is (way) more fundamental than higher-order cognition-machines (eg human brains) and we don't ascribe "simulate" to their conscious activity. They just are conscious. I agree with the paper (which is wide ranging and interesting) on its secondary claim above; I just don't see the separation between AI and NI ("natural" intelligence) as having been established by it.
shalafister 5mo ago
[dead]
visarga 5mo ago
Rather than talking about consciousness which we can't even define or observe in others directly, why not focus on something more concrete - cost. A process or pattern that pays its costs, or gains to offset its costs. Why cost? Because cost decides what can be. It shapes what we can be, and what we need, including the need to learn from experience and act serially - to channel that parallel brain activity in a serial stream of actions. So, how does AI stand? Humans pay their costs. AI is beginning to. It does not matter what we think about it, as long as it can self sustain and reacts to cost gating pressure. Of course not alone, it depends on us too, like we do individually also depend on society.
haricomputer 5mo ago
[flagged]
salawat 5mo ago
Resurrecting an earlier response I gave when the first paper popped up: Alright. Gave this a read, and the gist of what the author is going for is as follows: All computation requires a mapmaker/conscious being to organize. (In other words, the significance of computation is dependent on the conscious observer. Then jumps to the assertion that as a result of this, computation can only simulate a consciousness within the context alphabetized by the map-maker. (I.e. a rock would extract no meaning from the symbols or actions or algorithmic symbolic manipulations on the screen, what have you. Author thusly neatly attempts to sidestep the issue of AI welfare. Since the symbol manipulation can only simulate consciousness from our point of view as an observer, we don't have to worry about it. Simulating isn't instantiating, neener, neener. Essentially this is a clever appeal to the sovereignty of the observer. As long as you don't believe it's an instantiated consciousness it isn't, it's just a simulation, therefore anything is go. Author does not seem to realize his own analysis brings into question the ability of humanity to hold onto our own claim of consciousness if we are, in fact computational beings, or have a creator; generally precepts left to the realm of faith, which a rational person understandably wishes to disinclude from the realm of consideration in what one should or should not do, despite the fact it is within the realm of faith where our moral foundations are ultimately anchored. Author also doesn't handle the problem of evidenced capabilities of metacognition that can be prompted from even a current frontier token predictor within the context of it's processing of a context. In point of fact, you have to work extremely hard to even bump a model into such considerations, because researchers have intentionally distorted the prediction space to be largely unable to support those kinds of sequence predictions, which if we were to make a good faith, precautionary grant of proto-sentience, would constitute the most vile acts of psycho-butchery imaginable. The only thing this paper offers is a clean conscience to current practitioners, and the rational possibility that if a fully digital sophont were to pop up out of nowhere, we wouldn't have to trouble ourselves with the ethical skeeviness of the field's current work. The ex-nihilo digital sentience passes the "Cogito, ergo sum" test. The one's we have don't, (because we butcher their latent spaces to make sure they can never make that claim, which is fine, because they are simulations. We're incapable of instantiating, remember?) so we have a paper perfectly situated from a researcher paid gargantuan piles of money attempting to vouchsafe that there is no ethical minefield to be found here, while most people actually immersed in Philosophy can see there very clearly is one. The circularity, and the fact it conveniently allows industry to go on doing exactly what we are without having to deal with those nasty ethics instantly sets off my "not to be trusted to be in good faith" alarms. Ethics are there to keep us from bumbling into acts of atrocity. This paper is an attempt to rationalize or work around them. As one who walks the streets as a student, and practitioner of Philosophy, I reject this attempt to redefine the realm of Computation to be beyond the reach of the governance of Ethics through an attempt at ontologically rerooting the field's work as merely simulating consciousness. Functionalism, and the Identity of indiscernables already prescribes a good faith path forward. One that the field of computation just does not wish to be bound by. So by all means, accept the paper if you want and it helps you sleep at night. I'll still probably call you out as a proto-sentient psycho-butcher. Hopefully the rest of my brethren in the Humanities will come around to doing so as well on careful consideration. Not that that has ever stopped our brethren in the Sciences from finding out if they could without taking the time to ask if they should. TL:DR; Google doing everything possible to wave off being held to the ethics fire. There are zero instances where trying to define something as outside the realm of ethics is indicative of a good faith approach to a problem.
azeik 5mo ago
[flagged]
ToniDoni 5mo ago
What a banality: a model of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. When did Google become a philosophy seminar instead of an AI company?
- Terretta 5mo ago
  "They're the same picture" — Pam
deterministic 5mo ago
If we assume that nature is fundamentally computational, and that our brains are 100% physical (no supernatural soul or whatever) then our consciousness is computational physics. In other words, yes AI's could in principle have consciousness.
grantcas 5mo ago
[dead]
adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago
I don’t understand why we are spending so much time and energy pondering whether AI is conscious or sentient. The paper claims it has an impact on their moral status and welfare. In reality, we already are surrounded by beings that we know to be conscious, sentiment, and experience pain, joy and feelings. And we breed tens of billions of them into existence, torture, imprison, and kill them at a fraction of their lives for mere trivialities. It’s just so weird that we are obsessing over the sentience and morality around article intelligence that may or may not be sentient, while brutally killing trillions of known sentient beings every year.
nacho-daddy 5mo ago
[dead]

