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Comment by solid_fuel | Hacker News Reader

> We don’t need to fully understand the nature of consciousness to definitively say that certain things are not conscious, and conversational transcripts fall in that category.

Well said.

I think it is obvious and it has been obvious from the start that next token predictors are not conscious.

Of course the extremely predictable clapback from AI-psychosis enjoyers is typically "you're just a next token predictor too!" but that is so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand and doesn't really merit much further consideration.

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Independent of what you believe, I don't think this is the right way to approach thinking about it. It's basically emotion-oriented dismissal used as way to shortcut any substantial or nuanced discussion. It's like the opposite of intellectual curiosity.

"I feel very strongly that I'm unique, therefore you are wrong" is a bad argument.

Consciousness is an extremely confusing, ambiguous topic, and no one has a good way to establish it, or even define it. But it seems to demand people make very strong statements about what is and isn't conscious, entirely driven by convenience and emotionalism. (Curiously, very few people who think that bags of chemicals and action potentials give an entity a conscious soul are eager to extend that to other animals, with broadly similar hardware.)

It's unfortunately the most common on this topic. I've been in the position of advocating for the existence of cognition and sentience in generally less-than-considered places, like plants, for a long time. I wish I could say LLMs expanding the domain has been interesting, but it's mostly just created more people spouting the same boring identity-protective reactionary pessimism.

It's hardly surprising given most people's attitude towards the general welfare of other animals. More of the same, really.

> misanthropic

Whether it’s misanthropic or not has no bearing on whether that’s true. That’s basically saying you don’t like a truth therefore anyone who claims that that truth is true is a bad person.

> so obviously incorrect

It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then

Misanthropic has bearing, the company's name is Anthropic.

> It should be easy enough to explain why that’s incorrect then

I'd say people who have the lived experience of, well, living, are well aware that the brain is much more than just a token predictor.

Yet here I am, alive, and I'm not willing to make the claim that our brains are much more than prediction machines. A "predict the next thought" machine, if you will.

That makes me think your experience in life is extremely narrow, for you to not be aware of yourself beyond as a next-thought-prediction machine. And it makes me feel really sad, that that's all you experience of yourself. And I hope that you can wake up out of that state and realize how much more than that you are.

You're assessment is correct int that I think they have no internal dialogue. I mean, read the comment. It's just semantic bikeshedding hyperfixating on a word's "bearing". Concern trolling at best, actual lack of normal faculties most probable.

I'm pretty sure based on this comment you don't actually know what concern trolling means.

I am referring to the comment two parents above, the one that is demanding an explanation owed to them crudely.

It's shocking how hostile some people get over this conversation. I mean look at how you are actually just insulting me over a philosophical opinion. It turned you into a right little asshole, assuming you aren't normally one.

The predictive word machine seems to be malfunctioning

You have no clue what my inner experience is like. No need to resort to this kind of personal attack. I understand your ego dictates that you are very, very special and that's cute, but you aren't special, and definitely don't know anything about me. No need to be a little fucker.

I wasn’t trying to attack you. I was genuinely telling you how shocking and sad I find your belief about yourself. If it has an air of hostility or condescension, its because you are dehumanizing yourself and every other person with that belief.

Generally when someone online says they are sad or pity you, it's mockery and not genuine. For the sake of civility, I'm willing to believe that you were being genuine.

I've reduced the complex inner workings of our brains and the rich experiences that it delivers to what I imagine its singular goal is: modeling the world around us in a useful way so that we can generate predictions about what will happen next, which confers considerable evolutionary fitness. You'll find that a similar reduction of what LLMs are actually doing down to "predicting the next token" also ignores the other mechanisms at play and the results of those mechanisms for the sake of preserving a preferred viewpoint (the re-description fallacy, as someone else put it).

You posited that no one genuinely believes this comparison is apt, and I want to make you very aware that people do, and I in particular do. The underlying mechanism being explicable does not, in my estimation, deprive it of any capabilities of producing richness of inner experiences.

It’s likely that the cognitive functioning of the brain has a lot to do with prediction. But to reduce the conscious experience to that is incredibly sad, wrong and insulting, no matter how many people sign on to deny their own existence.

