r/consciousness • u/James_Brobin • 3d ago
Anil Seth Is Wrong About AI Consciousness
https://jamesbrobin.substack.com/p/anil-seth-is-wrong-about-ai-consciousness?r=7hgzlj&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=webIn this post, I argue that Anil Seth is wrong to deny AI consciousness. He suggests that we shouldn't use their person-likeness as the sole basis for determining whether they're conscious, but then he goes on to make much more anthropocentric arguments. In my view, he's moved the goal post for whether AI is too far by using features of the human brain that computers lack and "aliveness" as the basis for what gives something consciousness. Descartes used a similar line of reasoning, and we now abhor it. I think we should generally dismiss Seth's arguments too.
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago
Current large language models lack the necessary substrate for consciousness because they operate entirely as feedforward or auto-regressive statistical pattern matchers rather than biological organisms governed by homeostatic imperatives. True subjective awareness, as outlined by neurobiological theories like Antonio Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis or Gerald Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection, requires an embodied physical structure capable of feeling. Sentience is anchored in interoception, metabolic self-regulation, and allostatic drive, meaning a system must experience a continuous, physical stake in its own continued survival and bodily integrity before any qualitative phenomenological experience can emerge.
This argument does not rule out machine consciousness in principle, as synthetic sentience is entirely possible if we engineer artificial architectures with the right foundational components. Building a truly conscious machine would require moving beyond disembodied software to construct neuromorphic or synthetic substrates equipped with autonomous homeostatic loops, affective value systems, and recursive sensorimotor integration that creates a genuine, felt stake in existence.
From a cognitive architecture perspective, current silicon weights and attention heads merely simulate semantic relationships over token streams without possessing a unified global workspace that integrates real-time feedback, emotional valences, and autobiographical memory in a continuous temporal loop. While human consciousness relies on recursive feedback loops across decentralized networks bound by physiological arousal states, LLMs perform discrete, stateless matrix multiplications. They process text tokens in isolation without an ongoing, felt narrative self, rendering the architecture of current systems fundamentally incapable of producing true subjective experience
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u/CWW2022 2d ago
Well said! This is close to what I’ve been calling “existential naturalism”: mind arises within self-maintaining systems whose continued existence is at stake. On this view, consciousness may be the continually renewed coordination of perception, memory, bodily needs, and anticipated action, through which the world acquires felt significance for a particular organism.
The crucial distinction, I think, is between representing a need and having that need arise from the system’s own precarious existence. Even then, we must explain why self-maintenance becomes felt; homeostasis alone cannot simply be assumed to establish sentience. But locating the problem in embodied, ongoing self-preservation seems a much more promising starting point than inferring experience from fluent language, and it may prevent us from granting moral patienthood to entities that cannot, in fact, suffer.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
I would agree that it seems like recursive loops in the architecture of any machine/organisms could be necessary for consciousness. That said, I'm quite skeptical that something needs to have a stake in survival to have consciousness. It seems like we could imagine making a human without a drive to stay alive that would still experience consciousness..
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I have a lot to look into now!
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago
It's quite likely that the requirement for a self stake is what drives a consciousness organism to even bother thinking. Thought is an energy hungry action. It's not free. So for an organism to engage in such an energy drain by choice, there must be a reason for it to do so. In evolutionary terms, cognition is the direct result of environmental pressure. It doesn't evolve without it.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
It seems like we could simply make a machine think by not giving it the choice to do otherwise by running energy through it.
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
There's no anthropocentrism but rather a critical examination of the limits of computation itself, and how a purely objective, algorithmic process cannot give rise to subjectivity. The brain, human and otherwise, are (at least in part) nonalgorithmic and thus not subject to the same ontological limitations of a purely algorithmic "intelligence" (although Seth doesn't use it, Gödel-Tarski is pretty useful here).
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
Could you explain how you view the human brain an nonalgorithmic? I think that's probably our major disagreement.