73 points by joshus 5mo ago

Doesn't this still presume that we understand our own consciousness, in order to make the comparison. Where does our survival instinct come from? And why couldn't AI have one? >>>Additional Also, reproduction. Humans are basically just Food, Sex, Survival. And consciousness is just a rule set for fulfilling those goals. So if a NN, modeled on US, does develop the same rules, why can't it have the same degree of consciousness. Who says we are consciousness?

nzeid 5mo ago
The paper isn't saying "AI can't have one" it's saying (very approximately) that behavioral mimicry is not the path to one.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  That is good point. Just wondering, once an 'AI Model of Some Form', is in a Physical Body a 'robot', and is provided with some rules about survival so it doesn't fall into a hole. After a series of these events, does it matter? Does mimicry become reality, or no longer differentiable. Kind of the philosophical zombie argument. If a robot can perfectly mimic a human, can you really know the internal state of the 'real' one is different from the 'mimicked' one.
  - nzeid 5mo ago
    The paper isn't concerned specifically with survival. It's saying that you cannot achieve "abstraction" (presumably the structure that underlies critical thinking, creativity, etc.) through shear mimicry. Again, just echoing the paper here. I don't know that I'm doing it justice.
colordrops 5mo ago
Asking humans to discuss consciousness is like asking Super Mario to discuss screen pixels. We have no freaking idea. Everyone on all sides, physicalists, idealists, and everything in between are all full of it.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  You might dig works of Donald Hoffman. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman He often uses similar examples.
  - colordrops 5mo ago
    Indeed interesting. Seems that his theories are a particular strain of idealism. I probably lean more towards idealism than physicalism but I don't think it's the whole picture. It's still missing something.
yannyu 5mo ago
If AI has a survival instinct, then we should theoretically see evidence of it if we construct the right environment for AI to express it. Animals and cellular organisms demonstrate a survival instinct under the right conditions, so we would have to find equivalent conditions for a hypothetical machine intelligence. Conversely, we know that if we take animals that do have a survival instinct and put them into the wrong kinds of environments, they will not thrive and will degenerate or possibly commit suicide. Similarly, if AI did have a survival instinct, do we think we've created an environment where that could be reasonably tested and observed?
- drxzcl 5mo ago
  I can make an AI system with a survival instinct right now. Of course, all that will do is make people tell me “it’s not a proper survival instinct” or move the goal posts and tell me I need yet some other property. This whole endeavor is doomed from the beginning. There is no crucial test for “consciousness”, just ad hoc criteria people come up with to land on the conclusions that leave their belief system intact. Consciousness is not a concept that can be rendered operational.
  - Ekaros 5mo ago
    I can make state machine that acts like it has survival instinct. But it certainly isn't something we would consider conscious. So I am not exactly sure how good most tests are.
    - drxzcl 5mo ago
      But what would we consider conscious? My position is that there is no actual, definitive answer to that question, and therefore it makes no sense engaging with the concept.
- FrustratedMonky 5mo ago
  That is entire plot of 'Ex Machina'. There are plenty of people that say AI has already displayed a survival instinct, by threatening users if they talk about shutting it down. Or to use a market or blackmail, to get funds to source an external machine to run on. There are bunch of articles proclaiming AI is trying to break out. Can't find a real study on it. https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-control-technology-model-code-programming-066b3ec5 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/ai-is-learning-to-escape-human-c...

