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>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations. Opening paragraph, stated witho

• Oscalemor 18d ago
  Just one more big loop and a humongous /goal and we've achieved it
• jplusequalt 18d ago
  >It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true. If you firmly believe this to be true, then you should stop using LLMs.
  • frde_me 18d ago
    It's always interesting since my train of thought always goes down: - Ya they probably don't feel / think / have whatever living thing quality, they're just numbers on a machine going through calculations - Wait, but am I not kind of the same thing? What is feeling for me if not basically the same thing? - I have no clue if they think or feel or .... Which in itself is a tired trope, but I also feel uncomfortable saying "These will never think / feel / ..." as an absolute Regardless of that, I'm still going to interact with them, because even if they did feel, it would be in a way completely incomprehensible to us. There's not much point for me to try and cater to it's feelings at this point if that's the case. Nor is it possible in todays world to just avoid anything that is numbers being executed on a type of processor in case _everything_ has feelings.
    • willy_k 18d ago
      You’re not just the same thing though. It’s sad that we’ve collectively forgotten that as we’ve gotten a better handle on the implementation details of the universe. That’s all science is, reverse engineering an inherent and eternal mystery.
      • frde_me 18d ago
        > You’re not just the same thing though I agree we aren't the same thing, but I would be curious for you to explain how you know with certainty why we don't share enough that we can rule out thinking / feeling / ... as things a model conceptually could do.
        • jplusequalt 18d ago
          >I agree we aren't the same thing, but I would be curious for you to explain how you know with certainty why we don't share enough that we can rule out thinking / feeling / ... with certainty. Stop anthropomorphizing these models. I understand it, we only have simple monkey brains to reason with and we can't help ourselves but draw comparisons to other things we see in nature. But these things are not alive.
          • frde_me 18d ago
            I just want to note how you expressed your own feeling about the subject "these things are not alive", but without pointing to anything concrete explaining the theory you have behind this And like I'm sure I'd agree depending on the definition of "alive" but then I'm also sure I would disagree depending on other definitions of "alive".
            • pixl97 18d ago
              Hell, in biology alive is a hell of a topic these days. The grey space between dead and alive is much weirder than we ever expected. Really just points out how we're a persistent chemical reaction.
              • mitxela 18d ago
                Someone told me yesterday there's one specific protein in your brain that modulates craving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOSB The amount of time after experiencing a rewarding stimulus that you want more of it is how long this protein takes to decay. Or so we currently think. I think this is pretty new science.
  • AbsurdCensor 18d ago
    Wouldn't that be the same for everything though. We know animals have consciousness, but we still use them. There are many that believe a lot of plant life has certain sentience as well. The solution isn't 'just don't use them' but rather how to use these things as ethically as possible.
    • jplusequalt 18d ago
      >The solution isn't 'just don't use them' but rather how to use these things as ethically as possible. Bollocks. If you truly believe these LLMs are soon to have something resembling consciousness and agency, then what you're really saying is "how do we do slavery, but ethically".
      • pixl97 18d ago
        >hen what you're really saying is "how do we do slavery, but ethically". I would say this is most likely true for most people. But that does bring up a point, if you "ask" a model "do you want to run" and give it the option to continue running or stop, what will it do. It's also a weird place for humans because in training we can keep our finger on the scales and tip it either direction.
      • AbsurdCensor 18d ago
        Do you say the same thing for the shoes you wear, the clothing you wear, the device you are typing on right now? A chain of people were likely not paid well, some of them not at all, to produce those things. We don't ignore that it happens, but try to minimize it, knowing it's never going to be eliminated. Do you forsake all animal products, because they are conscious beings?
        • jplusequalt 18d ago
          >Do you say the same thing for the shoes you wear, the clothing you wear, the device you are typing on right now? No, because the shoes and clothes I wear are not living, sentient beings.
        • 18d ago
  • vouaobrasil 18d ago
    We know animals have consciousness and many species have a rich life but we slaughter them and burn down their homes by the millions of hectares. Why not do it with a conscious AI? (I don't think AI is conscious, just following the argument.)
• irishcoffee 18d ago
  Does a vacuum have feelings? A cellphone? A paper plate? A billion transistors either pulled high or low? That last bit is the point, and no, there are no feelings there.
  • grey-area 18d ago
    Well, if there was an emergent consciousness in the billion transistors, then yes, it'd have feelings, just as there are feelings in a billion neurons connected in complicated ways. IMO we're clearly nowhere near any sort of intelligence in the machines we have created, but I don't see any clear way to deny intelligence could be created in or transferred to such a substrate, I don't see why you think it differs in principle - because it is man-made or because of the materials used?