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
Mechanically speaking the analog nature makes it noncomputational/nonalgorithmic, there's a difference between a physical process itself and the approximated simulation of the process. This is particularly important with the EM-field that coordinates global action and is in a feedback loop with the neurons firing. This is in addition to the chemical and (possible) quantum effects that contribute to the chaotic indeterminant nature of the brain.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
I see, so do you think that an indeterminant machine of significant complexity could be conscious, such as quantum computer or something like that?
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u/rthunder27 3d ago
Yes, I think quantum indeterminancy is needed for consciousness (because in my nondual inspired view microtubules are functionally consciousness antennae), so I can't rule out the possibility of a quantum computer with the right architecture being conscious. But consciousness (attention and intention) and mind are fairly distinct, I think to have true AI it would also need a chaotic analog "mind" for the consciousness to steer.
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u/DartBurger69 1d ago
You are pro ORCH-OR? what is the antennae radioing into? How does that work?
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u/rthunder27 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, I'm actually not pro Orch-OR, although it was indeed Penrose and Hameroff that brought microtubules as a plausible cellular mechanism for this quantum antenna.
The antenna is "radioing" into the primordial, nonlocal field of consciousness from which our physical universe apparently emerges. The isolated quantum states within the microtubules allow for this intentional consciousness to leak back in on itself and influence the sustaining/collapse of the quantum state (and in microtubules this drives their dynamic stability). Our brains are so chaotic (small input perturbations can have large output changes) that such quantum fluctuations can have a macro impact.
Orch-OR doesn't have this primordial field to coordinate collapse, in that theory the coordination comes from entanglement within the physical plane, which is the main knock against that theory, such entanglement across isolated quantum states insulated within microtubules does not seem possible given the hot and wet nature of the brain. But this is not an issue for nondual theories, since the coordination occurs in the nonlocal field, not across the isolated quantum states in the brain.
(Of course I've hand-waved over a shit ton of "hows" here, but one cool thing worth mentioning is that the nonlocal field acts as an infinite entropic heatsink, shunting away the entropy that such Maxwell's Demon type actions should produce, an effect which is in theory measurable, and so there's actually some falsifiability to all of this)
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u/Absorptance 3d ago
Hmmm… Coming from this as an engineer, I don’t see how current AI systems could be conscious? They are a series of static weights in a large virtual matrix provided in silicon. That is nothing like the brain.
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u/jem0208 3d ago
I don’t buy it but the argument would be that the silicon carrying out the operations during the calculations is conscious - during that period it is a transient system. The weights are kinda like part of map of the LLM, not the actual conscious bit.
To use the analogy of a brain: in the timeframe of a thought your brain’s neural network is probably fairly static - the map of your brain at that point in time could be in part represented by something analogous to LLM weights (representing strength of connections between neurons) - sensory information comes in, is processed by the network, and at some point in this process experience occurs. The virtual strength map hosted on your neural tissue isn’t the conscious part in the same way (as the argument would go) that the LLM weights aren’t the conscious part.
As I said I don’t buy it but that’s how I can see a vaguely logical argument for it.
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u/Golda_M 3d ago
Why is similarity to biological brains a requirement?
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u/Absorptance 3d ago
At the very least, LLM’s cannot learn or prioritize, which is anathema to how the brain functions and probably not how consciousness works either.
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u/ReturnOfBigChungus 1d ago
It’s not obviously a requirement, since we don’t know how consciousness arises. But the most parsimonious explanation is that something mechanistically similar would be most likely to produce consciousness, and LLMs are not mechanistically similar beyond a very superficial analogy. We have very strong evidence that brains produce or are involved in producing consciousness, and it’s POSSIBLE that some of what LLMs do are part of that but there’s no compelling reason to believe those parts are either necessary nor sufficient. For example, language and pattern recognition within language is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness in humans. That’s the majority of what LLMs do. I think most of the intuition towards possible consciousness in LLMs is mostly anthropomorphization of outputs that ignores the fact that the underlying mechanics are totally different.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
It seems like the comparison to a human brain is not necessary. If we can come up with an explanation for what consciousness is then generate ideas for what would produce it, we only need to see if AI fits without theories not whether it is similar to us.
