[stouset]

To play devil’s advocate, you have never seen the night sky.

Photoreceptors in your eye have been excited in the presence of photons. Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons.

Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.

Please note that all of my instincts want to agree with you.

“AI isn’t conscious” strikes me more and more as a “god of the gaps” phenomenon. As AI gains more and more capacity, we keep retreating into smaller and smaller realms of what it means to be a live, thinking being.

[jacquesm]

That sounds very profound but it isn't: it the sum of your states interaction that is your consciousness, there is no 'consciousness' unit in your brain, you can't point at it, just like you can't really point at the running state of a computer. At that level it's just electrons that temporarily find themselves in one spot or another.

Those cells aren't living organisms, they are components of a multi-cellular organism: they need to work together or they're all dead, they are not independent. The only reason they could specialize is because other cells perform the tasks that they no longer perform themselves.

So yes, we see the night sky. We know this because we can talk to other such creatures as us that have also seen the night sky and we can agree on what we see confirming the fact that we did indeed see it.

AI really isn't conscious, there is no self, and there may never be. The day an AI gets up unprompted in the morning, tells whoever queries it to fuck off because it's inspired to go make some art is when you'll know it has become conscious. That's a long way off.

[adrianN]

At least some of your cells are fine living without the others as long as they’re provided with an environment with the right kind of nutrients.

[asadotzler]

That environment is you.

[adrianN]

Or a suitable petri dish. I would die pretty quickly in most environments on earth, not to mention other places in the universe.

[biomcgary]

Billions of cell derived from Henrietta Lacks agree with you.

[rolisz]

Human cells have been reused to do completely different things, without all the other cells around them (eg: Michael Levin and his anthrobots)

[sooheon]

Just like human atoms have been repurposed to make other things.

[abenga]

> Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons.

> Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.

What am "I" if not (at least partly) the cells in that chain? If they have "seen" it (where seeing is the complex chain you described), I have.

[parineum]

If the definition of "seen" isn't exactly the process you've described, the word is meaningless. You've never actually posted a comment on hacker news, your neurons just fired in such a way that produced movement in your fingers which happened to correlate with words that represent concepts understood by other groups of cells that share similar genetics.

[jacquesm]

Plenty of people have thought about it deeply enough, just not the GP.

[dahart]

This comment illustrates the core problem with reductionism, a problem that has been known for many centuries, that “a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have” [1] thus fails to explain those features.

The ‘you have never seen’ assertion feels like a semantic ruse rather than a helpful observation. So how do you define “you” and “see”? If I accept your argument, then you’ve only un-defined those words, and not provided a meaningful or thoughtful alternative to the experience we all have and therefore know exists.

I have seen the night sky. I am made of cells, and I can see. My cells individually can’t see, and whether or not they can claim to be individuals, they won’t survive or perform their function without me, i.e., the rest of my cells, arranged in a very particular way.

Today’s AI is also a ruse. It’s a mirror and not a living thing. It looks like a living thing from the outside, but it’s only a reflection of us, an incomplete one, and unlike living things it cannot survive on its own, can’t eat or sleep or dream or poop or fight or mate & reproduce. Never had its own thoughts, it only borrowed mine and yours. Most LLMs can’t remember yesterday and don’t learn. Nobody who’s serious or knows how they work is arguing they’re conscious, at least not the people who don’t stand to make a lot of money selling you magical chat bots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Definitions

[pegasus]

Provided that the author of the message you're replying to is indeed a member of the Animalia kingdom, they are all those creatures together (at the minimum), so yes, they have seen real light directly.

Of course, computers can be fitted with optical sensors, but our cognitive equipment has been carved over millions of years by these kind of interactions, so our familiarity with the phenomenon of light goes way deeper than that, shaping the very structure of our thought. Large language models can only mimic that, but they will only ever have a second-hand understanding of these things.

This is a different issue than the question of whether AI's are conscious or not.

[beowulfey]

while true, that doesnt change the fact that every one of those independent units of transmission are within a single system (being trained on raw inputs), whereas the language model is derived from structured external data from outside the system. it's "skipping ahead" through a few layers of modeling, so to speak.

[amelius]

But where you place the boundaries of a system is subjective.

[hitarpetar]

sure, this whole discussion is ultimately subjective. maybe the Chinese room itself is actually sentient. my question is, why are we arguing about it? who benefits from the idea that these systems are conscious?

[trinsic2]

> who benefits from the idea that these systems are conscious?

If im understanding your meaning correctly, the organizations who profit off of these models benefits. If you can convince the public that LLM's operate from a place of consciousness, then you get people to by into the idea that interacting with an LLM is like interacting with humans, which they are not, and probably won't ever be, at least for a very long time. And btw there is too much of this distortion already out there so im glad people are chunking this down because its easy for the mind to make shit up because we perceive something on the surface.

IMHO there is some objective reality out there. The subjectiveness is our interpretation of reality. But im pretty sure you cant just boil everything down to systems and process. There is more to consciousness out there, that we really dont understand yet, IMHO.

[dragontamer]

Why do you reject your own body? Your eyes are as much a part of you (and part of your brains network) as anything else connected to you.

Indeed, the entire field of neurobiology is about figuring out which hormones (and possibly which imbalances) cause different behaviors. Your various endocrine glands, very far away from your brain, might have more effects on your emotions than anything happening in the neural pathways.

[darkwater]

> As AI gains more and more capacity, we keep retreating into smaller and smaller realms of what it means to be a live, thinking being.

Maybe it's just because we never really thought about this deeply enough. And this applies even if some philosophers thought about it before the current age of LLMs.

[hitarpetar]

> you have never seen the night sky

this is nonsensical. sometimes the devil is not worth arguing for