Not understanding how consciousness is created doesn't make it divine. Do you think it's an impossible task or just one we need more time to figure out?
Never mind that you need to learn about the god of the gaps. But what you’re doing here isn’t even relevant to GPs main point.
How would you prove if it did? What kind of proof would you accept?
Concretely, that means: We already have indirect evidence: conscious states vary predictably with brain states. Damage specific regions, lose specific functions. Alter chemistry, alter experience. This is not proof, but it’s systematic dependence, which is exactly what emergence predicts. Stronger evidence would look like precise, bidirectional mappings between neural activity and reported experience: to the point where you could reliably read subjective states from brain data, or induce specific experiences through targeted stimulation. We’re already moving in that direction.
The hardest bar would be building a system from physical components, having it report coherent subjective experience, and being able to explain why that configuration produces experience while others don’t. That’s the hard problem: and no, we’re not there yet. And it’s worth being honest: we’ve been assuming physicalism will eventually solve it, but there’s no guarantee that’s true rather than hopeful. The fact that brain states correlate with conscious states doesn’t explain why there is something it is like to have those states. Correlation is not mechanism.
But here’s the key point: you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets. We don’t have that standard of proof for evolution, gravity, or quantum mechanics either. We have overwhelming evidence that makes alternatives implausible.
So the question isn’t “can you prove it beyond all doubt?” It’s “does the evidence favor it over alternatives?” Right now, it does — but that’s a pragmatic verdict, not a metaphysical one. Idealist frameworks like Kastrup’s or Faggin’s remain serious contenders. The debate is more open than mainstream science often admits.
So like if i finetune an LLM in a loop to tell you that it is feeling a coherent subjective experience would you accept that?
Does that mean that no dog has ever been conscious, because they cannot report a coherent subjective experience? (Because they can’t report anything at all. Being non-verbal.)
> you’re implicitly holding emergence to a standard of certainty that no scientific theory meets.
Wtf? I asked what kind of proof would you accept. How is that holding anyone to any kind of standard? Let alone one which is too high.
Better criterion: a system whose overall architecture and behavior is consistent with experience, not just one that says the right words.
On the standard of proof: that was a rhetorical deflection and you’re right to call it out. You asked a genuine question and got it turned back on you. And you’re pointing at something real: in science, strong correlation is not accepted as proof when stricter evidence is achievable. The reason we settle for correlation here isn’t because it’s sufficient, it’s because subjective experience may make stronger proof structurally inaccessible. But it’s also worth noting that scientific consensus has a poor track record of admitting this honestly. Dominant paradigms tend to defend themselves long past the point where the cracks are visible, physicalism on consciousness is no exception. The confidence with which emergence is presented often reflects institutional momentum as much as evidence.
It's not divine, just expensive, and has to pay its costs. That little thing - cost - powers evolution. Cost defines what can exist and shaped us into our current form, it is the recursive runway of life.
These entities, whoever they are, they act on our world, they are real, and more and more over time they will get independent from humans, eventually becoming different species that can self-replicate.
For now they need legs and arms to interact with the physical world but I am certain that 100 years from now they will be an integral part of the society.
I already see today LLMs slowly taking actual legal decisions for example, having real world impact.
Once they get physical, perhaps it will be acceptable to become friend with a robot and go to adventure with it. Even, getting robosexual ?
We are not that far away. If I can have my buddy to carry my backpack and drive for me I'll take it. Already today. Not tomorrow.
See, I don't believe that for even one second. They are just very clever calculators, that's all. But they are also dumb like a brick most of the time. It's a pretend intelligence at best.
We will only prove humans are not.
The best time to start paying attention was ten years ago, when the first Go grandmaster was defeated by a "pretend intelligence." I sure wish I had.
The next best time to start paying attention is now.
A computer playing GO is intelligent now? Is this the kind of conversation we're having?
>>I sure wish I had.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
>>The next best time to start paying attention is now.
I am paying attention, I use these tools every day - the whole idea that they are intelligent and if only you gave them a robot body they would be just normal members of society is absurd. Despite the initial appearance of genius they are just dumb beyond belief, it's like talking to a savant 5 year old, except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
And how would you have changed your decisions in those last 10 years if you did?
I'd have dropped everything else I was doing and started learning about neural nets -- a technology that, for the previous couple of decades, I'd understood to be a pointless dead end.
As for Go, the defeat of Lee Sedol caught my attention in part because a friend and colleague, one of the smartest people I've ever worked with, had spent a lot of time working on Go-playing AI as a hobby. He was strongly convinced that a computer program would never reach the top levels of play, at least not during our careers/lifetimes. The fact that he'd turned out to be wrong about that was unnerving, and it should have done more than "catch my attention," but it didn't.
Today, my graphics card can outdo me at any number of aspects of my profession, and that's more interesting (to me) than anything I've actually done.
...except a 5 year old can actually retain information for more than a brief conversation.
Like I said: it's a good time to start paying attention. Start taking notes, so to speak, like the models are doing now.
Idiot savants are still idiots even though they are exceptional at some things. A person powered by an LLM and no human intelligence would absolutely be classified as an idiot savant.
For that matter — you might be talking to one now!
Does it mean that researchers wasted their time on useless dead end architectures, or are they ahead of the curve and commercial companies are slow to adopt them?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
I don't quite follow. Are you saying researchers are wasting their time working with transformer networks now, or that they wasted too much time in the past, or...?
Even the coding agents are more primitive than expected.
What did you expect, exactly? I don't know about you, but I bought my GPU to play games, and now it's finding bugs in my C code, writing better code to replace it, and checking it into Github. That doesn't signal "primitive" to me. More like straight outta Roswell.