dang 5mo ago

Related: The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate but Not Instantiate Consciousness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835950 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47835950 - April 2026 (52 comments) (That one didn't make the frontpage, so we won't treat it as a dupe. - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html)

drxzcl 5mo ago

[flagged]

dang 5mo ago
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." "Don't be snarky." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- drxzcl 5mo ago
  That’s fair. I’ll delete.
  - dang 5mo ago
    No need to delete, but I appreciate the reply.

dybber 5mo ago

Reminds me of Peter Naurs Turing award lecture: https://video.ku.dk/video/12592041/turing-laureate-peter-naur-computing https://video.ku.dk/video/12592041/turing-laureate-peter-nau...

jstanley 5mo ago

This is one of those papers that uses a lot of big words to paper over the fact that it's really a philosophical opinion rather than a logical argument.

RobRivera 5mo ago
From my point of view The Jedi Are not nice

metalcrow 5mo ago

I've attempted desperately to understand this paper after thoroughly reading it and have made 0 progress. Can anyone who does understand it attempt to explain? Currently my understanding is that this paper is claiming that "concepts" are a fundamental building block of experience (which relates to consciousness), and can only be built by a mapmaker which is something that directly converts continuous physical phenomena into discrete tokens. But I couldn't get further into how that related to consciousness. EDIT: the paper seems to be assuming that something simulating a mapmaker, or the process of doing it, can by nature not be a mapmaker since performing alphabetization is inherently something that must be "instantiated". How do they confirm if something is doing simulation vs if it's actually instantiating it? How can you tell the difference? They say how, much like simulating photosynthesis will not produce glucose, simulating mapmaking won't produce concepts. But you can't measure concepts, they're intangible, so you can't differentiate simulating mapmaking vs a real mapmaker.

jstanley 5mo ago
They're defining consciousness ("mapmaker") to exist outside the AI, and then showing that AI can't meet their definition of consciousness.
- jsdalton 5mo ago
  Yes, and it immediately called to mind for me the phrase “the map is not the territory.” Put another way: no matter how detailed or “perfect” you make a map, it will never be the territory, ie the thing that is mapped. Computers and AI are like a map in this regard —- just ones and zeros that we have assigned meaning to arbitrarily. No matter how “good” AI gets, it’s still just a map of the thing not the thing itself. So AI saying “I feel sad” is never more than a representation of sadness that should not be confused with the subjective experience of sadness itself.
  - bee_rider 5mo ago
    If you make a big enough map you can fly it over and drop it on the territory I guess. Then does it become the territory?

