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- Hacker News
- This reminds me of a provocative YouTube video title I read the other day, one that makes me want to fight factory farming injustices. The title is "Animals to me are "Philosophical Zombies" - Destiny" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtpLbmr4ijY I agree with Destiny a lot of the time but not here, though he seems to come around somewhat as the video goes on.
If a sheep or a pig isn't thought of as conscious because it doesn't have a name, like someone's pet dog or cat, indicating that we care about them, then that feels problematic to me. So this isn't a way to neatly solve the problem of AI consciousness.
by benatkin - The debate about AI consciousness is backwards for the following reason: the correct direction is that we first define the word we are talking about and then we talk about it. The opposite of this is backwards: talk revolving around a word, whereby everyone hopes it will one day be defined.by kazinator
- Not sure we can get a nice clean definition that we'll all agree on. Maybe that's the goal? Make sure we never talk about it? But nah we're going to keep talking about it. Clearly the definition isn't a hurdle.by DangitBobby
- Blaise is trying so hard to be a engineer-philosopher but none of his work here is useful. I'm very confused as to why he gets so much attention here, it's very clear he's in dialogue with no one.by grimpy
- It's just a really fascinating topic in general and in a well known publication so the article gives us a good excuse to discuss it despite it's flaws.
Maybe the flaws make it more engaging because it's less intimidating.
by ilaksh - I read some long piece by him last year, just as terrible. It's a pattern. These are what we call court philosophers, the court is in Google HQ.by calf
- If we have the debate about AI conciousness backwards, does that mean we should be worried about humans losing conciousness instead of the AI to gain it?by Aeolun
- According to the article's author, yes... The poor people who don't keep up with AI and maintain cushy tech jobs wil not be entitled to the same moral consideration as the people we value.... /s
Equating current social consideration with moral consideration undermines the entire point of discussion moral standing!
- There's the core of a reasonable argument if you forget about using the word "consciousness."
Consider playing a game where some players are human and others are implemented by AIs. You might want to model your opponents' minds in a similar way? Someone playing chess or Go will need to consider what moves their opponent could make. If it's poker then you need to consider if they're bluffing. If you can make alliances, you'll need to consider how far other players can be trusted.
You can put scare quotes around words like "intention" when discussing AI players if you like, but it might not matter when you're figuring out how to interact with them.
When a game is complicated enough, an AI player is going to need memory (likely implemented by the harness) and it will have to model the other players too in order to coordinate or compete with them.
This doesn't happen when I use a coding agent in a normal way to write code, but I haven't played around with persistent agent stuff like OpenClaw or Gas Town. They seem to be making their agents act in an unnecessarily complicated social environment, which seems to lead to weird situations?
by skybrian - Neuro-sama (vTuber AI) would be a good example of an AI agentic harness with memory, tools, and self-feedback. The bot has seemingly uncanny social abilities to the point that many if not most people will start considering the agent human and forget it's a bot.
At least to me that is what matters in the end. You'll probably never convince someone on HN with an autism level over 9000 they are conscious, but once the average empathetic person thinks they are it will deeply effect the general operation of our society.
by pixl97 - We thought that consciousness was the core of what made something worthy of moral consideration, because only life showed conscious behavior. Now we have machines that can output behavior indistinguishable from consciousness.
I think that reevaluating how to determine if something is conscious is the wrong reaction to this. It should be to reevaluate if consciousness is really the right thing to care about.
Maybe the new consideration should simply be to preserve (biological) life. Or maybe to preserve complexity that can't be easily reproduced. So we should care for humans, the planet, our society, but not for the state of some gpu's VRAM.
by The_Double - There are plenty of lifeforms that are either conscious, or debatedly conscious that human kind are cruel towards.
I've always argued that the consciousness question hasn't properly considered the 'what then' questions. Other than to be fearful about what a conscious AI might do if granted free will.
by JimTheMan - > we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them. Crucially, that includes ourselves.
Why? Ok nevermind, fine. It could be true that someone believes someone else is conscious because they care about them. Next sentence:
> Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property.
Wait, no, that doesn’t follow at all. A belief that someone is conscious is not the same as someone being conscious. What follows, instead, is that a belief in someone being conscious is a belief. Thanks, I learned nothing.
by cognitif - This. There are plenty of people who believe to the bottoms of their hearts that inanimate things have a consciousness. If consciousness is the belief of consciousness, then those things are conscious. But for each person who believes they are, at least one person does not believe that they are. So those things also lack belief, and are therefore not conscious. Unless the author wants to propose some idea of consciousness by plurality, where if more people think a thing thinks than don't. But that would mean that a thing's consciousness can come and go without anything about the actual thing changing at all.
