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No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2026
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maybe he has in his book but he should've put them in the article, and of course we don't have a model for that, so he should've put whatever his model is for it before he started talking about it, that way we can both understand what he means. This is done in for example, cladisticss papers because there's no definition of a species that everyone agrees on. As it stands there's no way to discern what he even means thus leaving the argument incoherent.
i'm not providing a counter argument, because there's no argument to counter. I haven't thought about this because I think that consciousness is completely unimportant, I don't think it is a meaningful term, it is spiritual woohoo nonsense where we try to make ourselves special by pre-supposing we are special and that this isn't just a property of any mechanism with enough inputs that outputs a response.
the real problem I am facing with his article is that it didn't accomplish what he claimed at all, he didn't move the conversation forward and claims to have solved it definitively.
There obviously is an argument to counter, which is that the way LLMs work does not appear to be in line with any definition of consciousness we have right now. If you disagree with that, then feel free to provide a definition of consciousness that would credibly account for the notion of LLMs being conscious.
It's also rather absurd to claim that consciousness is spiritual woohoo nonsense given that we all have an internal experience. That's fundamental denial of the observed reality. Consciousness does not in any way presuppose that humans are special, but it is a property of the configuration of physical systems where matter is arranged in a particular way to produce patterns that constitute internal experience.
I could say that they experience negative feedback when given a thumbs down and positive feedback when given a thumbs up which is something akin to a conscious experience.
the part that presumes we are special is the notion that not everything that reacts to something is conscious, in philosophy there is a notion of a philosophical zombie that does all the things a conscious being does and is therefore indistinguishable from one but doesn't have any internal experience. I believe that the ability to react IS a conscious experience and that such a being is impossible because consciousness does nothing and means nothing beyond an ability to react to stimulus. We say computers aren't conscious, but they react to stimulus if setup properly, I ask how that's meaningfully different. You'll say "because in decides if we care whether it suffers" to which I say we shouldn't decide whether we care about the suffering of a being on the basis of something that has no physical or measurable ramifications on the world and should use a better, well defined framework. This same line of thinking lead people to the notion that there is no such thing as insect suffering and is just a bad way of looking at the world.
You could also say a thermostat experiences negative feedback when you turn it down. That's not really a meaningful definition.
Also, the notion of philosophical zombie is indeed absurd. Dennett dismantles this idiocy in Consciousness Explained quite thoroughly. My view that consciousness requires having a system that's capable of introspection in a sense that it is able to observe its own internal patterns and to be aware of itself. Such a system would obviously not be restricted to humans or even biology. There is absolutely no reason why a neural network implemented on a different substrate could not be conscious. You're making quite a lot of assumptions about what I'll say, while ignoring what I'm actually saying here.