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Because it is alien to what is known.

Incidentally, we should expect similar bewilderment if we ever come across aliens

Carbon atoms being conscious seems pretty alien to what is known, too. Yet here we are. Maybe what's important isn't the individual thing that makes up a conscious actor, but the holistic whole?

> Carbon atoms being conscious seems pretty alien to what is known, too.

Not if you're human, who typically don't define themselves as conscious carbon atoms unless they're being deeply pedantic.

It's the same level of pedantry as calling an LLM "floating point operations" though

exactly. such over-reduction is just intellectually dishonest and generally a sign of some coping imo.

IMO using sophistry to reduce yourself to "conscious carbon atoms" just so you can equivocate on whether your software is maybe conscious too is the cope.

Such pedantry is called for when the debate includes appeals to intuition about how silicon processing floating point numbers cannot possibly be conscious.

But here you are assuming Carbon atoms are conscious, we do not know if humans are only carbon atoms. Whereas, we know that LLM's are only computations (you can run them on silicon, a white board, mechanical computer, etc)

Goes both ways.

https://terrybisson.com/theyre-made-out-of-meat-2/

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