Post #2022438
2026-05-03 05:04 UTC
Replies (6)
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@thesmokingman@programming.dev 2026-05-04 02:41
> **Claudia**: That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence. . . … > Could a being capable of perpetrating such a thought really be unconscious? Oh it’s actually stupider than the tweet makes it seem. > 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. Competency should imply the ability complete a lengthy task (eg hunting, building a nest, writing a paper). LLMs [can’t](https://cekrem.github.io/posts/llms-corrupt-your-documents/).
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@SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-05-03 05:21
Man, those conversations are eye roll inducing I like the shift away from "are they conscious" towards "what's a way to define consciousness?" Because that's the actual important question. And literally nobody can answer it. Any discussion is more philosophy than hard science The most interesting part is the last paragraph > 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?
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@Nalivai@lemmy.world 2026-05-04 00:34
> LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing "We" as in lay misunderstanding of some pop science, still don't get what consciousness is and can't describe it. There are people alive today who didn't believe in their youth that black people are fully conscious, Dawkins demonstrated by his communication to his personal friend and hero Epstein, that he doesn't fully believes that women are conscious. What we thought or didn't think of previously can't be a good indication of anything.
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@FinjaminPoach@lemmy.world 2026-05-03 12:21
Thank you for the comment, i feel silly for not linking the article when people will probably want to read it. ::: spoiler My thoughts: > His argument is basically that LLMs are able to do things we previously thought only conscious beings would be capable of doing, and so, if they aren’t conscious, then perhaps consciousness isn’t as important as we thought it was Seems like an "evil" and dangerous talking point. To me, the value of consciousness isn't in ita evolutionary efficiency. > > My conversations with several Claudes and ChatGPTs have convinced me that these intelligent beings are at least as competent as any evolved organism. I know people working in AI insist otherwise but I see talking with LLM not as them thinking, but as them selecting the right combination of data that correctly continues a conversation. :::
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@Einskjaldi@lemmy.world 2026-05-03 12:31
There's enough that it would be difficult to tell an actual sentient Ai from chatbot just by words.
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@FaceDeer@fedia.io 2026-05-03 06:22
As LLMs have developed and have been able to cram more and more "thoughtlike" behaviour into smaller RAM and less computation, I've steadily become less impressed with human brains. It seems like the bits we think most highly of are probably just minor add-ons to stuff that's otherwise dedicated to running our big complicated bodies in a big complicated physics environment. If all you want to have is the part that philosophizes and solves abstract problems and whatnot then you may not actually need all that much horsepower. I'm thinking consciousness might also turn out to be something pretty simple. Assuming consciousness is even a particular "thing" in the first place and not just a side effect of being able to predict how other people will behave.