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Comment by dimbletimbers | Hacker News Reader

Can you prove they are? I think “AIs are conscious” is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence. The burden is on the claimant to provide evidence it is conscious, and I suspect any evidence you can provide has alternative explanations. The majority of claims I’ve seen like this amount to “how do you know humans are conscious in a way that’s distinct from a next token predictor.” I do not find those claims compelling.

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I cannot prove that they are, and I cannot prove they are not. I'm not convinced that the burden of proof lies on either side. To make a statement like that in the opening lines as if its obvious seems genuinely presumptous.

Separately, I think 'conscious' is not a well defined / universally agreed upon term.

> To make a statement like that in the opening lines as if its obvious seems genuinely presumptous.

Then you must not be familiar with Bertrand Russell’s teapot analogy. The TL;DR is this: “Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake.”

If object a behaves like it has property x and you cannot otherwise test out x, then it is logical to assume it indeed has x. In this instance, 'object a has property x' is not an extraordinary claim at all. It is simply pointing out what has been observed. In fact, what is an extraordinary claim is saying what looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and moves like a duck is not a duck.

That’s a tragically sophomoric take. 'object a has property x' is too generic to be meaningful. “AI has the property of conscious” requires settling the small matter of what the properties of consciousness are. And “behaves like it has property x” is not the same as “has property x.” I may behave like I have a million dollars and have not a cent to my name. Many things evolve to appear like many other things. And I have never seen an LLM do anything at all unless turned on and fed input tokens.

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