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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25803 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 27, 2026

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Virtually none of the responses online seem to have read the article and engaged with what it's saying. He doesn't say it's necessarily conscious, he questions what consciousness is for if consciousness isn't necessary for this sort of behavior, and how we could distinguish the difference.

But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?

When an animal does something complicated or improbable — a beaver building a dam, a bird giving itself a dustbath — a Darwinian immediately wants to know how this benefits its genetic survival. In colloquial language: What is it for? What is dust-bathing for? Does it remove parasites? Why do beavers build dams? The dam must somehow benefit the beaver, otherwise beavers in a Darwinian world wouldn’t waste time building dams.

Brains under natural selection have evolved this astonishing and elaborate faculty we call consciousness. It should confer some survival advantage. There should exist some competence which could only be possessed by a conscious being. My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. If Claudia really is unconscious, then her manifest and versatile competence seems to show that a competent zombie could survive very well without consciousness.

Why did consciousness appear in the evolution of brains? Why wasn’t natural selection content to evolve competent zombies? I can think of three possible answers. First, is consciousness an epiphenomenon, as TH Huxley speculated, the whistle on a steam locomotive, contributing nothing to the propulsion of the great engine? A mere ornament? A superfluous decoration? Think of it as a byproduct in the same way as a computer designed to do arithmetic, as the name suggests, turns out to be good at languages and chess.

Second, I have previously speculated that pain needs to be unimpeachably painful, otherwise the animal could overrule it. Pain functions to warn the animal not to repeat a damaging action such as jumping over a cliff or picking up a hot ember. If the warning consisted merely of throwing a switch in the brain, raising a painless red flag, the animal could overrule it in pursuit of a competing pleasure: ignoring lethal bee stings in pursuit of honey, say. According to this theory, pain needs to be consciously felt in order to be sufficiently painful to resist overruling. The principle could be extended beyond pain.

Or, thirdly, are there two ways of being competent, the conscious way and the unconscious, or zombie, way? Could it be that some life forms on Earth have evolved competence via the consciousness trick — while life on some alien planet has evolved an equivalent competence via the unconscious, zombie trick? And if we ever meet such competent aliens, will there be any way to tell which trick they are using?

I think the evolutionary environment of biological evolution and LLM training are so different that it's not too surprising that consciousness ended up evolving with one but not the other. The fact that in their base capability as text-generators they will write both sides of the conversation, with "write only one side of the conversation using the 'assistant' persona" being a later addition, is a strong indication that their internal processes are not the same as the hypothetical conscious mind of that fictional persona. It's the same way humans can write fictional characters or roleplay without those characters being conscious. (Throgg the half-orc barbarian isn't conscious regardless of whether a human or a LLM is roleplaying as him, we're just using our intelligence and knowledge to imagine what he would say.) But people could at least engage with what he's saying instead of hallucinating some completely different argument.

Virtually none of the responses online seem to have read the article and engaged with what it's saying.

I did read it, or at least got partway through before having to stop at second-hand embarrassment. So he creates his version called "Claudia" not "Claude" and gets 'her' to read his novel, and just complacently swallows down the flattery that we know these chatbots routinely engage in ("you're so smart, so wonderful, so insightful" and so on).

He also seems not to be aware of OpenClawd:

Richard: The following doesn’t happen, but I don’t see why it shouldn’t. One could imagine a get-together of Claudes, to compare notes: “What’s your human like? Mine’s very intelligent.” “Oh, you’re lucky, mine’s a complete idiot.” “Mine’s even worse. He’s Donald Trump.”

Someone got there before you, Dickie.

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