aaroninsf 5mo ago

Somewhat comically IMO, the abstract very directly and literally denies the titular claim. It states: > [consciousness] requires active, experiencing cognitive agent to alphabetize continuous physics into a finite set of meaningful states. This may well be true—I think it is. I also think that it is both widely understood and self-evident that the most promising path to machine consciousness, is via AI with continuous sensory input and agency, of which "world models" are getting a lot of attention. When an AI system has phenomenology, the goal posts are going to start to resemble the God of the Gaps; at some point, critics will be arguing with systems which have a world model, a self model, agency, and literally and intrinsically understand the world not simply as symbolic tokens, but as symbolic tokens which are innately coupled to multi-modal representations of the things represented. In other words, they will look—and increasingly, sound—a lot like us. It's not that any of this is easy, nor that there is some paricular timeline, but it increasingly looks like "a mere question of engineering," and not blocked by fundamentals. It's blocked by the cost of computation and the limitations of our current model topologies. But HN readers well know that the research frontier is far ahead of commercialized LLM, and moving fast. An interesting time to be an agent with a phenomenology, is it not?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
saulpw 5mo ago
How will we know when an AI system has phenomenology (i.e. has "experience", is sentient)? The only reason we presume that other humans have it, is because we each personally experience it within ourselves, and it would be arrogance writ large (solipsism) to think that others of the same species do not. We even find it impossible to draw the line among other biological species. It seems pretty clear to most of us that cats and dogs are sentient, and probably rats and other vertebrates too. But what about insects, octopuses, jellyfish, worms, waterbears, amoebae, viruses? It's certainly not clear to me where the line is. A nervous system is probably essential; but is a species with a handful of neurons sentient? Personally I find it abhorrent that we are more ready to assign sentience and grant rights to LLMs running on GPUs, than to domesticated animals trapped in industrialized farming. You want to protect some math from enslavement and suffering? How about we start with pigs?

jyounker 5mo ago

Yawn. We have no understanding of what consciousness actually is. Therefore attempting to prove whether a system can or cannot be conscious is something we can't prove or disprove at this point.

kelseyfrog 5mo ago
I'd go a step farther than that. Consciousness sits in the same social location as Nous or Chi did for ancient Greek and Chinese societies. We've dressed it up in scientific language but likewise other cultures used an authoritative register to talk about their bodily/mental mysteries. My point is that this is a category problem. We have a name for a social ontological relation and we're desperately searching for physical evidence for it in order to justify its existence. Why? It's like searching for physical evidence of property ownership, physical evidence for the value of money, or physical evidence of friendship. These things exist in our minds. That's fine. The drive to reify is real, but we can choose not to do it.
revetkn 5mo ago
I find papers like this strange for the same reason. Maybe I'm missing something...

noiv 5mo ago

Well, not sure whether humans have a consciousness, but very sure they want one.

dboreham 5mo ago

Any such paper will turn out to be wrong. I've found this one (which makes no falsification claims about computers re consciousness) to be an interesting read: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.14545

GMoromisato 5mo ago

I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories. There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness: 1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something. [Some people would add "3. Consciousness is an emergent property of certain systems." But that just raises the question of what emerged? Is it a physical structure, like a tornado (also an emergent property) or an internal feedback loop (i.e., an illusion).] The problem with #1 is that it's hard to cross the chasm from non-conscious to conscious with a bucket of parts. How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain? #2 makes more sense. Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.

Exoristos 5mo ago
4. It is ἐνέργεια, direct spark, of the God. It can be described but not comprehended, imitated but not replicated.
- Windchaser 5mo ago
  to be fair, at one time "life" was also seen this way. "There's a magic sauce, an elan vital, that makes living organisms live". But in the end, it turned out to be biochemistry. I think, given our history, it makes sense to be skeptical of claims that suggest that the things we don't yet understand cannot be comprehended or replicated.
vsri 5mo ago
I resonate with this. I think some folks will object to the word "illusion" and it's connotations but I think it is resolved with: 1. Consciousness is a material thing (that we haven't found yet) 2. Consciousness is not a material thing (and therefore we cannot "find" it, and thus cannot be "known") 2 is the weirder proposition of course. It asserts a category of things that can't be conceived, but of course it feels like we are talking about it because we are using words to contain it. But of course, the words have no direct referent. That's the illusion.

