1. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they're conscious because they talk like a human.
2. People who haven't really thought about it, and assume they can't be conscious because humans are obviously somehow special. This appears to be the largest group, and is linked to our religiously rooted culture in which human exceptionalism is the default.
Those first two groups comprise the majority of people, and are not worth engaging with.
3. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they might be conscious, usually for computationalism/functionalism reasons. This is the group that I place myself in.
4. People who have thought about it, and came to the conclusion that they can't be conscious, usually for biological naturalist reasons. This seems to be the predominant group on Hacker News (among those who discuss it).
The interesting bit to do for both cases is look at the 'they talk like a human' and 'are obviously somehow special' parts, separate the ideas of language, intelligence (memory, fluidity, abstract reasoning), _aliveness_ (as a biological process) and finally ideas about metacognition and theory of mind, and see whether their idea of consciousness as a super-bundle of the above (which is how I assume a lot of default ideas about consciousness are) actually sticks, or whether it falls apart when beings can have a subset of those properties but not all.
Also, I nominate myself to be in the 'People who have thought about it and are becoming more doubtful that I myself am conscious, and the question might be moot.' group.
If you're looking for one of the genuine angles on this:
Consciousness is horrendously under-defined, to the point some people go something like "you know, at this point I figure we'd be better off not having this word at all. "
Some days that's me, with a headache.
[It can be done. But it'll be dirty]
If you grant that humans are conscious, then surely domestic cats are as well. It is simply irrational to talk about Claude's "consciousness" without actually engaging with this: cats, humans, pigeons, fish, etc etc all share some common features we associate with consciousness (I don't mean sensory awareness, I mean the fuzzy cognitive concept). Claude really does not. In fact Claude doesn't even have much in common with uncontacted hunter-gatherers! Claude imitates the solipsism of formally educated human philosophers.
It is uncharitable and curmudgeonly but totally scientific to dismiss people in camp #3 as unserious and not worth engaging with: they ignore scientific criticism and don't provide any themselves, it's just a mishmash of sci-fi-adjacent philosophy. There's nothing "functional" about ignoring animals and there's nothing scientific about waving your hands and saying "computationalism." That's certainly how I feel. I know this isn't a very nice comment. But I am so sick of AI folks thinking they can ignore animals and still have an honest conversation about machine consciousness. It's just sci-fi ghost stories.
Are you sure you're a <biological naturalist>? [1] Which is to say, do you adhere to Searle's position about syntax not leading to semantics?
Or is it more like: You're scientifically inclined, and thus you accept Ethology[2] or Neuroscience[3] as being an empirically rigorous studies of animal behavior and cognition respectively?
Incidentally, Alan Turing's 1950 imitation game paper was actually pretty Ethological if you look it up. He immediately replaces the question "can machines think" with a more practical operationalization: the famous imitation game.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_naturalism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethology
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computing_Machinery_and_Intell...
I personally have not been ignoring animal consciousness in how I think about the possibility of AI consciousness and I don't see how animals having consciousness means that AI can't.
I say clearly as at some point we reach proof by construction. As in, we already built intelligence because the system already completes tasks that require intelligence.
We are so far into what would have been science fiction five years ago and the goal posts have moved so far.
For anyone who disagrees, I challenge you to prove deep learning systems cannot solve <task with specific outcome humans can solve but not AI> given sufficient data and compute.
I think the strongest sign we have true intelligence already is no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve.
Yes, our current robotics lags AI, so we don’t have the equivalent of the human body to give our deep learning systems. Thus, it’s expected AI will be limited in physical scenarios.
Second, hallucinations are present in humans. We are highly biased to ignore all the misspoken words in everyday life as we have error correction built into normal conversations. How often do you have to have someone repeat or rephrase something?
It just doesn’t make sense to me.
It’s like there are people out there whose belief systems are incompatible with this tech existing.
Sure, it has limitations due to training data. It has limitations with no physical body. It cannot combine training and inference the same way a human does. But none of those are measures of intelligence or required to be intelligent.
> Consciousness is a property of humans biology
You're assuming consciousness is a product of biology rather than attracted to biology.
But I don't think the takeaway is "humans are intelligent and LLMs are not", it's that our vocabulary for talking about the intersection of language, cognition and compute is not up for the task.
No true Scottsman fallacy.
It is not just uninteresting that computer programs can be written to accomplish information tasks, it's intellectually dishonest to anthropomorphize machines and algorithms to characterize it as consciousness.
> no one has built any benchmark that AI cannot solve
"Be human."
My point still stands
The crux of my argument is Consciousness is irrelevant to any AI debates. It’s not necessary to perform tasks we previously deemed only humans could do.
My very amateur view is that until the underlying compute architecture and substrate resembles artificial biology more than silicon, we wont get there.
The latest advances in AI have given me even more appreciation of biology and evolution. It's incredible what the human brain can do with about 20 watts of power, barely enough to power a lightbulb, in comparison to what it takes to run even our most basic LLM models.
This approach actually makes testable (and tested) scientific predictions.
This makes Searle-derived papers super-weird for me; since from my perspective they seem to disprove the existence of life. (and it makes the name of the philosophy "biological naturalism" very ironic to me :-P )
(for extra irony, Turing actually went into biology late in his life. See: Turing 1952 "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis" )
Total drivel. Consciousness in biological systems is "a given" because of metabolism?