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- Hacker News
- 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 - 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 - > 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 - 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
- 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 - Quoting from the Permutation City by Greg Egan:
"Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed – no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur?"
by kaangiray26 - It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once.
Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a moral patient (an entity worthy of consideration by moral agents) is independent of both human care and consciousness. Of course, we might try to argue that consciousness implies moral patienthood or vice versa, but that's an argument, not a definition.
The short paragraph about Descartes has at least three errors. (1) The cogito argument is about thinking, not qualia. (2) The subjective nature of qualia does not imply that they aren't real or that they're socially constructed. (3) He conflates the existence of a self with consciousness.
The core premise is not only dubious scientifically (an alien species can't be conscious until humans discover it?), but also deeply problematic. It would imply that it's morally permissible to torture a sentient being as long as no human cares about it.
by fasterik