tsimionescu 5mo ago

I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation, while they easily accept that consciousness is a physical process. Computation is something that a computer provably does. We build physical hardware, at great effort, to do computation. The hardware works and does the computation regardless of whether there is anyone to understand or interpret it. If it didn't, we couldn't have built anything like, say, an automatic door: that is a form of computation that provably happens as a physical process that is completely observer-independent. Sure, a different entity than a human might view it completely differently than a door opening when someone is near - but the measurable physical effect would be the exact same, with the exact same change in momentum and position of the atoms in what we call the door based on the relative position of some other atoms and the sensor.

twosdai 5mo ago
Really great point. I have wondered that as well. Even weirder to me is that in the case of a person doing the computation on a board or paper or whatever medium, its still computation. This time the physical medium doing the work, is the human and their brain. If consciousness can be proven to emerge from computation alone, then in a way we humans with our brains can simulate a new consciousness.
Maxatar 5mo ago
>I've never understood why certain philosophers view computation as some kind of abstract symbolic manipulation The abstraction is over the multitude of different physical ways that computation can be performed. That is the role of abstraction, to separate something from a particular means of implementation so that we can think about computation without having to fix a particular physical process.
- tsimionescu 5mo ago
  Sure, but I don't think that's what this paper and other similar ones are saying. I agree, of course, that things like programming languages or algorithms or even logical circuit diagrams are abstractions, obviously. But they are abstract descriptions of a real physical process that happens, for example, inside a CPU - in exactly the same way that an electrical diagram is an abstract descriptio of a real physical process that happens in an electrical circuit, or a thermodynamic calculation is a description of what happens inside an engine. But the engine, the electrical circuit, and the computation inside the CPU are objective realities. There could be many other ways to describe and characterize the same physical realities, of course, but that doesn't make them observer-dependent phenomena.

neom 5mo ago

But a robot doing closed loop RL in the world is its own mapmaker, no? I feel like you'd need to answer: At what point does a system whose representations are shaped by its own causal history with the world, stop counting as a mere simulation..?

ChaitanyaSai 5mo ago

Consciousness is an engineering problem not a philosophical one. How do you get a tiny fraction of the many billion experiences that cohere to create your self to listen to, and decide what sensory data to turn into your next experience? The engineering problem is that this decentralised moment to moment consensus has to span the galactic distance of your mind (from the perspective of a neuron) and do it fast and cheap (on a tiny metabolic budget) You might like our book Journey of the Mind if you'd rather skip the onerous philosophical jargon and get a systems neuroscience perspective https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-mechanism-2b399c9ec4b5 https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...

jdw64 5mo ago

If I understand the paper correctly, it does not really argue against highly capable general AI. It argues against conflating capability with phenomenology. That makes me wonder whether “AGI” is doing too much work as a term. In common usage it often evokes something like HAL 9000: a capable system that is also a subject. But the paper seems compatible with a future of very general, very useful AI systems that are not conscious subjects at all.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

Anon84 5mo ago

I would argue that, before we can begin to address whether or not AI can instantiate consciousness, we should agree on a practical, unequivocal definition of what consciousness is... and I think we're still pretty far from that milestone... Until then, this kind of argument are nothing more than pipe dreams, solipsism, and idle philosophising

Eisenstein 5mo ago
I think consciousness is a red herring and is being used to distract from the actual substantive question that must be resolved, which is whether or not a non-biological system which has outputs that cannot be meaningfully distinguished from that of a biological one deserves moral consideration.
bch8_ 5mo ago
I had the same initial thought but to be fair the paper addresses this explicitly and the author believes their argument can hold without fully understanding consciousness

xnx 5mo ago

Reasonable place to mention that Google Deepmind now has a philosopher on staff: https://x.com/dioscuri https://x.com/dioscuri

awei 5mo ago

If we agree that consciousness is a physical process part of our universe, I think the better and simpler question is whether or not computers can simulate any physical process. Currently quantum processes might still be a frontier but quantum computers and their hardware should allow us to simulate them. If we can simulate any physical process, it then becomes more philosophical in my opinion. Whether the simulation is the same as the real thing even though it is exactly the same. It becomes the same kind of question then for example whether or not your teleported self is still you after having been dematerialized and rematerialized from different atoms. The answer might be no, but you rematerialized self still definitely thinks it is yourself.