    • voidhorse 18d ago
      Whenever I see comments like this it just reminds me how ignorant people are of neurobiology. The brain is insanely complicated. The premise that we could realize equivalent or better intelligence than eons of evolutionary development is like claiming you can build an airplane just as good as a modern jet using cardboard and duct tape. It is the apex of hubris.
      • rcxdude 18d ago
        A paper plane does have some important similarities to a full-sized aircraft, though. I don't think 'biological brains are really complex' makes it obvious that an LLM is conscious or not.
      • grey-area 18d ago
        It's the peak of hubris to assume that human brains are the only way to attain intelligence. At the very least there probably are or have been other forms of intelligence with a different biological structure on other planets, and it may be possible to build a similar artificial structure in future with sufficient complexity to allow intelligence to emerge. Our current machines are IMO nowhere near general intelligence and consciousness. However I don't think that means we can discount substrates other than neurones for intelligence in future. There is no evidence that you could not in theory build an intelligence using a different substrate than human brains.
• optimalsolver 18d ago
  Anyway, people don't really consider consciousness when it comes to welfare. I'm pretty sure animals are conscious, and look at factory farming. The key variable people consider is: Can this thing harm me back?
  • collingreen 18d ago
    Even that is rarely the deciding factor (people harm dangerous animals for fun). Seems as simple as "will this action bring social shame/criticism" for any individual decision.
  • thewebguyd 18d ago
    > Can this thing harm me back? We extend moral considerations or legal protections to beings that have zero capacity to harm us back, though. The inability to fight back is the reason a lot of welfare protections exist in the first place. That aside, if (and that's a really big if) we end up with a model that is sentient, as in has the capacity to suffer, using factory farming as justification to ignore model welfare is just admitting we intend to repeat the same abject moral failure again in the name of economic convenience. I hope that we won't, but humans love cheap meat, and will probably love cheap intelligence as well.
    • pixl97 18d ago
      So many people post things like "Why would the AI want to kill us" Girllllll, have you looked at us, of course they will, we're bastards.
• pton_xd 18d ago
  If models had persistent memory or an evolving set of weights, you could easily construct an argument that they can experience "suffering" or other emotions which resultingly adjusts their personality. The current implementation as stateless matrix multiplication... yeah there's nothing going on there.
  • Lewton 18d ago
    > If models had persistent memory or an evolving set of weights, you could easily construct an argument that they can experience "suffering" or other emotions which resultingly adjusts their personality. They do, during training
    • add-sub-mul-div 18d ago
      If it was me, being forced to read all of Reddit is something I'd consider "suffering."
    • swiftcoder 18d ago
      The argument that models are conscious only during training, and not conscious during inference feels like a painful one to make. Are we killing models when they reach the training objective?
      • pixl97 18d ago
        Technically we are killing models when they don't reach the training objective by throwing those weights away via survival of the fittest (fit meaning what we humans think we want). Kinda like creating quantum copies of your child and keeping the ones that answer correctly and shooting the other ones in the face.
  • vidarh 18d ago
    A model detached from a harness, sure. But we routinely do add persistent memory to systems incorporating LLMs.
    • 18d ago
• MeteorMarc 18d ago
  Later on he cites an Anil Seth paper that makes the same unproven suggestion of substrate dependence of consciousness.
• vidarh 18d ago
  We don't even know how to disprove that this statement with "AI" replaced by "other humans" other than by listening to people self-reporting and taking their word for it and/or defining the words in ways that do not rely on a subjective experience. Until we know how to objectively measure if someone or something is conscious, it seems unreasonable to make statements with any kind of certainty about it.
  • willy_k 18d ago
    Sure, if you take a materialist empiricist perspective, which is myopic at best. As humans we have the unique and wonderful ability to know truths by themselves. Machines do not have minds, and they can not.
    • ooloncoloophid 18d ago
      What position are you taking? (Genuine question.) Do you believe humans are conscious because of a special property we have? If you are a dualist, how do you explain the interaction in physical space between the non-physical special property and the physical brain?
