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Comment by gqgs | Hacker News Reader

Who exactly are these people confidently claiming that stones possess consciousness you are talking about?

I've read a number of panpsychist publications, yet I have yet to encounter an author who asserts with certainty that stones are conscious exactly in the same way human beings are.

The more common panpsychist interpretation, that everything exists on a spectrum of consciousness, with stones at the low end and humans at the high end, seems like a fairly reasonable ontological hypothesis to me.

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What's the difference between a computer and a stone?

A lot of answers to this question so it depends which layer you are talking about.

Functionally,I'd say a key difference is that it's probably easier to perform general computation with a computer than to achieve the same goal using a stone.

If the computer is functional, powered, and connected to some some kind of interface allowing you to use it (e.g. network, touchscreen, desktop setup, etc.), then sure you can use it to perform general computation. But if its unpowered, is there any real difference between a stone and a computer in a debate about consciousness?

So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive? The weights of an llm obviously don't have consciousness. It's the process that potentially has it.

Are you conscious on a nanosecond timescale?

> So because you eventually die, it means that you were never alive?

I said nothing of the kind. I can only assume your question in response to my comments mean you think a powered computer is alive. I'll challenge that on the basis that a computer can generally maintain its state without power just fine. Shut it down, unplug it. Wait a day, a year, a decade and plug it back in. Assuming the hardware didn't degrade to the point of failure you can turn it on again and it will be in the same state you left it in before you unplugged it. Is it alive while its unplugged? Or is it simply not alive whether its plugged in or not?

It's having condciousnedd while it acts as if it's having consciousnes.

It is powered while it is powered.

Under general anesthesisa you are still alive, but you don't have consciousness.

Cool. I've never seen a computer act as if it's having consciousness.

What do modern LLMs act like then to you?

They act like LLMs. They are unprecedented.

Self referential nonsense. You cannot have something that that is both a model of something and unprecedented.

It'a even in their name, they model language, language is the thing that humans use to communicate, therefore they model communcating humans.

Humans are the precedent.

We're done here.

One is a computer and the other, a stone.

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