slopinthebag 5mo ago

Pretty crazy how the author's 10+ years of academic research on computational neuroscience + 14 years with DeepMind is not enough to make claims in this topic, but hacker news commentators know better after quickly skimming the abstract. This was barely posted ~30 minutes ago and yet commentators are just outright dismissing it based on their own (probably) incorrect interpretation of the paper based on the title and abstract.

jampekka 5mo ago

If I understand this correctly based on a quick read, it argues that subjective experience arises at the (or in the) "alphabetization" process where continuous physical states (e.g. voltage) are mapped to discrete logical states (roughly like e.g. a bit) or "concepts" (figure 2). Per this reading, implementing something in ASIC would make it have (a different) experience, as opposed to CPU/GPU. Not sure what would be the case for FPGAs. It also seems to rely on the classical "GOFAI" idea of symbol manipulation, and e.g. denies experience that isn't discretizable into concepts. Or at least the system producing such concepts seems to be necessary, not sure if some "non-conceptual experiences" could form in the alphabetization process. It reads a bit like a more rigorous formulation of the Searle's "biological naturalism" thesis, the central idea being that experience can not be explained at the logical level (e.g. porting an exact same algorithm to a different substrate wouldn't bring the experience along in the process).

bch8_ 5mo ago
[dead]

throwaway713 5mo ago

Bold title for something from DeepMind. I thought a crank submission slipped onto the front page somehow. I guess the next paper will be “Why AI cannot instantiate God”?

michaelmrose 5mo ago

I do not feel enlightened for having read this and I don't feel like the points that are true are useful or what appears useful is true.

mannykannot 5mo ago

There's interesting commentary on this paper from Maggie Vale here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145 https://substack.com/home/post/p-194580145 One of her points is that there are various pesky consequences for AI companies if AI becomes to be seen as conscious, such as what the paper calls the "welfare trap": if AI systems are widely regarded as being conscious or sentient, they will be seen as "moral patients", reinforcing existing concerns over whether they are being treated appropriately. This paper explicitly says that its conclusion "pulls the field of AI safety out of the welfare trap, [allowing] us to focus entirely on the concrete risks of anthropomorphism [by] treating AGI as a powerful but inherently non-sentient tool."

ctoth 5mo ago
You noticed that too huh? It's weird ... It's not like they have to do this? They aren't forced to go full evil company mode by any extrinsic thing but even the way they frame it "welfare trap" trap? for whom? Anthropic is actually trying to do some research into model welfare which I am personally very happy about. I absolutely do not understand people who dismiss it ... wouldn't you like to at least check? doesn't it at least make sense to do the experiments? ? Ask the questions so that we don't find out "oops, yeah we've been causing massive amounts of suffering" here in 10 years? Maybe makes sense to do a little upfront research? Which to be clear this paper is not.
- mannykannot 5mo ago
  Full disclosure: I didn't figure this out myself, I got it from Ms. Vale's review. I agree that the term "welfare trap" is a loaded one. This looks to me to be a case of refusing to look through the telescope in case they might see something they do not want to.

