[bbor]

They're not ascribing consciousness, they're investigating the possibility. We all agreed with Turing 75 years ago that deciding whether a machine is "truly thinking" or not is a meaningless, unscientific question -- what changed?

It doesn't help that this critique is badly researched:

  The Anthropic researchers do not really define their terms or explain in depth why they think that "model welfare" should be a concern.

Maybe check the [paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986) instead of the blog post describing the paper?

  Saying that there is no scientific *consensus* on the consciousness of current or future AI systems is a stretch. In fact, there is nothing that qualifies as scientific *evidence*.

A laughable misapplication of terms -- anything can be evidence for anything, you have to examine the justification logic itself. In this case, the previous sentence lays out their "evidence", i.e. their reasons for thinking agents might become conscious.

  The report's exploration of whether models deserve moral and welfare status was based solely on data from interview-based model self-reports. In other words: People chatting with Claude a lot and asking if it feels conscious. This is a strange way to conduct this kind of research. It is neither good AI research, nor a deep philosophical investigation.

That is just patently untrue -- again, as a brief skim of the paper would show. I feel like they didn't click the paper?

  Stances on consciousness and welfare [...] shift dramatically with conversational context... This is not what a conscious being would [do].

Baseless claim said by someone who clearly isn't familiar with any philosophy of mind work from the past 2400 years, much less aphasia subjects.

Of course, the whole thing boils down to the same old BS:

  A theory that demands we accept consciousness emerging from millennia of flickering abacus beads is not a serious basis for moral consideration; it's a philosophical fantasy.

Ah, of course, the machines cannot truly be thinking because true thought is solely achievable via secular, quantum-tubule-based souls, which are had by all humans (regardless of cognitive condition!) and most (but not all) animals and nothing else. Millennia of philosophy comes crashing against the hard rock of "a sci-fi story relates how uncomfy I'd be otherwise"! Notice that this is the exact logic used to argue against Copernican cosmology and Darwinian evolution -- that it would be "dehumanizing".

Please, people. Y'all are smart and scientifically minded. Please don't assume that a company full of highly-paid scientists who have dedicated their lives to this work are so dumb that they can be dismissed via a source-less blog post. They might be wrong, but this "ideas this stupid" rhetoric is uncalled for and below us.

[jrm4]

Perhaps I slightly misspoke: The underlying ideas in an academic context are not stupid.

The "rush" (feels like to me) to bring them into a law/policy context is.