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Comment by richardw | Hacker News Reader

People run on autopilot unless we put in effort to focus on the current moment. Almost everyone demonstrates bad habits that show how little conscious awareness and control we have. LLM’s can replicate a lot of our activities, so the realm of “consciousness” is in the things that the AI can’t do by simply repackaging and regurgitating content back at us. What we can claim as conscious special sauce has grown smaller over the last 15 years.

Argument 2:

Could we design a machine that is absolutely sure it’s conscious, but is not? If so, what differentiates us from it? Open question, I’m not sure. But I’d be surprised if we can be permanently sure.

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Argument 2 seems more like a thought-experiment or a question than an argument. (Unless maybe I missed the point?)

Anyway, isn’t a machine that “is absolutely sure” (of anything at all) having subjective experience (I think is the word, not a brainologist) by definition anyway?

We could clearly design a machine that asserts that it is self aware very strenuously

    printf(“I *am* experiencing existence!”);

But whether or not it actually sure of anything or experiencing at all is the question in the first place.

How do you know you’re not an automaton that thinks it’s conscious?

Not feel. Not think. Not have a strong vibe. Proof.

I don’t have to prove anything here, because I’m not the one making an assertion. My thought experiment demonstrates a situation where an entity thinks it’s conscious but isn’t. Humans think we’re conscious but can’t prove it.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about.

How can you be remotely unsure about whether you are conscious? It is inconceivable to me that you could be conscious and unaware of it. It's an oxymoron.

Of course you can be unsure about whether others are conscious. But if you are conscious then you know that you are.

Do you experience things at all? Or are you a soulless machine that takes inputs and gives outputs and doesn't experience anything on the inside?

If the former, you're conscious and you know it.

We “experience” consciousness in the same way we experience hard objects that are actually made of mostly space. It feels right but it’s impossible to say that it’s the truth.

There are a lot of smart people who are less sure that our perceptions reflect reality. Free will, time, consciousness, space all feel very real. But when you interrogate them enough, those fall away. Go fast enough and your time slows down. Go as fast as a photon and time and distance disappear entirely. Yet we’re sure they’re real. At one point we absolutely knew the sun revolved around us. We could see it doing that daily.

One smart person on free will below. There are so many others. There’s certainly no consensus that “our experience = how things are”.

https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-illusion-of-free-will

The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”. To make absolute statements you need to be a lot more sure and be more correct than all the smart people who say “not sure yet”.

You mentioned smart people and I wondered who you were talking about. Then you said Sam Harris who has a reputation for being a clueless idiot in philosophy circles.

Most philosophers are compatibilists, since that’s a good strong philosophical position. Harris is just saying libertarian free will doesn’t exist, but that’s irrelevant since that’s not what people really mean by the term.

I thought I might get pushback on the example. I honestly just googled and found a random person being Harris, but just add anyone who accepts spacetime/relativity and how it represents not what we experience. Or anyone who accepts that the mind predicts rather than observes reality, because our responses need to be faster than what we can process what we perceive. So even our direct perceptions are not quite exact.

The point, please focus on this point, is that it’s not a done deal that all accept free will. There exists a set of people who are smart and believe the opposite. I’m arguing against “everyone should think what I think”.

Edit: although to be honest if you convinced me otherwise I’d be 100% happy! “Most philosophers” (or my own “lots of smart people”) isn’t an argument I am moved by but I’ll go read up. My personal view is that the disappearance of time at the speed of light is incredibly powerful. I don’t feel we’ve explored the implications of that nearly enough. It either means the future impacts the past or super determinism is correct. Is there an alternative?

> The point is that our perception doesn’t provably equal “truth”.

That's fine, but that you have experiences at all proves that you have experiences.

I'm not saying nothing can be an illusion! I'm saying that consciousness specifically can't be an illusion, because if it was an illusion you wouldn't be experiencing anything at all.

I think we’ve skipped defining terms, which makes it hard to work out exactly what your thought experiment is trying to say.

What does it mean to be conscious? I (layman, this is a well-explored space so maybe somebody more informed will come along with a better definition) would define a conscious being as one which has subjective experiences, that is, one which has has the sensation of thinking. Therefore I know I am a conscious being by definition.

I mean this is just “I think, therefore I am.”

It is definitely possible that I’m an artificial being programmed to have first person subjective experience. I can confirm, if so, to my creators that their experiment was successful. But, I can’t offer any proof, and of course they would be totally reasonable to assume I am lying.

In your thought experiment, you say an entity that thinks it is conscious, but isn’t. By my definition of consciousness, that is impossible, because thinking things is definitionally a characteristic of conscious beings. It is fine if you want to use a different definition of consciousness or thinking, I just assumed and later supplied (my bad, I also should have defined in the beginning) what I thought were typical definitions.

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