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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

Consciousness isn't behavioral, which is why we can't prove anyone other than ourselves is conscious. Mimicking isn't going to work. But if you want a more scientific reason, LLMs don't have bodies, thus no sensations. What woult it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?

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The body is the mind's interface with the world. Why couldn't a digital mind "feel sensations", subjective as they are, on its own interface with it? If it's assumed to not be a subject, then how could it be a mind at all?

I didn't say AIs couldn't be conscious, only that mimicking behavior (or speech) is not a way to become conscious.

I'm sorry, then what was that "more scientific" reason you gave for?

Lack of sensory organs due to lack of a body. A sophisticated enough robot might be able to have conscious experience. That gets into the harder problem that Ned Block laid out where we don't know whether consciousness is biological or functional.

So if we embodied them, they would become conscious?

I feel like the answer would still be no. There would be another gap. We'd ask the question again, "If they had Y, would they be conscious?" and still the answer would be no.

We could keep going on forever, which makes me think, it's not really about these gaps at all. It's an ontological distinction swapping in reasons in order to justify itself. Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

OK, but why does "human consciousness" even need to enter into it? What I mean is, what's our basis for demanding that the consciousness of an Artificial Intelligence be the same kind of consciousness as that of a human?

I think you would have to justify why humans share a kind of consciousness that is tangibly different from AI while maintaining that we have no apparent means of discriminating between the two. It would seem that it's a difference without meaning.

while maintaining that we have no apparent means of discriminating between the two.

Yeah, and that's part of what makes this whole conversation so frustrating. And maybe also pointless in the end. We have a hard time even establishing for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Even more so that "each other" are conscious. Now extend it to some "artificial thing" running on an entirely different substrate and... all bets are off.

My argument though, is not that "AI's are conscious" or even that "AI's will definitely become conscious". I just have an issue with fervent assertions that say "No, AI's cannot become conscious" while not really providing any particular justification for that position. I think a more neutral "wait and see" position is more honest.

The basis is that this is what we know to be human consciousness is to a degree relateably similar to our own. I do see your point but IMO, a dramatically different form of 'consciousness' comes with the risk of being something completely different from what we consider 'consciousness'. One of the great challenges with speaking about 'Self-awareness' aka consciousness (sometimes incorrectly confused with sentience, sapience, phenomenal experience etc) in AI is that we largely lack the vocabulary to properly capture the mutli-dimensional phenomena that most understand simply as 'consciousness'. IMHO, an ant or dog is 'conscious' in that it can perceive the outside world and make decisions about how to respond to it or operate within it... but we know that we operate at a different level of self-awareness including metacognition. Other forms of 'consciousness' will certainly manifest in future AI systems and perhaps already have but the models and architectures of today lack a number of key features that a human like consciousness would be based upon... a short list might include a persistent, unified self-model across time; continuous learning and development, embodied perception, interaction with the world; intrinsic goals, drives, emotions and deeply integrated metacognition—awareness of its own thoughts, uncertainty, attention, and intentions.

> Why not just say, "Human consciousness is ontologically axiomatic," and leave it at that?

I have no need of that hypothesis.

Do you not think humans are conscious?

I think consciousness is a redundant magical word for a bag of things that most mammals do to varying degree.

What's magical about subjective experience? We all have them, they're the basis for having any empirical descriptions of the world.

What does subjective experience mean in this context?

Your own experiences. Nobody else has direct access to them.

That sounds like a measurement problem.

>> What woul[d] it mean for an LLM to feel hungry or cold?

What would it mean for a human to feel the passing through our bodies of 100 trillion neutrinos every second?

My point is that there are things we cannot "feel" either. Why should consciousness depend on certain feelings and not others?

Because we don't have a sensory organ for neutrinos. LLMs have no sensory organs, they just emit tokens.

We will be it's body, it will sense through us.

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