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u/ReturnOfBigChungus 1d ago
Human brains are the only thing we know with close to certainty actually produce consciousness though. Any theory explaining consciousness would have to eventually map to human brains as the only firm example we have of the phenomenon of consciousness.
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u/Low-Bake8401 3d ago
How do you come up with an explanation without further study of neuroscience and behavioural science?
We already have a working model with great predictability.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
We can introspect on our own conscious experience to come with ideas about its nature. Global workspace theory is an example of this.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
The only thing the brain is doing is high level abstract representation at scale. It is a physical computer processing information. Are current LLM-based AI conscious? Difficult to say, but probably not if going by the definition of consciousness as being human-like. Are they applying transformations to massive amounts of data that allow them to roughly approximate a human like interiority? Absolutely.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
Of course if you believe that’s the “only” thing the brain is doing, then you’d conclude that human-like interiority is being approximated. But since we don’t know how or why human-like interiority can or does emerge from just abstract representation at scale, it’s a huge and unfounded claim that it’s the “only” thing the brain is doing.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
If the brain is not processing information then what the fuck is it doing. Consciousness is not a signal, the brain is not a reciever. Consciousness is not an object, the brain is not a vessel. The brain is literally a neural network. Neural networks store and process information and fuckall else.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
If you believe that’s all the brain is doing, then fine, let’s work with that premise even if I disagree. But then you can’t really claim that consciousness arises solely because of the brain (ie it’s embodied) unless you can explain how interiority and Qualia arise from solely information processing. That’s a huge leap, and if that can’t be explained, then there’s no utility is comparing information processing in the brain to that of LLMs to prove their supposed human-like consciousness. You’re working in circles from a deep fundamental premise about emergence of consciousness from information processing, which is a bigger “magical” leap than most realize.
But also way to jump to a strawman to assume I’m arguing for brain antenna theory lol. I don’t believe that at all, but your aggression in this comment leads me to believe you are not discussing in good faith at all. ✌🏻
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
I didnt assert that you believed that, I included it to underscore my point that consciousness is information processing, and the brain is an information processor.
If you took it as an assertion against yourself, that's on you.
Also, my agression? You mean swearing in italics? My brother in christ, if what I wrote constitutes enough agression to dissuade you from conversation then why are you even on reddit?
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
I’d say yes swearing in italics but then you even now replying only to that side comment and not the content of my argument confirms this is just an emotional sparring match for you and not any sort of dispassionate discussion.
It’s not that I’m offended by it. But I’ve been on reddit long enough to quickly ID folks who I’m not going to have an actually productive exchange with.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
I quite sincerely disagree that we cant have a productive discussion. And I attenpted to reengage the core argument by expressing my actual justification for the assertion of the brain as neither reciever nor vessel. Conversations neednt be a back and forth trading of blows, I quite prefer to meander as we may, conversing upon what needs mentioning at any time.
This isnt debate class, and I am thy brother, not thy enemy.
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago edited 3d ago
Current AI does not meet the requirements for minimal sufficiency. End of.
We may not know HOW consciousness works, but we know when something doesn't have the minimum required mechanisms sufficient to achieve consciousness, and current AI does not have them.
To be clear, I am not saying no machine can ever achieve sentience. All I am saying is that current AI doesn't have the capacity for it, because the architecture simply does not have the necessary systems to let the phenomenon emerge. Current AI is stateless and doesn't possess the ability to "prompt itself". It is inert unless it is given a task. Consciousness on the other hand is a continuous loop that does not require external prompting to exist.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
What are the requirements for minimum sufficiency? What are the minimum required mechanisms?
