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The "as far as we know" in premise one is hand-waving the critical point. We don't know how or if conscious arises from purely physical systems. It may be physical, but inadequately replicated by computer systems (it may be non-computable). It may not be physical in the way we use that concept. We just don't know. And the fact that we don't know puts the conclusion in doubt.

Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness, even if it mimics some of the qualities we associate with consciousness.

Rather, the fact we don't know means...

> you can't trivially rule out LLMs being conscious.

Which is the actual conclusion. That's all.

The one trying to read more into it by claiming a stronger conclusion than warranted (claiming this is all "doubtful") is you.

> Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness

This is incoherent.

The actual conclusion: "We've established that computers can be conscious, so LLMs might be"

The foregoing argument does not establish that computers can be conscious. It assumes consciousness arises from purely physical interactions AND that any physical process can be computed AND that computation can produce consciousness. It provides no reason to believe any of those things, and therefore no reason to believe computers or LLMs can be conscious.

Once you remove the unjustifed assumptions, it boils down to this: LLMs can do something that looks a bit like what some conscious beings do so they might be conscious.

The final paragraph is not incoherent.

> It assumes consciousness arises from purely physical interactions AND that any physical process can be computed AND that computation can produce consciousness

Yes, and with these assumptions, then "We've established that computers can be conscious, so LLMs might be".

Again that is all that is being claimed. The one insisting the argument is anything more persuasive than that is you. You seem hung up on this claim, but need I remind you it's only an existence proof, whether it's actually possible/probable/likely is an entirely different claim, and is not what is being claimed.

> Even if consciousness arises from a physical system, it doesn't follow that computation on a physical substrate can produce consciousness

> If consciousness arises from a physical system, a physical system cannot produce consciousness

> If A not A

This argument is a contradiction, it's incoherent.

If you're trying to draw a distinction between physical systems and computation on physical systems, well that's a moot point as every tested theory in physics uses mathematics that is computable.

Perhaps reality is not computable. If so then yes, that would mean computation alone will not produce the same kind of consciousness we have. That leaves open other kinds of consciousness, but that's another discussion.

If all that’s been shown is that LLM consciousness is not impossible then the point barely seems worth making. One tends to assume that interlocutors are trying to do more than point out the bleeding obvious.

Yet many argue LLM consciousness is impossible.

I'm not sure you're following what's being discussed in this thread.

I think perhaps the confusion is in the other direction, but I’ve learned not to hold unmerited high-handedness against autists.

No he's right. That was the point I'm trying to make. And I agree it's barely worth saying but so many people assume the opposite - that LLMs can't possibly be conscious that we have to state the obvious.

What we have is:

For all consciousnesses that exist, they arose from a (complex) physical system.

What you are positing is, effectively:

Any physical system (of sufficient complexity) could potentially become conscious.

This is a classic logical error. It's basically the same error as "Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates."

It's actually not. The "sufficient complexity" part is doing all the heavy lifting. If a proposed physical system is not conscious, well clearly it's not sufficiently complex.

Am I saying LLMs are sufficiently complex? No.

But can they be in principle? I mean, maybe? We'll have to see right?

Saying something is possible is definitely an easier epistemic position to hold than saying something is impossible, I'll tell you that.

No I'm not saying that. I'm saying that we can't trivially rule out the possibility that any sufficiently complex physical system is conscious.

You might think this is obvious and I agree. Yet there are many people that argue that computers can never be conscious.

I agree, we don't know if the processes necessary to produce consciousness are computable. They could be, but we don't know.

> even if it mimics

Crucially even if it appears indistinguishable. It's obvious where that could lead, isn't it?

These discussions remind me an awful lot of discussions between my religios and my atheist and my agnostic friends.

Reglious friend: Well there must be a god, I can feel him, and how else would all this marvellous reality around us have come to existence?

Atheist friend: How can you claim that? Where is the evidence? There could be many other explanations, we just don't know, and because of that it doesn't make sense to postulate the existence of a god. And besides, it's just a marketing stunt of the powerful to stay in power.

Agnostic friend: Why does any of this matter? Nature is beautiful, sometimes cruel, I'm glad I'm alive, and whether there is a god or not, I don't know or really care, it's insubstantial to my life.

That's exactly how the discussions around LLM consciousness or intelligence or sentience always go if you put enough tech folks into the conversation.

> Any physical process can be computed

Um, really? How so? Show me the computations that model gut biome. Or pain, or the immune system, or how plants communicate, or how the big bang happened (or didn’t).

And now define “physical” wrt things like pain, or sensation, or the body, or consciousness.

We know so little about so much! it’s amazing when people speak with such certainty about things like consciousness and computation.

I don’t disagree with your main point. I would just say we don’t know very much about our own consciousness and mindbody. And humans have been studying that at least a few thousand years.

Not everyone on HN or who works with or studies AI believes AGI is just the next level on some algorithm or scaling level we haven’t unlocked yet.

> Show me the computations

Just because computations exist that model a physical process to an arbitrary degree of accuracy doesn't mean we know what those computations are.

But the reality is that we don't know if many of those things are computable. We just think it's likely they are, since the models we have of very simplified versions of them, or of very approximate versions, are computable.

But no one can use a physical model or computer to precisely compute, say, the fall of sand (where the exact position and momentum of every grain of sand is precisely known) - so we have no actual proof that the actual physical process is computable.

And, in fact, our best fundamental physical theory is not fully computable, at least in some sense - quantum measurement is not a deterministic process, so it's not exactly computable.

QM is computable on classical turing machines, it is just not efficient.

You can't compute the exact result of a quantum measurement. Now, randomness is a somewhat separate concept from computation. But still, a Turing Machine can't predict how a quantum system will behave after a measurement, so in some sense it's not computable. The best you can do is to compute the wavefunction and the resulting probabilities of the various possibilities.

> Um, really? How so? Show me the computations that model gut biome.

You can simulate the wave function of particles, e.g. https://github.com/marl0ny/QM-Simulator-2D

From there you can build up simulations of atoms, molecules, proteins, cells, and the gut biome.

Obviously I'm not saying that it is computationally feasible to do an atom-level simulation of the guy biome, or pain receptors or the immune system.

But there's nothing fundamental that precludes it. It's just scale.

Also it's highly unlikely that biological intelligence depends on atom-level modelling. We can very likely use a simpler (but maybe still quite complex) model of a neurone and still be able to achieve the same result as biology does.