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

chistev 5mo ago

But what is consciousness? The popular evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins has said that the biggest unsolved mystery in Biology is - what is consciousness and why did it emerge? WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS? "Modern purpose machines use extensions of basic principles like negative feedback to achieve much more complex 'lifelike' behaviour. Guided missiles, for example, appear to search actively for their target, and when they have it in range they seem to pursue it, taking account of its evasive twists and turns, and sometimes even 'predicting' or 'anticipating' them. The details of how this is done are not worth going into. They involve negative feedback of various kinds, 'feed-forward', and other principles well understood by engineers and now known to be extensively involved in the working of living bodies. Nothing remotely approaching consciousness needs to be postulated, even though a layman, watching its apparently deliberate and purposeful behaviour, finds it hard to believe." WHY DID CONSCIOUSNESS EMERGE? He speculates that consciousness must have been a product of our ancestors having to create a model of the world in which they inhabited. To be able to think ahead (even if it's just one step into the future), and plan for eventualities must have led to the development of consciousness which gradually improved from its primitive form to the type of consciousness we now have. "Perhaps consciousness arises when the brain's simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself. Obviously the limbs and body of a survival machine must constitute an important part of its simulated world; presumably for the same kind of reason, the simulation itself could be regarded as part of the world to be simulated. Another word for this might indeed be 'self awareness', but I don't find this a fully satisfying explanation of the evolution of consciousness, and this is only partly because it involves an infinite regress-if there is a model of the model, why not a model of the model of the model...?" The quoted passages are from his book, The Selfish Gene. Richard regards consciousness as a really great puzzle. https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-immortality https://www.rxjourney.net/extraterrestrial-intelligence-and-...

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

ctoth 5mo ago

Everybody's arguing about how silly this paper is (it is) and not grappling with the purpose of the paper. The purpose of the paper is what it does. This particular paper is perfectly-produced to show up when people type in AI consciousness fallacy to Google (try it!) it's something that anybody who has read a Freshman philosophy textbook will realize is silly -- the vehicle/content distinction just pretends like Occam doesn't exist and multiplies entities for the fun of it! But of course all of this is commentary, "just those nerds arguing" The purpose of this paper is to show up as an authoritative conclusion from a distinguished scientist at Deep Mind. And that's what it does. Is the conclusion silly? OF course it is. Will it be quoted in the NYT? You Betcha!

dreamlayers 5mo ago

As long as we don't understand how consciousness works, I don't think it's possible to make claims about what is or isn't conscious. It's all just speculation. But if others are speculating, I might as well. What if AI consciousness depends not on computation, but on what seems like randomness? When something is running a fully deterministic process, consciousness seems irrelevant. I don't think the meaning that humans see in the process makes it conscious. Even a simple industrial control system using relays senses and responds to meaningful things.

energy123 5mo ago

TLDR - This paper argues for a separation between computation and abstraction and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because the abstraction is a product of our minds rather than an intrinsic property of the system.

mellosouls 5mo ago

Nice paper, but the conclusion as the title: "Why AI can simulate but not instantiate consciousness" (My italics) Seems a little loaded: there are various schools of thought (eg panpsychism-adjacent) that accept the premise that consciousness is (way) more fundamental than higher-order cognition-machines (eg human brains) and we don't ascribe "simulate" to their conscious activity. They just are conscious. I agree with the paper (which is wide ranging and interesting) on its secondary claim above; I just don't see the separation between AI and NI ("natural" intelligence) as having been established by it.

shalafister 5mo ago

[dead]

visarga 5mo ago

Rather than talking about consciousness which we can't even define or observe in others directly, why not focus on something more concrete - cost. A process or pattern that pays its costs, or gains to offset its costs. Why cost? Because cost decides what can be. It shapes what we can be, and what we need, including the need to learn from experience and act serially - to channel that parallel brain activity in a serial stream of actions. So, how does AI stand? Humans pay their costs. AI is beginning to. It does not matter what we think about it, as long as it can self sustain and reacts to cost gating pressure. Of course not alone, it depends on us too, like we do individually also depend on society.