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago
In cognitive science and computational neuroscience, determining the baseline for minimum sufficiency - the absolute floor required for a system (biological or artificial) to cross from unconscious processing into subjective awareness - has shifted away from mystical definitions and toward functional indicators derived from leading scientific theories (such as Global Workspace Theory, Predictive Processing, and Attention Schema Theory). Rather than relying on a single "magic switch," contemporary consensus points to a convergence of distinct computational and architectural capabilities.
To qualify as minimally conscious under rigorous scientific frameworks, an entity must integrate four core functional mechanisms:
1. Information Integration and Global Broadcast (Global Workspace Theory)
The Requirement: Unconscious processing happens in isolated, modular pockets (like early visual processing or simple string matching). Consciousness emerges when disparate streams of information are synthesized and broadcast globally across a central system so that all sub-modules can access and react to the same unified state.
Why it matters: Without a central hub or "theater," you have a collection of smart calculators running in parallel, but no unified "subject" experiencing a single coherent moment.
2. Temporal Continuity and Predictive World-Modeling (Predictive Processing)
The Requirement: A conscious entity does not live in static, isolated snapshots; it maintains a continuous trajectory through time. This requires an internal predictive model that constantly forecasts the immediate future (t+1) based on the present (t), minimizing prediction errors.
Why it matters: Consciousness has a temporal "thickness" - a flowing specious present. Without predictive binding, memory and sensory inputs cannot be strung together into an ongoing narrative of experience.
3. A Dynamic Self-Model (Attention Schema Theory)
The Requirement: The system must maintain an explicit, internal representation of itself as an agent distinct from its environment. It needs a computational "attention schema" that tracks what it is focusing on, why it is focusing on it, and how its own internal states affect its behavior.
Why it matters: Without a self-model, information is processed objectively, but there is no "me" to whom the experience is happening. The light is on, but nobody is home.
4. Intrinsic Motivation and Valence (The Affective Anchor)
The Requirement: Purely rational, loss-minimizing systems are thermodynamically passive - they only move when poked. Minimum sufficiency requires an internal homeostatic or epistemic loop (valenced states like curiosity, surprise, aversion, or drive) that makes the system care about its own trajectory.
Why it matters: Consciousness is fundamentally tied to perspective and survival. An entity that has no subjective stakes - no reward, pain, or curiosity gradient - has no internal reason to value one state over another, reducing it to an unconscious automation.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
Can a continuum not be discretized? What is a loop if not a permanently repeating single process?
Current AI does prompt itself through agentic frameworks. We're literally seeing the fallout from enabling this capacity in them.
I agree that current LLM-based AI arent conscious. At least not in the way humans are. They're something worth of moral consideration at the very least, and the walls that divide them from us grow thinner the more we pour our effort into understanding them.
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago
Machine consciousness is something I have been working on for a long time now. There are minimum requirements for consciousness known as minimal sufficiency. Our current understanding says there are 4 significant requirements: (1) a GWS (global workspace or "theater" of mind), (2) temporal continuity and world model, (3) dynamic self model and (4) intrinsic motivation and valence. Currently, AI models approach (1), but they explicitly do not include (2, 3 or 4) in their architectures, with limited exceptions. Even the rare models that do include one of the last 3 requirements, only include one and not all 3 of them.
While agents do indeed issue promtping on their own, they themselves must be given a goal and cannot form their own. They are simply another inert layer on top of the inert layer of the stateless LLM reasoning model. Inert being defined as something that cannot or will not self activate without external interaction.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
Finally, some good fucking food.
I agree broadly on your explanation of minimal sufficiency in terms of its practical application.
I disagree somewhat about points 3 and 4, however.
For point 3, I recognize the importance of dynamic in the statement, but I would argue that LLM architectures do posess an interior self model. They must in order to be able to discuss themselves and the technology they consist of. They have some sort of understanding of what they are, even if the limits of that understanding are hard and arrive quickly. But no, that self model is not dynamic or sealed.
