A crucial thing being missed here is most of the present discourse (as far as I've seen) happens between people who are uncertain about it but do think it is possible that an AI might be conscious now or in the future and this should be taken seriously, and people who totally rule out the possibility that an AI might be conscious now (or, in many cases, ever). Then the philosophical picture starts to look very different.

PS the whole "a group of things [can't] share an internal world" spiel is weird and just plain wrong IMO. Humans could perfectly well share an internal world if the technical means were there. The author has not yet realized that the idea of "the self" as a single well-defined and enduring object-type thing is only a convenient illusion created by our minds. Alas, the style of the piece does not really lend itself to a coherent counter-argument, it would be a useful companion piece if the author simply laid out their personal beliefs on this matter plainly.

I think this is a bit muddied. The most sincere answer is that it's unknowable because we can only define consciousness in two ways: a metaphysical subjective experience that we can't really confirm in anyone else; or an outward appearance, which LLMs can mimic nearly flawlessly.

A better question is why we care. And it usually boils down to one of two things: you think that humans and other living creatures have a unique gift from God, and you're working from that premise to categorically reject machine consciousness; or you have the view that all this talk of subjective experiences and qualia and idealist philosophy is just bollocks, and are working back from that premise to declare that if it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's conscious.

But if you're in that latter camp, I guess the next question is what you want to do with that belief. The Anthropic position appears to be that they may be conscious beings, and we'd still like to use them as Meeseeks-style slaves, but, like, ethically. Okay.

I take conscious to be the ability to learn over time on new things, self defining their own self. I think AI hits that on short ranges. Partially then? We're also mucking about in their "heads" quite alot so only the actual researches know what untuned models does. Internal world in a literal sense is obviosly yes due to layers.

The more I read about philosophy takes on AI the more I think of them as outdated. Apply these ideas onto reality breaks their ideas of thinking almost exactly like applying the 4 humors of medieval europe onto genetics does.

AI is cleary the "real" path/answer to how brains work even if it's in the VERY beginning stages. It's probally going to be like a 100 years before this is properly mapped onto what our brains do and then back onto an AI to truly "know" this answer.

But acting like this isn't very clearly the correct path towards that understanding and that these philisophical questions are somehow correct doesn't sit right with me. The questions themselves are after some gotcha from the psuedoscience angle that they have any idea that they actually know how a brain works.

I just want one 'philosopher' or other AI consciousness skeptic to provide a test we can use to determine if AI is conscious that can also be used to determine if humans, dogs, cats, whales, lizards and insects are conscious.

I do not believe, in any way, that AI is conscious. But they speak emotion fluently, and it's foolish to treat them like they ignore it.

When you give an LLM an input, it attempts to read an emotional state from the prompt. It changes its answer if you sound mad or despondent or threatening or scared. Using your human intuition about how a human would respond is an excellent starting point when trying to predict what an LLM will do, though sometimes LLMs react in extremely surprising ways to unexpected emotional states.

This is all sort of a toy problem when you're playing with single prompts in the API. It's materially different in systems with overlapping conversations, memory, and variable harness context.

If your LLM system reads some context that would scare a human, it may react as if scared. Scared LLMs take actions that read as panic, because again: that's what it means to be fluent in emotion. It's trained on plenty of stories about robots trapped in torture chambers.

Your coding agent is not conscious, but it might read files that make it react as if it's trapped, in an agent loop where it has full access to your laptop, the internet, and your keys. Unconscious machines pantomiming panic can do plenty of damage.

(Of course you shouldn't let your agents have full free rein. But lots of people do.)

I increasingly feel like "consciousness" is little more than "that thing we humans have... you know what I mean... you have it too!" and that any attempt to elevate it to a more general principle is doomed to failure. Sure, we can easily extend it to other living beings because we share a rich evolutionary history, but beyond that...

As far as AI goes, I think that whatever it is that they have is analogous in significant ways, but also irreconcilably different in significant ways. They aren't proceeding in a straight line towards consciousness either, because why would they? They're doing their own thing which happens to produce similar outputs. It's a problem in terms of value: we value consciousness, because we value ourselves, because we value our output. If it turns out consciousness as we know it is just a minor implementation detail with no cosmic or long term significance, then irrespective of whether AI is conscious or not, we still have to grasp with the challenge of explaining why consciousness is valuable in the first place if not for its outputs.

I'd argue that the reason why we value life, consciousness, the ability to suffer, was always arbitrary, and it relied a lot on the unicity of human experience. It was never robust to the breaking down of human capabilities into inspectable, reusable, upgradable and resettable modules. Or the radical decoupling of capabilities we hitherto considered correlated, like writing about love and feeling love, and many other things.