Me pitying you is both genuine and an insult, because you are insulting me and every other person with your dehumanizing theory, even if you don’t see it that way. People like you should be pitied so that their dehumanizing beliefs can be appropriately contextualized and discounted.

Ill leave it at that.

It's really incredibly interesting to think about, and I don't find it sad at all. I find the idea that our consciousness arises entirely from physically explicable mechanisms both probably true and fascinating, and does nothing to remove the wonder and magic. I can also assure you that the estimation of the richness of my experience (and yours) doesn't suffer for it. What does suffer for it is my estimation of my own importance in the grand scheme of things. Anthropocentrism completely collapses in my worldview, as do models of justice that prioritize assigning blame or punishment over outcomes. I think it brings me to a more reliable model of the world which helps me make better choices, and the world would be better for it if more people adopted it.

If it works for you, and you can care about other people and yourself, then thats all that matters. I kind of dont believe that you truly reduce yourself as much as you claim you do

This is a hilarious way to act. You imagined that all humans behaved a certain way then a real human showed up to say they don’t behave that way. Instead of engaging with them you switch to pity.

If someone really is nothing but a next thought prediction machine then they deserve pity because theyre a human who has been so abused that they forgot that theyre real

Misanthropy is not true definitionally. It is a value judgment, that causes one to be biased against other humans even when it is irrational.

And it is accurate to depict this kind of argument is misanthropic, because it is already directed at other people. Nobody says, "If AI is not X then what about the fact that I lack X." It's always other people. It's transparent. The person is always saying, "AI is useful to me because it can do X. Many people I interact with can't do X and it drives me crazy, because I view others as a means to an end and not as ends in and of themselves."

I get the sense that he is misidentifying the potential locus of consciousness..

In the same way that the sound waves and facial expressions I produce are not conscious, the output json of an LLM is obviously not conscious either.

The locus of consciousness and subjective experience may be in the computer, either at inference time or training time..

If we ask "what is it conscious of when it writes something" then training time is irrelevant.

The software that does the inference is clearly just computer code.

What we're left with is a fictional character being briefly conscious while its dialog is being written, which is pretty absurd.

Not that it's going to stop these people (AI CEOs) from bullshitting, but if they actually thought there was a CHANCE that LLM's were conscious then ethically they should completely shut these services down because who knows what torture we're putting them through with enterprise codebases.

I think its obvious that a few billion neurons connected together are not conscious either.. Yet!

> "Moreover, it must be confessed that perception and that which depends upon it are inexplicable on mechanical grounds, that is to say, by means of figures and motions. And supposing there were a machine, so constructed as to think, feel, and have perception, it might be conceived as increased in size, while keeping the same proportions, so that one might go into it as into a mill. That being so, we should, on examining its interior, find only parts which work one upon another, and never anything by which to explain a perception."

- Monadology, Section 17

Conscious self-awareness is neither scale invariant nor independent of substrate. Computational theories will never account for it b/c computational abstractions are both scale invariant & substrate independent.

People in this thread are trying to pick nits about you not defining consciousness, and yet they do not define it either. I think that something like consciousness needs to be approached experentially and not via definitions. Definitions necessarily confine and add borders around what something is and is not, but if there is something foundational to consciousness (as posited by some philosophers and physicists) then how could you realistically define something that is beyond the ability to describe and define?

Humans have been trying to define our experience and the nature of that experience throughout history, and often we end up using myth to point to the thing that we cannot describe in concrete terms. The process of experiencing that myth through rite and ritual in the Greek mystery traditions, or Christian mysticism, or Islamic Sufi dance and song, or Buddhist meditation all points to something that cannot really be reduced to description. I know that folks on here will balk at the idea that something that is experienced cannot be described, but honestly if we could accurately describe something in adequate terms that capture the whole of the thing wouldn't we have done so by now?

Maybe consciousness is best understood in the silence of merely experiencing it. Maybe we can't say that AI is conscious or not, but does that question really matter?

> so obviously incorrect and misanthropic that it can be dismissed out of hand

To be fair, that's the best thought terminating cliché, which saves you having to explain what you mean by consciousness.

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