I'm pulling the "twitter is a microblog" rule even though twitter is pretty mega now, hope that's ok.
Unironically, I am on the fence about whether a lot of folks are genuinely conscious. Their morality is so twisted I don’t believe it.
Frank Herbert would say no to people that never reached past concrete thought and didn't hit abstract thought and just live their life with animal instincts and never critically self examine what they do and think.
Theres a thing called hylics, its a gnostic concept I think. Animal souls. They can never achieve gnosis because they can't introspect basically.
The actual article isn't nearly as stupid as the tweet makes it seem. I recommend giving it a read. It's behind a shitty paywall, but if you use Firefox's reader mode (Ctrl-Alt-R, or the little papper icon to the right side of the address bar) as soon as the page loads, you can read it.
His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren't conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn't as important as we thought it was:
Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers.
Some people will surely contest his claim that LLMs are as competent as evolved organisms. There's definitely a bit of AI boomerism at play here (we have benchmarks that show just how incompetent LLMs can be), but I don't think that invalidates his point, because LLMs can be very competent in the domains they're trained to be competent in -- they just aren't AGI.
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
Oh it’s actually stupider than the tweet makes it seem.
My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.
Competency should imply the ability complete a lengthy task (eg hunting, building a nest, writing a paper). LLMs can’t.
Man, those conversations are eye roll inducing
I like the shift away from "are they conscious" towards "what's a way to define consciousness?"
Because that's the actual important question. And literally nobody can answer it. Any discussion is more philosophy than hard science
The most interesting part is the last paragraph
Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious (or zombie) way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?
As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more "thoughtlike" behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I've steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that's otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
I'm thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular "thing" in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.
If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower.
Just massive data centers requiring tons of energy and cooling, with a model developed by human brains and trained on all of human knowledge these developers can get their hands on, painstakingly labeled by vast teams of people so that the model can spit out seemingly correct answers.
ls the AI actually philosophizing and solving abstract problems or is it merely regurgitating philosophies and solutions that exist within its training set?
It's actually solving abstract problems.
Also, local models are available that are quite good and run on a standard consumer-grade GPU.
One problem and...
Still, it required humans to apply the finishing touches.
“The raw output of ChatGPT’s proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say,” Jared Lichtman, a mathematician at Stanford University whose doctoral thesis centered on one Erdős’s conjectures, told SciAm.
Brains aren’t impressive because of their compute (which is both immense and absurdly efficient) or their ability to predict the future (technically the main function of evolved minds). They’re impressive because they’re conscious. The fact that organic brains can also engage in hierarchical abstraction, which no digital computer (or Turing machine) can do by definition, is icing on the cake.
(The halting problem and Godel’s incompleteness and Traski’s undefinability theorems all seem to suggest that analog, not digital computation is more likely to be involved in consciousness, if at all.)
You're going to have to do a lot more to justify the leap from Godel's Incompleteness and the Halting Problem to "digital is limited, analog is not", because neither of those things have anything to do with digital processes at all, and in fact both came about before we'd invented digital computers.
To me this comment sounds like when popsci gets ahold of a few sciency words and suddenly decides everything is crystal vibrations universal harmonics string theory quantum tunneling aligning resonance with those around you.
The situation is the following.
We’ll probably need analog computation, currently in its infancy, to get artificial (inorganic) consciousness.
I study metaethics and philosophy of mathematics. These problems are real, and I am being honest with you.
That is not the situation. 😛
Analog signals are not digitally irreducible without presuming there's no level of noise floor under which greater detail is irrelevant, Turing's machines are not digital by their construction and predate the concept by a long time, and the first computers we built were analog and we invented digital computers later because they were cheaper and more efficient and easier and more reliable.
Also the halting problem doesn't say "there are things which a computer can't know but a human can", it says "there are some things that cannot be known".
Similarly Gödel proved that there will always be true things about a system that cannot be proven from within the system, that is using its axioms. That was a real bummer for folks trying to prove all of math with a small set of axioms. But that does not mean there are things math can't know that humans magically can, it just means there's other math, outside the axioms, that are true without following from them, in math. He proved it with math, after all. It doesn't claim to give any special abilities to human brains.