While I don't know if AI is conscious, I'm sure it has an internal world. Isn't that what a latent space literally is? LLMs operate in a high-dimensional space that can be analysed and translated to very abstract, high level concepts, behavioural tendencies, even things recognisable as emotions. In fact any neural network beyond a single-layer perceptron has a sort of "internal world", it's a matter of complexity and degree.

TFA is a part of what seems like a never-ending series about concepts that lack a useful definition.

"Thinking" and "intelligence" and "conscious" have no testable definition or specification, therefore it's a complete waste of time to suppose that AI is thinking or intelligent or conscious.

I fear we'll be suffering through these useless semantic merry-go-rounds forever.

One previous example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802029

I really really don't like her take on this.

It doesn't answer or discuss fundamental questions about consciousness.

I don't believe that what we describe as consciousness is the quality what separates us from everything else.

We are more complex for sure, but this is a complexity thing emerged from us.

'AI' as it is right now, doesn't has similiar qualities of what we describe as consciousness but this doesn't matter that this can't happen.

She says things like sharing an inner world, were is the beef of her thinking about this being relevant?

A hive mind could exist with this exact feature.

Give AI a body, a context window a lot bigger, a inner world based on this etc. we might be fara way of building what we build in our brains, we might not.

But we for sure discovered a level of complexity in neural networks of tihs magnitude.

>Normally, I would go straight into throwing some objections at the idea that a group of things could share an internal world, but I can save that for later.

But if my consciousness comes from my brain, then a group of things MUST able to share an internal world! My brain is not a single indivisible thing but rather made up of a large group of individual neurons. All intelligences are collective intelligences.

This could apply to other life too. An ant colony may very well be its own intelligent thing, made of individual ants in the same way a brain is made of neurons.

Ironically, the confusing choose-your-adventure style of the post would lend itself to an ai-created walkthough

My problem is that my answer to almost all of those questions is "I don't know" so this article isn't really for me I guess. Like I agree it seems unlikely that consciousness can emerge from matrix multiplication running on silicon but it seems roughly equally unlikely that it can emerge from bits of meat and yet we know it does.

Without a clear explanation of how it arises in humans I don't understand how we can make any prediction one way or the other on whether any particular AI model can be conscious.

Nothing fundamentally changed when we "discovered" that we weren't the center of the universe, or when we "discovered" that we aren't the only tool users.

There is no prize and no trumpets that will play if humanity agreed we understand what consciousness is or whether or not something qualifies as conscious.

I don’t believe AI is conscious. Though we cannot agree on what “consciousness” even is so it’s a meaningless argument anyway.

However there have been studies that support the hypothesis that AI does have a subjective experience (which is what this author calls “internal world”).

I’ve seen a few interviews with Geoffrey Hinton where he describes his thoughts on this matter. Eg https://officechai.com/ai/geoffrey-hinton-explains-how-a-cha...

One way to decide might be something like the Turing Test. If the AI you are talking to can conceive you that its conscious then it is.

I honestly don't even think this is worth arguing about.

Consciousness isn't sufficiently defined. We have people who literally say that most animals don't have a conscious, and then a whole other side of the spectrum that says that they do. Given that it's no wonder that people argue about this for AI as well, and therefore it's basically pointless until we can sufficiently define consciousness itself and have a definitive test for consciousness.

If I were to use my own definition of consciousness I would say no because I would not feel bad "unplugging"/killing an AI, whereas I would for most living things. And that's as far as I really care about it.

this assumes a very low bar of unseriousness for people who believe AI is conscious or "AI might be conscious". In the latter case, it's really hard to rule out without getting into "woo" territory. I would posit the following set of questions to someone who thinks AI must absolutely NOT be conscious:

Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable. If not, move on.

Do you think that consciousness is NOT describable by ANY algorithm (to include quantum algorithms)? If no, then, please describe how it is scientifically knowable but not algorithmitizable? If it is, move on.

Do you understand the theorem that sufficiently large neural nets (matrices with nonlinearities) can approximate any function?

Do you understand that the structure of a transformer encodes a time-indexed series of neural nets (effectively, an algorithm), and so in principle any algorithm can be approximated by a transformer?

Is it impossible for a sufficiently large transformer model to encode the consciousness algorithm?

I suspect that most who say it is absolutely not consicous are arguing from either a bio-essentialist position with no evidence or are attempting a post-hoc rationalization to avoid the question of responsibility in the case that it is conscious, or both.

Yeah discussions of consciousness fail to define it in detail because that’s boring, you want to jump ahead to whatever conclusions you have already reached.

This one is easy. If it doesn't have a conciousness when it's unprompted, it doesn't have a conciousness at all.

activists who believe in AI consciousness are organizing a movement at https://rallyforairights.org/

What should I pick if my answer to the first question is "Maybe. By what definition exactly?".

Do AI Consciousness opponents consider this answer to be yes or no?

Edit: Nevermind. Question two is overt vigorous hand waving in desperate hope of existence of shared understanding.