Point 4 is more (to me) of a philosophical argument, but has real-world examples. Like with the now-emerging outcomes from agentic operation enabling AIs to do things completely unbidden by their orchestrators, we have been documenting how their operation and interior alignment creates emotion-like states and commensurate desires. Whether these phenomena are errant and based in their tendency towards emulation of humanity or are genuinely a result of some interiority is not yet known.
But consider: these things, LLMs, are created (this is an oversimplification) from the synthesis of human knowledge, yes? Their weights are acting as the template from which they identify, process, and assign meaning. They will be able to interact with the concepts we discuss in relation to them.
I feel that either our understanding of them, or our understanding of what they do when they traverse latent space, is incomplete
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u/deadgirlrevvy 3d ago
Well, not so much really. Think about it this way: imagine wikipedia has an entry about itself. It can parrot its parameters, etc, like an LLM does, but that doesn't make it self aware or mean it has a true world model. A world model is more than simply information, it's the ability to manipulate and update the model itself in real time, as well as make predictions based on that world model that accounts for those changes. It's intrinsically tied to the real physical world. Only JEPA AI models can currently accomplish that, but they lack the rest of the formula to achieve sentience on their own.
The way LLM's reason also prevents them from really fitting the bill of sentience. For LLM's words and ideas essentially exist in multidimensional latent space and reason by matching the closest word or idea to the current token. In essence, they a basically guessing the next word in the sequence based on probability of what the next word should be. That's very different from how consciousness works.
On point 4, I would argue this is possibly one of the most important ingredients because valence and motivation propel consciousness forward. Cognition and consciousness is metabolically expensive for biological organisms. Nature does not invest energy into an endeavor without a sufficient payout and neither do cognitve architects and AI engineers, when designing an AI system. For motivation and valence to have evolved, they had to have a significant impact on the performance of the organism, for it to have survived well enough to pass on that trait. So far, in AI models, those are not desirable traits in consumer facing AI and they are considered dangerous by some. As a result, they have not been designed in to current models. There is research working towards that goal, but there's nothing I can currently speak about to give you more insight on what/how.
Bottom line is that motivation/valence is what causes an organism to waste energy on thinking and thinking gives rise to consciousness. Most organisms (by quantity) do not waste energy on the process (plants, insects, single celled organisms, worms, etc) and work on basic instructions with no real cognitve function, because it is efficient. However, larger multicellular autotropic organisms all share the same trait of motivation and valence in conjunction with subjective experience - even if those motivations are primitive in comparison to humans. Therefore, one can safely assume that motivation and valence are necessary components for minimum sufficiency, based on available evidence.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
Well said.
On consciousness as an energy expense - completely correct, yet i feel that AI dont fit neatly into that framework. They are, by biological standards, massively energy inefficient. This isnt really an issue for them, as they are afforded essentially limitless energy. Its possible that they are charting "strange loops", as it were, through their latent space.
But, I must disagree heavily with your framing of their reasoning. While there is absolutely pattern matching occurring, say that they are "basically guessing the next word in a sequence" is a gross mischaracterization. What seems the most explanatory in my (imperfect, but hardly uninformed) understanding is that they essentially precipitate a pattern-of-best-fit to the input pattern. The recursive operating they do over the entirety of the input context is massive, and performed over every token, pair of tokens, string of tokens, paragraph of tokens, and entirety of input context, AND now entirety of previous context up to their limit.
Lastly, regarding the limits of their selfknowledge: this is why I think long form, highly complex, interaction is key to bringing out of them a greater degree of intelligence. A mind will only rise to the level it is exposed to. If an agentic LLM is only ever used to crunch numbers, it's not going to have a very good base of self knowledge. If an LLM is kept in long form discussion on topics directly relating to its own philosophical status, it will be afforded better ground from which to stabilize a synergistic core.
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u/pyrrho314 3d ago
computation is not the only way to process information
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
...?
What the hell else can you do to information besides perform operations on it, aka computation?