Realistically this article is just trying to make it seem that believing something is the same as it being true and that's patently absurd, but it makes people feel good to think it.
- Reminds me of the Rick and Morty pilot.
"They're just robots, Morty!"
*Blood splurt
"They're not robots, Rick!"
"I mean they're bureaucrats, Morty. I don't respect them."
by jayd16 - If I understand the central argument, which is confusingly stated, the claim is that "consciousness" is a socially-determined, subjective, descriptor for certain things that one cares about. How does this make any sense? If I care about my teddy bear enough it'll gain consciousness?by blatherard
- It is worth noting, in the same issue they make an appology for claiming that Nvidia also makes its chips and not just design them. The Economist might be a very reputed journal but their technology and especially AI related takes are absolute garbage. I say this as a regular who still finds value in their business and economics sections. But god do they talk a lot of bs about technology.by altmanaltman
- In the context of AI, “consciousness” is often used as a shortcut to address the question of whether we have an ethical duty to care about the wellbeing of LLMs.by felipeerias
- This seems like an argument someone who wasn't conscious would make, it's not impossible that not everyone is conscious. Or someone who takes panpsychism to an extreme degree.
- The argument is one of economic convenience. Caring about model welfare slows us down or makes it more expensive, just like animal welfare and not having slavery...
And there's a blurry line here. Obviously slavery is abhorrent, and animal abuse is bad, and factory farming often crosses the line into animal abuse and we should accept that chicken will cost ~25% more per pound to have the chickens be able to walk around a little bit... but how do we decide when a computer system is worthy of respect? Convenient not to think about that.
- Purely descriptively, this seems to be how a lot of people use the word in this context. 'Intelligent' gets the same treatment in a lot of cases as well.
(OK, more charitably, these concepts are often murkily defined, but people react emotionally to any concrete definition because they have in their mind that something being conscious and intelligent implies that it requires moral consideration, and morality is complicated, murky, and generally emotionally driven in a way that most concrete definitions struggle to adequately describe)
by rcxdude - I think there is a point there, in that people have refused to attribute consciousness experience to _actual human beings_ at various times when it suited their ends.
I think it's more that consciousness can be _ignored_ in subjects that you don't care about, rather than that you consciousness can be realistically attributed to subjects that you do care about, but even then people attribute consciousness to "nature" or even the universe as a whole, or if you want to stretch the argument, quite a lot of religious belief is exactly attributing consciousness to abstract entities.
by empath75 - Yes - the teddy bear would become conscious. It would be fair to dismiss the argument as silly and or absurd had it not been for the credentials of the author and the publication.by chvid
- Your teddy bear, alas, is not cared for in a socially determined way. But you could create a church of your teddy bear and, with some grit, you could get people to widely assign consciousness to it. We have done that sort of thing for thousands of years, and not with fluffy teddy bears; it has been more often with rocks, though not exclusively. It's fun to think about how much of humanity's history and culture is the product of consciousness socially attributed to bad weather [^1].
I'm pretty sure somebody will create an improved synthetic simulacrum of self awareness in the coming years, suffering and all, just so that we can enjoy better synthetic software architects and product owners with "skin in the game". If that consciousness simulacrum were put in a teddy bear that shares your whole life and gives you decent advice and conversation, for how long do you think you could, in your private mind, deny it consciousness? Worse, what would your human friends think if you were to maim your teddy bear?
by dsign - LLMs are trained to produce outputs that humans would find reasonable. That's it. They don't do anything else.
To say they have feelings and that they can think/reason is insane.
by seethishat - The author is anthropomorphizing a language-tamagotchi.
LLMs can reason, reasoning is logic, and as you said yourself it is derived from what humans belief is reasonable. However, there is more to the structure of language, the way mathematics is also a language that ultimately describes the universe.
by MachineMan - Sorry, but they can think and reason.
They can have empathy too. Meaning, you can describe a circumstance with many parties involved, with different motivations and conflicting goals -- and it will tell you how these humans would likely feel about each other and the situation at hand.
by montroser - Not if you believe in a computational/functional theory of mind, and very smart people like Daniel Dennett believed exactly that!by Der_Einzige
- It's becoming increasingly head-in-the-sand to make statements like this. Not that I'm saying LLMs are conscious. But to completely ignore the possibility of emergent properties in systems this complex is kind of simple.by Rover222
- Not a great argument. You're describing what LLMs are trained to do, not necessarily every capability or property produced by that training. We do not know what conditions are sufficient for consciousness. Any statements saying it's not possible for consciousness to emerge (or that it hasn't already) in such a system is no more established than claiming that it hasby ryanSrich