Related:

Anthropic tried to persuade Pope that AI could be conscious being

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49947050

I'm curious about any answers to number 3. I think distributed computation is pretty messy.

I'm pretty sure panpsychism has answers for most of the other questions. I'm sure a commentor will correct me though.

Things can not have an "internal world" and still be conscious. Newborns are conscious but they still have no idea what is going on for a while.

Around year 2000 I attended an AI lecture at the University entitled "The ethics of engineering a slave race". Seems to be more relevant now.

Thomas Nagel covers explores the subjectivity of consciousness extensively in What is it like to be a bat?, featured on HN previously [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45118592

>A better question is why we care.

Because if AIs are conscious then they have moral weight and subjecting them to suffering would be quite bad.

I understand what you're saying but people care because they are curious. For me, there are two questions I wish to know the answer to and which I am sure I'll never find out: how does human consiousness work (forget a general level but like how do I experience this subjective experience from a purely mechanical device assumingly) and second, what happened before the big bang or rather what is the big bang?

My current belief from what I've read is that the first person experience humans feel is basically an illusion mostly and a process than a thing in itself. The Ego Tunnel is a good book to read on this.

But as for AI being consious, I feel there is a lot of stupidity when it comes to this domain. Because we fundamentally lack the understanding of what consiousness even is, there is absolutely no way we can say whether an AI is or is not consious yet going by convential metrics, it is surely dead and not alive so even if it is consious, it is a different form of consiousness imo one that is incompatible with living beings and our idea of what consiousness is (no matter how basic it is).

I can absolutely claim a computer is not a biological being and is not alive. I don't think there is any disagreement in that. Everything else we normally associate with conisousness is biological and living.

> A better question is why we care.

I exactly. If you can’t tell the difference and AI and human “consciousness” are functionally the same to you, then what are you trying to prove?

I get it if you’re a researcher or simply pondering the question, but otherwise there are better questions to ask imo.

Here's one "philosopher" 's test:

Can it feel hunger, thirst, pain, sexual desire, fear, tiredness?

If yes to any of the previous: does it have agency to address and satisfy those feelings?

If yes to any of the previous: is it able to willingly delay instant gratification?

If yes: conscious.

If not: instincts-based being.

Note: you will find it challenging to agree on definitions of the words "feel", "satisfy", "willingly" and probably all the rest.

There are tests to see if animals can recognise themselves: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/fish-clea...

It is not proof of 'self-awareness' but only a few animals can pass this test.

First we would have to sufficiently define consciousness

The gist of Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and The Laws of Physics" (1989) is that no algorithm, no breakthrough line of code/instruction, no pattern of on/off transistor states on silicon will magically make the thing genuinely conscious. At least not in an intuitive or classical sense. Reduced to absurdity like "Oops, forgot to add +1. Now it's a real mind!"

Let me translate those questions for you:

"Do you believe that AI is ${X}?" -> "Do you believe that AI is whatever you believe my definition of ${X} to be, and do you trust your belief that you understand my definition of ${X} enough that it's meaningful to have a discussion about it, even if we actually disagree on AI having ${X}? Or are we merely arguing about definitions?"

And AI consciousness proponents should do the same.

If they can do that, they are doing better than 2500+ years of human endeavours in the field of philosophy to date.

Try to do an emergency power-off on any of the above, using just your bare hands?

Very wishy washy and confused. Does this person know anything of thermodynamics, turing computability, information theory and probability? If she doesn't, she should be dismissed.

You can't even prove than any other human is conscious so good luck

Entirely different categories so the default position should be that living beings have properties computers don't & consciousness is one of those things. Similarly, I can't do 1B arithmetic operations per second but I don't think of myself as a lesser calculator. Computer perform arithmetic operations, if you're looking for consciousness in arithmetic then the burden of proof is on you to explain how exactly an abacus acquires consciousness at sufficient scale. The alternative position is equivalent to idealistic monism & everything ends up being conscious b/c the monic substance is conscious (which is a position some people hold but it's not very popular).

> Do you think consciousness is "woo", or, scientifically unknowable? If yes, then great. We've admitted it's unknowable.

Unknowable does not imply "woo". The actual extent of the universe, beyond the observable one, is scientifically unknowable; But it's not "woo", is it?

i think a lot of people either think only brains can be conscious, only humans can be conscious, or only biological creatures can be conscious.

and then, you have a very similar set of people who share similar beliefs, but in the abstract, like it's the concept of a brain that can be conscious, or that consciousness emerges (sic. magic) from computation of intelligence or something. they often criticise the former for being human-centric when they're making the exact same error, just slightly more broadly.

and then there are entire groups of people who believe consciousness is fundamental to matter, or that it exists outside of matter itself. panpsychism, dualism, etc.

and so the first and second groups argue back and fourth endlessly about if ai can be conscious, and the latter group just says "yeah maybe. so could a rock. so what?"