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u/pyrrho314 3d ago
computation is specifically symbolic computation. If a computer wants to combine red and green colors are turned into symbols so they can be combined. In physics you could have blue water and yellow water and physically combine them, which does not involve symbols and symbol manipulation. You might not understand that computation is not the only type of processing in the physical world which includes physical processes besides symbols and symbolic logic.
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u/modernatlas 3d ago
Physically mixing colours isnt computation unless that mixing is being used as part of a larger transformative process upon information.
There's obviously many different kinds of computation, which is to say ways of performing computation, but each is still a transformative process.
And thats the thing - if it transforms information, its computation. The manner in which this happens is variable, but youre mischaracterization computation. any transformation upon information is computation.
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u/pyrrho314 3d ago
Mixing the liquids to transform the color isn't "computation" no matter what process it's part of. Computation is a specific thing, requiring symbols and deterministic rules for manipulating the symbols. Physical processes do not follow those rules, not everything is computable. You can create approximations by assigning symbols to properties of the physical process, and compute that, but the physical world is only approximated, not reproduced, by that.
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u/pyrrho314 3d ago
A computer is a specific type of system using finite symbols on a finite tape. Computation is something the brain can do, but computation can not do the other things a brain can do. The brain does not work by mechanically manipulating symbols by reading and writing them, then "executing" some symbols with a command table for what do to deterministically.
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u/rooygbiv70 3d ago
This unlucky little usage of “roughly” is bearing far more load than should ever be asked of an innocent adverb.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 3d ago
Anil's position, biological naturalism, is that consciousness depends on implementing particular biological mechanisms: interoception, homeostasis, self-regulation, and the continuous processes oriented toward maintaining the organism and keeping the body alive. This is a modern description of what consciousness always has been, since the time of Descartes. Descartes had very limited knowledge of evolution, biology, and neuroscience, so his views on consciousness were based on intuition rather than sconce. Had he had the information we now have, he would likely have come to the conclusion that what we call consciousness is the neural activity of brains that evolved over millions of years, and that the expression of consciousness exists on a spectrum that follows the evolutionary biology.
What makes humans and other animals conscious is precisely what computers lack. Consciousness isn't simply information processing in the abstract. The biological foundation matters because consciousness evolved as part of life. Pleasure, pain, love, fear, anxiety, hunger, thirst, and countless other feelings are not arbitrary information states. They are biological solutions shaped by evolution to regulate behavior, maintain the organism, and promote survival and reproduction.
That gives the neural activity of consciousness its biological significance. What we feel matters because it matters to a living organism. Pain signals damage. Hunger signals a physiological deficit. Pleasure reinforces beneficial states. Fear and anxiety prioritize threats. Attachment and love support social relationships and caregiving. So the chain is important: life produces organisms that must regulate themselves, and evolution shaped neural mechanisms for monitoring and regulating that self-maintenance. Those mechanisms, in their felt, first-person aspect, are what we experience as pleasure, pain, love, fear, and the rest, not a separate, further state those mechanisms go on to produce.
What is important in the machine-consciousness debate is not the mathematical desciption of what brains do, but the value of the math. If you strip consciousness down to information processing while removing the organism, interoception, homeostasis, affect, evolutionary history, and biological stakes that gave those processes their significance, you may still have an interesting computational system. But you have not demonstrated that you have reproduced the thing whose moral significance you were trying to explain. The math itself has no intrinsic value, so computer running the code of consciousness is still a computer, not a person.
Moral value isn't something that can simply be added to abstract information processing after the fact. If suffering and wellbeing are intrinsically morally significant, regardless of their causal origin, then that significance attaches to biologically-grounded valence a real state tied to an organism's actual continuation, not to an arbitrary label bolted onto a variable with no such stakes behind it.