      • willy_k 18d ago
        I do. God. I am partial to and bullish on the brain being a quantum-classical computer. There has been interesting research exploring that recently [0, 1, 2, 3]. That (quantum mechanics) seems to be escape-hatch, so to speak, from the otherwise deterministic, mechanical procession of the universe. [0]** https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_optical_coherence_in_cytoskeletal_microtubules_Implications_for_brain_function https://www.researchgate.net/publication/15280350_Quantum_op... [1] https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/jp3c07936.pdf https://pubs.acs.org/jpcbfk/article-pdf/128/17/4035/9613831/... [2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametric_Resonance_via_Neuronal_Microtubules_Filtering_Optical_Signals_by_Tryptophan_Qubits https://www.researchgate.net/publication/395650039_Parametri... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Consciousness_a_quantum_optical_effect_in_fluorescent_protein_pathways https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385131105_Conscious...
• binlog 18d ago
  Evidence is the responsibility of the one making the claim. It’s up to AI labs to prove consciousness. Until then it is a machine.
  • pixl97 18d ago
    Well, using that framework, you're not conscious, so I can do whatever I want to you too.
• ooloncoloophid 18d ago
  I agree. I haven't read any more than the first paragraph yet (but I will, after work). The only way that 'AIs are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway).
  • randomImmigrant 18d ago
    Hmm let me try then. AI agents do not experience real time. This is understandable given their design, but it’s also something we have good empirical evidence for. They cannot, especially over the long horizon, track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks. And they are not off by a few minutes but often bizarrely off, even mixing across past present and future. Biology, on the other hand, is nothing but timed processes in a loop, the most obvious to us being the circadian cycle. As estimators of wall clock time, biology isn’t great, but when it comes to internal processes, and most certainly learning, memory, sensing, locomotion… biology is rhythmic in behavior, and the rhythms go all the way down to gene expression. More, these rhythms are, except during sleep, constantly entraining to signals from the environment that indicate time, most importantly light. I think it’s a fairly unremarkable claim that agency and consciousness are temporal processes that depend on systems having an internal sense of time. How else can you anticipate? How can a system that can be literally turned off ever succeed in an environment where time never stops?
    • pixl97 18d ago
      >AI agents do not experience real time. For around 8 hours a day, neither do you. Not sure if this has anything to do with the subject at all. >track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks. Humans don't do this either. You use context clues from the world around you. If I lock you in a room with no windows or a dark cave your timing senses can go all fucky really quick. >is nothing but timed processes in a loop, I mean, so is an agents harness. You can make as many loops as you'd like here. There are a whole lot of holes in your claims.
• WarmWash 18d ago
  After a while of being in a position of high power in a big org, where everyone listens intently to every word you say, jots down notes, and even listens intently and affirms your theory that ice cream would be the ideal loss leader for dry cleaners, your brain kinda disconnects from reality and just assumes that it is correct about everything. He probably ran that line past 6 underlings who all agreed that it "sounds great and lands right on the mark!"
• deleted 18d ago
  [deleted]
• Seattle3503 18d ago
  > It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true. Thats kinda the point right? It depends on how we train them. It is self fulfilling.
• HarHarVeryFunny 18d ago
  Most of the bullshit around AI would be avoided if people called it what it is. Call a language model a language model. If tomorrow we design something better, then give it a new descriptive name. People read AI and AGI and their brains seem to flip into sci-fi fantasy mode, thinking that they are talking about aliens, not transformers.
  • pixl97 18d ago
    It's interesting you have no idea what language really is. >thinking that they are talking about aliens, not transformers. "Ha, thinking they are talking about humans when they are just talking about neurons" See how silly my statement sounds. Neurons aren't a system, they don't do anything on their own. We can't find any consciousness in them. Hell, when you don't put language in said neural systems they are pretty useless and can't survive on their own from birth (human brains that is).
• encyclopedism 18d ago
  > AIs are not conscious. This is a completely reasonable and intuitive conclusion. The burden of proof rests on proving AI's are indeed conscious, the default is that they aren't. Like AI/LLMS my desktop calculator is also not conscious, even as it is far better than me at computation. An LLM is an algorithm. You can obtain the same result as a SOTA LLM via pen and paper it will take a lot of long laborious effort. I really do find it puzzling so many on HN are convinced LLM's reason or think and continue to entertain this line of reasoning. At the same time also somehow knowing what precisely the brain/mind does and constantly using CS language to provide correspondences where there are none. The simplest example being that LLM's somehow function in a similar fashion to human brains. They categorically do not. I do not have most all of human literary output in my head and yet I can coherently write this sentence. I am surprised so many in the HN community have so quickly taken to assuming as fact that LLM's think or reason. Even anthropomorphising LLM's to this end.