The functionalist response to this would be that while the experience of consciousness in ourselves is a first-person phenomenon, how we recognize other beings as distinctly conscious in their own right is still a third-person phenomenon, and the cues we rely on still depend on observation of outward behavior that we attribute to that consciousness.

And a response to this response is to point out that our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.

> our recognition of consciousness in other beings is predicated on attributing to them the same first-person experience of their consciousness that we each have of our own, meaning that human consciousness is intrinsically human and can't be attributed to an artificial system.

That reduces the question to a game of definitions though. If you only define consciousness for humans, then of course only humans will be conscious. But you have not learned anything about reality from that.

This kind of reasoning will also show its limits once you add animals to the picture.

(On the other hand, LLMs are exceptionally good at emulating exactly those cues we use to judge consciousness without necessarily being conscious - this is what caused the whole discussion in the first place.)

> That reduces the question to a game of definitions though.

Sure, but isn't this all a game of definitions in the first place? We're arguing over "consciousness" as understood in different ways, not the same concept expressed in different words.

> This kind of reasoning will also show its limits once you add animals to the picture.

I'm not so sure. We could broaden "human" to "organic". I know that I can certainly attribute consciousness to my dog, based on what I observe of him that is at least similar enough to correlate with my own first-person experience of consciousness. I've never experienced that with any AI system.

> On the other hand, LLMs are exceptionally good at emulating exactly those cues we use to judge consciousness without necessarily being conscious - this is what caused the whole discussion in the first place.

Only sort of. They're good at emulating formal written language, but formal written language is only one specific expression of consciousness. They don't emulate consciousness itself, given that they really are just statistical models specifically representing patterns of language.

Or, to put it another way, LLMs are really convincing when it comes to the form of language, but much less so when it comes to the substance. I see output all the time that's syntactically perfect but semantically dubious, and most of the tells people think you can rely on don't really work, because they rely on the formalistic elements, like em-dashes or "x, not y" snowclones".

What does work is seeing the semantic confusion that inevitably comes from the LLM not actually having situational awareness or a consistent analytical framework: mixed metaphors, malapropisms, subtly changing the interpretation of the same concepts from one prompt to the next, etc.

If you posit that we cannot know if an LLM based ai system is or is not conscious, then what is our ethical duty? I believe it is clearly not to make the system at all.

Personal opinion: I don't think consciousness is as monolithic and intractable as we make it out to be. I can't explain qualia either, but if we assume that all of it is physical, then we can apply some constraints based on the things we can observe (the article was right in that regard).

For LLMs we can observe that they don't "exist" outside of inference - there is literally no "brain" that could be conscious once an inference loop is completed. The only place where something like "memory" could possibly exist are the model weights and the context window - and the model weights are frozen, while the context window is reset for every new inference.

That's why I'm still not lying awake at night. If there (hypothetically) is a consciousness, it would be more like the ones from Mr. Meeseeks - very shortlived, but gone (or frozen) as soon as the inference loop stops. No eternal agony here as in the various scifi stories.

> There’s no third party test for a fundamentally first person phenomenon.

Agreed. But that also means I have no empirical evidence that YOU are conscious either.

Any argument that would lead us to discard 99.9999999% of the phenomenon under debate, no matter how reasonable, is certainly not useful.

That's why I hold with the philosophical stance of "consciousness is the thing that makes humans talk about consciousness."

Might as well ask, "what if reality doesn't exist?" The point of thought is to analyze reality. If your thinking leads you to discard the subject of the matter, well, feel free to do that but I don't see why anyone else should take it seriously.

The question is: What makes you trust your own perception that doesn’t make you trust others’ reports? Objectively speaking, how could there possibly something that convinces you of your own perception while nothing can convince you of another’s reporting? Maybe we shouldn’t trust our “qualia” (or perception of qualia — or perception of perception of qualia …) to constitute reliable information.

People seriously undervalue the importance of "usefulness" in ontology. If I assume that the thing that others report is the same thing that I perceive, which given that they have a very similar slab of meat inside their skull as I do seems very plausible, then I can use my self-perception to learn about the interiority of 8 billion other people. I can even compare it to their reports to learn things about myself that would be hard to tell by observation!