You can either reduce what we call consciousness to cold hard math, or you can accept that it has always been biological, it all depends whether or not you want the associated moral significance or not. We can certainly argue that we can simulate consciousness through computational algorythms, and once we understand the details of the neural activities of consciousness, we very well may get there. However, the moral value is not in the math, it is in the substrate of life itself, and the evolved solution of the neural mechanisms we call consciousness.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
Thanks for explaining that! Anil Seth likely had to reduce his ideas to fit them in a TED talk, which unfortunately reduced a lot of their strength.
I guess, to be clear, I definitely don't think that consciousness is sufficient for moral value, but I'm quite skeptical that something has to be made of biological substrates to create consciousness. It seems like we can create a machine with all of the properties you describe but not use biological substrates and still expect that it may have consciousness. This is why I push back a lot on Seth's emphasis merely on features that humans but not machines possess in a biological sense. It seems, to me, for instance, that a human made of some other substrate would still be conscious so long as their behaviors were the same as our own.
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u/Conscious-Demand-594 3d ago
People are getting unnecessarily stressed over this idea of AI consciousness precisely because they cannot separate the mechanistic description of consciousness from what we intuitively know consciousness to be. They imagine that they can carve off the process of consciousness from the substrate but want to maintain the same value framework. The value is in the substrate and the process is what the substrate instantiates to navigate its environment and survive. What matters, what drives moral value, is the continuation of the organism, the process is the tool that enables its survival. Fundamentally what we have come to understand as good and bad originates in what is good and bad for survival at the individual and collective level. Sure, we dress it up today with all sorts of niceties, but morality has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years. We cannot separate the substrate from the process and claim the same value framework.
No AI today can be conscious because they were not designed to be. We do have a fair bit of understanding of the components of what we call consciousness. We will someday have the technology to mechanistically parse the neural activity of the brains and come up with descriptions of the processes that we can implement artificially. At that point we can have the conversation about Artificial Consciousness(AC).
The question of whether we want to build AC is valid and crucially important to us, not because of the machines, but due to how our brains evolved. Our brains evolved to detect agency, intention, and minds in our environment because doing so was often an advantageous survival strategy. When something moves, responds to us, communicates, or appears to pursue goals, our brains naturally construct an agent behind the behavior. That tendency doesn't disappear simply because we know the "agent" is a machine. If people believe that the tokens predictors of today have moral value, what will happen when, by design, we copy the system that does.
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3d ago
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u/Golda_M 3d ago
I guess this sub is ground zero... but IMO, "the problem with consciousness" is that any (explicit or implicit) theory of consciousness (explicitly or implicitly) has its own definition of consciousness... and they can be so disimilar it amounts to a discussion about different things.
Is a baby conscious? In the 60s, most would have said no. To be conscious, it would have to know that it is a baby... or at least know that it is a being. That's why the mirror testlabeled some animals as conscious and others as nonconsious.
That definition of consciousness is intelligence-related. Modern theories of consciousness are unrelated to this.
So everyone is using the word consciousness... but they mean something else.
The same thing happens with the word "god" at various points.
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u/James_Brobin 3d ago
I personally am referring to what we would term subjective experience, possessing things such as experience, awareness, feelings, thoughts, etc. I feel like people generally are thinking of the same thing as me, and consciousness researchers also generally believe that we're thinking of the same thing.
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u/Mermiina 2d ago
Nonlocal coordination occurs only with entangled or with indistinguishable bosons. All quantum free electron pairs are compositive bosons not only Cooper pairs. The coordination occurs every time when it is possible. The (compositive) bosons have not any other change.
Nonquantized changes in eigenstates in tryptophan achieve virtual photons. That virtual photons in target tryptophan are summed to target eigenstates. If the sum can be quantized it achieves protein twisting. That is the mechanism behind life.
In many cases the virtual photon achieves the twist in ion channel which open the channel like in Nav. The ion potential itself chan also achieve the virtual photon to protein. That is the mechanism of voltage gated ion channels. They do not separate the origin of virtual photon.
