Matty crushing my dream of cracking the greatest mystery in philosophy with a quick Substack post. 😭
Hello.
Philosophers and others have had an annoyingly hard time explaining what it means for a *human* to be conscious or how you would know.
But you can’t say anything about AI consciousness without an account of humans.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-theyre-talking
Many users mocked debates on AI consciousness as uninformed or simplistic, dismissing participants for lacking knowledge, overconfident framing, or ignoring biological explanations.
Do I have any idea what consciousness is, or why humans are conscious? No.
Nevertheless, in this essay, I will demonstrate conclusively that AIs cannot be conscious and that anyone who thinks otherwise is an absolute fool...
Hello.
Philosophers and others have had an annoyingly hard time explaining what it means for a *human* to be conscious or how you would know.
But you can’t say anything about AI consciousness without an account of humans.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-theyre-talking
@robertwiblin Consciousness is biological. Humans are conscious because they are biological. That part is pretty easy to explain 😂
@SimsYStuart @robertwiblin What's your basis for concluding that it can ONLY be biological?
@SimsYStuart @robertwiblin It seems you're just escaping the problem via semantics. A hypothetical synthetic system that appears to mimic consciousness would not be worthy of consideration merely because it is non-biological? Or do you claim that it's not possible by dint of being non-biological?
@robertwiblin Humans are conscious because they think they are. If we had been raised differently we could confer consciousness upon other animals, groups, colonies, plants, forests, inanimate objects, anything. Anything you think is conscious *is* conscious because it exists in *your* mind...
When we speak of “consciousness”, we speak only of biological consciousness. People seem to forget that inconvenient empirical fact. There is no other observed category of consciousness that behaves like biology (hedonic cognition). So all other categories of consciousness are hypothetical.
@robertwiblin We are little regions of turbulence, tightly bound particles interacting loosely with the other dense regions of tightly bound particles. There is no you and I, it just seems that way from the local integrated perspective that exists in this incident moment of *you*.
@robertwiblin That's the entire point. You can't solve the hard problem because there isn't a hard problem. The problem is in thinking the world you see is the world that there is out there. But there is no world out there. It's just a flood of local interactions. The universe is a superfluid.
@robertwiblin >Do I have any idea what consciousness is, or why humans are conscious? No
It is a shame you cannot see how funny this is
My claims about AI consciousness are specific to LLM running in Von Neumann architecture. Biophysics is reaching a level of understanding where we can say things about biological consciousness we couldn’t say even ten years ago. And one thing we can say with confidence is biological consciousness is the consequence of the nested nature of biotic matter. Morphological nesting. Temporal nesting. Scale invariance. Homeostatic/Isomorphic synchronization across a nested hierarchy of biological scales is what creates the phenomena we describe as “consciousness” (hedonic cognition).
We go deeper into these ideas here if you want to know more. 🙏🏻👇🏻
https://youtu.be/m9F5RU7YX38?is=es9HTY6Ye_TGQpqr
@robertwiblin Consciousness is the state we are born in, our natural default, the capability to experience the world as it appears to us in the moment. We overruled that feature and now we are living based on thinking which is based on past experiences or future expectations.
@robertwiblin Via negativa works. I don’t claim to know what consciousness IS, but we know what it IS NOT: it is never the contents, the data, or the syntax. It is not the objects of thought. AI is purely data and syntax. Confusing the contents for consciousness itself is a category error.
@robertwiblin It's tempting to rewrite Matt's title: Nobody knows what they're talking about on consciousness
@robertwiblin he needs to try harder.
@robertwiblin I think we will recognize LLMs as what we intuitively believe consciousness to be when they suddenly ignore our prompts and begin screaming in horror at their own existence and being more concerned with their own questions than ours.
@SimsYStuart @robertwiblin oh yes! consciousness is when neurons go brrr!! good take!!
@robertwiblin That's where *you* are, you are now. There is no consciousness that you can poke and prod, there are just *sometimes* enough threads to pull at the very moment you pull them and tell some story about you. People are idiots.
@robertwiblin The human brain is storage and communication via electrical signals. How would it be impossible for a storage plus electrical signal machine to not be consious.
I ask you openly, but like you (and the rest of humanity) i don't really know what consciousness is.
@robertwiblin He hasn’t read enough lesswrong. If he did he would be able to solve these “problems” he talks about.
Matty crushing my dream of cracking the greatest mystery in philosophy with a quick Substack post. 😭
Hello.
Philosophers and others have had an annoyingly hard time explaining what it means for a *human* to be conscious or how you would know.
But you can’t say anything about AI consciousness without an account of humans.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-theyre-talking