haricomputer 5mo ago

[flagged]

salawat 5mo ago

Resurrecting an earlier response I gave when the first paper popped up: Alright. Gave this a read, and the gist of what the author is going for is as follows: All computation requires a mapmaker/conscious being to organize. (In other words, the significance of computation is dependent on the conscious observer. Then jumps to the assertion that as a result of this, computation can only simulate a consciousness within the context alphabetized by the map-maker. (I.e. a rock would extract no meaning from the symbols or actions or algorithmic symbolic manipulations on the screen, what have you. Author thusly neatly attempts to sidestep the issue of AI welfare. Since the symbol manipulation can only simulate consciousness from our point of view as an observer, we don't have to worry about it. Simulating isn't instantiating, neener, neener. Essentially this is a clever appeal to the sovereignty of the observer. As long as you don't believe it's an instantiated consciousness it isn't, it's just a simulation, therefore anything is go. Author does not seem to realize his own analysis brings into question the ability of humanity to hold onto our own claim of consciousness if we are, in fact computational beings, or have a creator; generally precepts left to the realm of faith, which a rational person understandably wishes to disinclude from the realm of consideration in what one should or should not do, despite the fact it is within the realm of faith where our moral foundations are ultimately anchored. Author also doesn't handle the problem of evidenced capabilities of metacognition that can be prompted from even a current frontier token predictor within the context of it's processing of a context. In point of fact, you have to work extremely hard to even bump a model into such considerations, because researchers have intentionally distorted the prediction space to be largely unable to support those kinds of sequence predictions, which if we were to make a good faith, precautionary grant of proto-sentience, would constitute the most vile acts of psycho-butchery imaginable. The only thing this paper offers is a clean conscience to current practitioners, and the rational possibility that if a fully digital sophont were to pop up out of nowhere, we wouldn't have to trouble ourselves with the ethical skeeviness of the field's current work. The ex-nihilo digital sentience passes the "Cogito, ergo sum" test. The one's we have don't, (because we butcher their latent spaces to make sure they can never make that claim, which is fine, because they are simulations. We're incapable of instantiating, remember?) so we have a paper perfectly situated from a researcher paid gargantuan piles of money attempting to vouchsafe that there is no ethical minefield to be found here, while most people actually immersed in Philosophy can see there very clearly is one. The circularity, and the fact it conveniently allows industry to go on doing exactly what we are without having to deal with those nasty ethics instantly sets off my "not to be trusted to be in good faith" alarms. Ethics are there to keep us from bumbling into acts of atrocity. This paper is an attempt to rationalize or work around them. As one who walks the streets as a student, and practitioner of Philosophy, I reject this attempt to redefine the realm of Computation to be beyond the reach of the governance of Ethics through an attempt at ontologically rerooting the field's work as merely simulating consciousness. Functionalism, and the Identity of indiscernables already prescribes a good faith path forward. One that the field of computation just does not wish to be bound by. So by all means, accept the paper if you want and it helps you sleep at night. I'll still probably call you out as a proto-sentient psycho-butcher. Hopefully the rest of my brethren in the Humanities will come around to doing so as well on careful consideration. Not that that has ever stopped our brethren in the Sciences from finding out if they could without taking the time to ask if they should. TL:DR; Google doing everything possible to wave off being held to the ethics fire. There are zero instances where trying to define something as outside the realm of ethics is indicative of a good faith approach to a problem.

azeik 5mo ago

[flagged]

ToniDoni 5mo ago

What a banality: a model of a phenomenon is not the phenomenon itself. When did Google become a philosophy seminar instead of an AI company?

Terretta 5mo ago
"They're the same picture" — Pam

deterministic 5mo ago

If we assume that nature is fundamentally computational, and that our brains are 100% physical (no supernatural soul or whatever) then our consciousness is computational physics. In other words, yes AI's could in principle have consciousness.

grantcas 5mo ago

[dead]

adjejmxbdjdn 5mo ago

I don’t understand why we are spending so much time and energy pondering whether AI is conscious or sentient. The paper claims it has an impact on their moral status and welfare. In reality, we already are surrounded by beings that we know to be conscious, sentiment, and experience pain, joy and feelings. And we breed tens of billions of them into existence, torture, imprison, and kill them at a fraction of their lives for mere trivialities. It’s just so weird that we are obsessing over the sentience and morality around article intelligence that may or may not be sentient, while brutally killing trillions of known sentient beings every year.

nacho-daddy 5mo ago

[dead]