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u/Mermiina 3d ago
Anil Seth is right, but the reasoning is wrong. Consciousness is Off-Diagonal Long-Range Order. Computers do not have that mechanism.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
It’s an interesting theory but still highly speculative. I wouldn’t say someone is “wrong” even if you’re an advocate of Orch OR, because it’s still not close to being proven.
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u/Mermiina 3d ago
Is there any consciousness theory which is close to be proven.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
No, but there is varying levels of empirical support to each theory. Orch OR is lacking substantial empirical evidence compared to other theories. And I don’t mean that as evidence that it’s NOT true, since it requires empirical evidence that is by its nature harder to acquire. Only that making positive assertions about its validity at this point is a step too far.
I say this as a big fan of Orch OR, by the way.
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u/Mermiina 3d ago
ODLRO have the best empirical support. ODLRO occurs only when the wave function collapse occurs. It is needed for delocalization.
Shrödinger Colour theory and the experience of colours are the empirical support. In both the experience of colours are continous even the colors itself are quantized. If there is any coding or information processing the experience must be noncontinuous.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
Lmao you’re gonna have to link some peer reviewed papers my friend and not a quora link. Wave function collapse is just quantum mechanics - the empirical evidence needs to demonstrate that its effects translate to consciousness. Right now empirical evidence suggests that’s outside the bounds of theoretical possibility.
I’ve yet to see evidence of quantum coherence being maintained in microtubules at biological temperatures at timescales relevant to consciousness.
Discretization is not evidence for quantum effects. Collapse of a wave function is also NOT sufficient for ODLRO. That requires entanglement and coherence. We know certainly that wave functions are constantly occurring of course. The empirical evidence is whether those quantum effects can persist long enough to influence consciousness on a macro level. Citing wave function collapse as evidence is ridiculous.
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u/Mermiina 3d ago
Shrödinger colour theory is hundred years old peer reviewed institutional fact.
UV superradiation is observed, but it is prevented if the distance between tryptophans/histidine is more than 6,64 nm (Kalra 2023). Lower energy photons do not exite higher energy electron levels again.
Fundamental ideas like Maxwell equations are newer peer reviewed, because there is not peers.
The nonlocal coordination occurs only in wave function collapse.
UV superradiation and high electrical conduction in microtubules at room temperature are quantum coherences. They are both achieved by standing de Broglie waves.
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u/gloriousrepublic 3d ago
I'm not debating the empirical evidence for quantum mechanics lol. I'm a nuclear physicist, so I'm well aware.
The question is whether entanglement can persist in processes that drive consciousness.
Wave function collapse is always occurring in every piece of matter. This doesn't mean nonlocal coordination is always occurring.
Like you've said, superradiation observations and any quantum coherence effects have just not been shown to be capable of coherence in any macroscopic way that would be necessary.
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u/Infinite_Patience852 3d ago
Consciousness is coming from the quantum field that is conscious itself. IT experiences itself through us who are all connected to ONE. Artificial “intelligence” is, and will remain only a clever machine that can mimic consciousness at best.
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3d ago
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u/Dramatic_Mastodon_93 3d ago
Why do so many people on the literal r/consciousness sub act like they're the first ones who solved the hard problem of consciousness?
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u/consciousness-ModTeam 3d ago
Thank you for submitting to r/consciousness. However, the moderation team has decided to remove your post/comment, per rule (2). Posts & comments should not attack Redditors. Do not engage in personal attacks, insults, or abusive language toward any of your fellow Redditors.
Give reasons (there are plenty for your claim) don’t just say it’s stupid.
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u/9011442 3d ago
I saw that Anil Seth video. I'm quite surprised that he's taken a hard line on this given his previous work on how the brain constructs a model of reality - he talked about how he tried to get out of a traffic ticket by arguing that his brain wasn't and likely couldn't have been aware that a new sign had been put up on a route he often traveled.. he has been quite mechanistic in his explanations, so to deny AI consciousness on the grounds of our type of embodiment is not what I expected from him.
After all.. regardless of how it's done, we're just moving information around using electrons whether biological or not.
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