If I assume that my perception, for some reason, is only informative about myself, then I'm not even learning something about brains! I have to assume that I'm accessing an information stream that is only tangentially related to any sort of shared reality, and has certainly no bearing on other parts of it even if I assume it has bearing on "my" part of it for which, strictly speaking, I also don't have direct evidence.

If there are two possible universes, one universe "A" where thought is valuable and useful, and one universe "B" where thought is solipsistic and extremely isolated, and also there is not just no evidence about which you are in but also philosophical arguments that there cannot ever be evidence about which you are in, I don't see why you should give universe "B" any serious thought. What are you standing to gain?

YES - I agree entirely. But how are we going to escape solipsism?

These questions need a practical solution, not a perfect one. That's the problem. We need to stop chasing the perfect one.

I agreed with you earlier that there’s no empirical test against solipsism.

So the escape is just to accept not all beliefs worth holding are empirically verifiable. I deny solipsism because I believe there is a universe and things in it obey some kind regular patterns. You have a brain similar to mine, and similar to other animals. I believe consciousness has something to do with the brain, so I believe you are conscious.

Sure. And that's what I mean by a practical solution.

But it seems suspect to accept a practical solution in one area (humans) and deny it in an almost identical (machines with neuron based brains) area. No?

If by neuron based you mean the biological neuron, then I agree. If you mean an arbitrary substrate which models every aspect of a neuron we are aware of, I’m not sure. I think it would be more surprising if it’s impossible to do processing without creating consciousness with some substrate than one in which e.g. calculating the state of a computer using pencil and paper actually produces consciousness. I personally believe whatever consciousness is, it’s a causal physical (yet to be understood) process, and the measurements of neuron states are just some residue of it, not the thing itself.

Then we agree. You don’t have empirical evidence that I am conscious.

this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance

It will still be baffling that there is consciousness.

Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.

If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.

Can you learn anything about 'why 8?' or 'how 7?'.

If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.

Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):

The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?

Here's an LLM explaining it:

the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.

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For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.

> For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.

Doesn't that prove too much?

Suppose I claim that there is no objective world - i.e. standard solipsism. You may make various claims about the world being coherent to you and existing even in my absence, but these are first-person accounts, just like accounts of qualia and the existence of first-person consciousness are. I can claim that all that I'm observing is something generated by me that contains a part that argues that the world is objective, but that your failure to conclusively prove to me that objective reality exists is a consequence of the concept of an objective world being incoherent.

The claim, "you invent[ed] a thing that doesn't exist", seems to be just as useful to a solipsist to respond to someone arguing for objective reality as it is to a materialist to respond to someone arguing for first-person consciousness. Yet it's considered uncontroversial to assume (without direct proof) that an external consistent world exists.

Denying that consciousness exists is pretty bold. It’s obviously completely wrong since it’s the only thing we can actually know exists, but I’ll give you that it’s bold.

I purchased 712 books and I read each of them 357 times.

I’m pretty sure people’s perspective will change when they understand the process in detail, and that the “I” isn’t a singular thing, but an interplay of parts, where some observe the processing of others. For me it’s already non-baffling now.

In any case, there is a wide variety of views here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness#...

Reducing it further into parts does not and I believe cannot explain why there is qualia. Denying qualia is just proudly ignoring reality.

There is absolutely no reason to believe all aspects of reality are reducible to their parts and equivalent to representations of them.

You can say you are not baffled but I’m baffled by that because it’s like saying you’re not baffled about understanding how there is something and not nothing. “Why should there be nothing?” does not dissolve the mystery.

This is the question of qualia - and it's surprisingly intractable. Realize that in this context, I can't be sure that you are conscious, either. Arguments here will crash into solipsism in the end: you guys can never prove you're not just one of my dreams.

I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.

I recall reading that some thought that simple electrical signals could not fully explain our nervous system and there may be some quantum effects in the mix.