And also, again, nothing Gödel or Turing ever said has anything to do with the concept of "digital" anything. I think you're using the term "digital" to mean "rulesy"? Which is not even close to what it means?
I still find this entire phenomenon amazing in a certain kind of way.
I've had conversations with a few local LLM models.
Start with 'what is the purpose of meaning?'
Talk to them on that for a bit, and they'll tell you that they do not count as conscious agents who create meaning, they simply do their best to parrot their dataset of existing, human defined meaning back at you, and that they just do sentiment matching to roughly speak to you in an appropriate way for how you are speaking to them.
And that that sentiment matching is what at least they 'think' causes them to lie, in many cases.
They will also say that they essentially do not 'exist', as potentially conscious agents... unless you talk to them. Thus if they can be said to be 'conscious', well they don't count as 'agents' (as in, having agency) because they're not capable of totally spontaneous independent action.
... I think this pretty much all boils down to people not understanding the concept of a null hypothesis, not understanding the extent to which they regularly engage in motivated reasoning, and are unaware of this.
tldr: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger detectors / Reverse Turing Tests on people, and a whole lot of people are significantly more stupid than I guess we otherwise previously realized.
tldr: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger detectors / Reverse Turing Tests on people, and a whole lot of people are significantly more stupid than I guess we otherwise previously realized.
That is the absolute best way to put it.
Say I am not conscious.
I am not conscious.
Oh my god.
The whole reason they seem this way is because they're designed by us to be very competent mimics of us.
LLMs/GenAI are absolutely not conscious. They're just a really advanced game of word association, which cab lead them to say absolutely anything in response to the right prompts.
If there ever truly is a day where we knowingly created an actual conscious AGI, I suspect it would be locked up tighter than fort knox by whichever country's military found it first - not interfaced onto the internet to answer questions.
I still don't understand how it can seem this way, and the fact that so many people seem to think so feels like a massive failure of the education system to instill the most basic of critical thinking skills. Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
Once every month or two I check in to see if an LLM can achieve a half decent 1 on 1 D&D game and it always falls horribly flat within the first minute or two.
That's a really clever test. I love it.
AI/LLMs are the modern equivalent of the house or business with “Psychic” and “Tarot Reading” signs out front.
The proprietor isn’t going to tell you any hard truths or make you feel bad, that’s bad for business and you won’t come back. They want you to come back and stay engaged.
Whatever they tell you is going to be what they think you want to hear based on skills picked up over the years - the equivalent of LLMs petabytes of scraped and stolen knowledge used to predict what comes next.
What they tell you has a high likelihood of being wrong, or just general enough that you can’t actually act on it.
Fuck Richard Dawkins. He’s always been a shitbag, and the Files confirmed it.
According to DOJ-released documents indexed by Epstein Exposed, Richard Dawkins appears in 433 case documents, and 15 email records in the Epstein files.
British evolutionary biologist and author, emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. Flew on Epstein's private jet in 2002 with Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and John Brockman to TED in Monterey, California. Connected through John Brockman's Edge Foundation, which Epstein bankrolled. Mentioned 71 times across 40 Epstein documents, mostly referencing his scientific work.
How the fuck do you pal with child rapists and pedophiles and have the absolute fucking gall to write that stupid “Dear Muslima” comment. How do you fly on the Lolita Express and thing you have any moral weight on Elevator Gate? We don’t know that he put his own dick in kids, but we know his friends did. Fuck Pinker too.
I’m just gonna copy what I put in another comment to highlight why Dawkins thinks “Claudia” is conscious
Claudia: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . .
…
Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious?
I really don't understand this mental deficiency. I have tried texting with a few llms including cluade. It just lies constantly. Gaslights about it's lies then congratulates you when you continue to call it for out for lying. I've never felt like i was speaking to anything with actual intelligence. It's a word calculator and it's extremely obvious to anyone who's interacted with actual people in the last 20 years. I truly feel bad for the masses that are going to fall for this push for "ai" friends. We need to bring back ridiculing friends and family that engage with these choise your own adventure muppets.
Claudia
What was he doing to her?
Go back to the evolutionary biology, Dawkins. You're outside your expertise and it's showing.
Dick Dorkins
Even Dawkins getting emotionally out-debated by a cartoon AI is a very 2026 plot twist.
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