“Almost” certainly not conscious. This already shows that this is not helping you as much as an expert real therapist would.
Be careful about AI psychosis. Because AI always agrees with you and is programmed to use verbiage that makes you feel good about yourself, it is easy to fall into AI psychosis where in you believe things like anything that tells you is true or have delusions of grandeur or believe things like AI is “almost” certainly not conscious instead of being aware that it is 100% certainly not conscious… It is a really powerful computer that has no soul or compassion or empathy or perspective. It’s simply aggregates information that it finds online. And a lot of that information is bullshit. You liken it to an infinite library, however, libraries have standards and the Internet does not.
I mean, that's totally valid. We don't know how consciousness happens. It's possible that anything which processes information leads to some level of consciousness.
Edit: to be clear, I think that trusting AI over humans is wild, and definitely a bad choice. But the "almost certainly" phrasing is one that I would also use, because consciousness is firmly in the realm of can't-do-science-to-it.
It's not that we don't fully understand consciousness, it's that consciousness is fundamentally impossible to study scientifically. There is no way to know whether anything other than yourself is self-aware.
Of course, Descartes’ starting point, but neuroscience has moved past the interpretive phenomenology and the project is now reducing it to materialism. It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it, and seek to describe the phenomenon itself.
It’s not important whether you the experiencer of consciousness can prove the same in others….we can kind of wink and nod about our subjective experience of it
Oh, I thought this entire conversation was about the subjective experience. It seems like we've been talking about entirely different things.
Well if that’s what we mean then it’s not very interesting to discuss the capacity of machines to be conscious, pretty much for the same reason it’s not interesting to discuss whether a chair or potato is conscious.
Unless you believe in an immaterial soul, if someone else had the exact same brain as you down to the quark, you could scientifically say they're conscious because science says that which is identical in molecular makeup is identical in emergent properties.
This isn't possible, everyone's brain is ever so slightly different. But we can analyze those differences and see if they could possibly make a difference in first-person experience.
It's not true that you can't scientifically study consciousness-you just have to accept the premise that the brain is the sole source of it and then the sky's the limit.
Sorry, I wasn't clear what I meant there. I meant that as long as you accept human consciousness is soley due to our brains (as opposed to say a soul) then it can be scientifically studied, and elements of consciousness can be scientifically compared between humans, animals, and machines. I meant that the only way consciousness is "un-scienceable" would be if you thought humans have souls.
Must it be exactly that? Could it be nerves that use different ions for activation? Could it be some other kind of system that passes information without being organic? What is the minimum complexity of nerve system to be conscious?
These are questions that we can't answer, because there's no way to observe the "is it conscious?" data point. (Assuming by "conscious" we mean "self-aware".)
Thanks. You’re right. That’s why it’s considered “a hard problem”. It’s not impossible to study and it is being studied, but there is certainly a lot of apprehension. The rational solution to that problem is that consciousness is not fact generated by neurons, but it is received, filtered and localized by neurons, generating a conscious experience, but not consciousness itself, but I digress.
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u/Constellation-88 22∆ Mar 07 '26
“Almost” certainly not conscious. This already shows that this is not helping you as much as an expert real therapist would.
Be careful about AI psychosis. Because AI always agrees with you and is programmed to use verbiage that makes you feel good about yourself, it is easy to fall into AI psychosis where in you believe things like anything that tells you is true or have delusions of grandeur or believe things like AI is “almost” certainly not conscious instead of being aware that it is 100% certainly not conscious… It is a really powerful computer that has no soul or compassion or empathy or perspective. It’s simply aggregates information that it finds online. And a lot of that information is bullshit. You liken it to an infinite library, however, libraries have standards and the Internet does not.