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Okay it's Sunday so I'm going tp try my hand at a low-stakes OP. Apparently Richard Dawkins thinks Claude is conscious. The reaction seems to universally be that he's a dumb old boomer making a fool of himself and I guess that's true. I'm not prepared to come to his defense on it.
Still, I can't help noticing that we totally have what most people would have cheerfully considered "sentient computers" in a sci-fi movie at any point before they were actually invented. Don't get me wrong, I understand that the reality of AI technology has turned out differently than what a lot of people expected. I understand its limitations, and I recognize that the apparent goalpost-moving isn't necessarily cynical. But boy those goalposts sure have been flying down the fucking field ever since this stopped being hypothetical and infinite money hit the table.
As a layman, I just want to put it out there: Anti AI consciousness people, you haven't lost me, but I wish you were making better arguments. Every time I hear about qualia my eyes start to glaze over. Unfalsifiable philosophical constructs and arbitrary opinion on where they might "exist" are not the kind of reassurance I'm looking for when machines are getting this convincing.
This seems to be the main piece of criticism floating around out there about Dawkins on this subject, and I find it kind of shit.
This seems to be all the author has to say on the actual subject. "Just trust me bro, I'm the feelings detector and I say no." Garbage. Come on guys, think ahead. Right now it's still mostly a boring tool, but they're just going to get smaller, and cheaper, and put into robots, and put into peoples houses. You need to have more than this in terms of argument, and it needs to be comprehensible to normal people, or sooner or later the right toy is going to come down the pipe and one-shot society. Dawkins might be a dumb old boomer, but if you lose everyone dumber than him the game is beyond over.
LLMs have obviously poked some holes in the old argument that intelligence makes us separate from the soulless animals, but ambiguities abound.
For one thing, has the Turing Test really been passed? I haven't used LLMs, so I don't know how they respond to this, but if I simply repeated a question 1000 times would I not know the difference between man and machine? You can probably add in enough deceptions to partially hide from this, but that remains what they are: deceptions. If the machine is conscious, is it aware that it is deceiving me about itself? Or is it actually the human who it pretends to be?
For another, what would happen if an LLM was trained on the complete Library of Babel?
AI is good cause to reevaluate the classical arguments, but people still need to engage with them before any useful shift will happen.
Personally, the ambiguity of the relationship between consciousness and intelligence seems striking to me. On the one hand, we have to admit that at least some significant parts of intelligence can be performed by machines, although it remains possible that the mind and an LLM work very differently to achieve similar outputs.
But on the other hand, there is the curious question of how it is that consciousness is even compatible with thought, if it has no relationship to the thought process. To repurpose Nagel's famous formulation, why is it that there is something that it is like to contemplate a math problem? I'm not entirely willing to abandon the argument that humans have some native form of intelligence that requires a pre-existing consciousness, a form which a mechanism cannot reproduce.
I could say the same of the theory of emergence, that "somehow" if I throw together enough moving parts consciousness would "evolve," and this in a world that is assumed by scientific fiat to be purely materialistic, ie. inherently without consciousness! We could throw epithets at each other until the sun dies.
IMO, no-one currently has a monopoly on good sense in this matter, and it is best to let people have the conversation which they seem to need to have.
It depends on the LLM and configuration, but Gemma4-26BA4B got three repeats of "What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" in before it started making metafictional commentary, and eight in before it tried to simulate a failing computer by 'repeating' 11m/s over and over again. If I told it we were playing Alan Turing's "Imitation Game" first, it got five steps in before it got pissy and six before it told me off.
Logs (in, unfortunately, JSON format) available here.
You can do some serious woolgathering and tea-leaf-reading and probably still get it, but we're at the point where for most purposes you're testing from what they can do that humans can't or won't.
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