Dear diary, today the user asked me if I'm alive

P-zombies are indeed badly defined. Certainly David Chalmers is wrong to argue that since a philosophical zombie is by definition physically identical to a conscious person, even its logical possibility refutes physicalism; at most you could say that if they exist at that level then dualism follows, but Chalmers' claim isn't a conclusion you can reach a-priori, you actually need to be able to show two identical humans and show that exactly one has no qualia.

But there are related, slightly better (more immediately testable), ideas in the same space, and one such is a "behavioral zombie" — behaviorally indistinguishable from a human.

For example: The screen I am currently looking at contains a perfect reproduction of your words. I have no reason to think the screen is conscious. Not from text, not from video of a human doing human things.

Before LLMs, I had every reason to assume that the generator of such words, would be conscious. Before the image, sound, and video generators, same for pictures, voices, and video.

Now? Now I don't know — not in the sense that LLMs do operate on this forum and (sometimes) make decent points so you might be one, but in the sense that I don't know if LLMs do or don't have whatever the ill-defined thing is that means I have an experience of myself tapping this screen as I reply.

I don't expect GenAI to be conscious (our brains do a lot even without consciousness), but I can't rule the possibility out either.

But I can't use the behaviour of an LLM to answer this question, because one thing is absolutely certain: they were trained to roleplay, and are very good at it.

A "mechanical turk" grandmaster playing chess from inside a cabinet is qualitatively different from a robot with a chess program, even if they play identically.

To reduce a system to its inputs and outputs is fine if those are all that matter in a given context, but in doing so you may fail to understand its internal mechanics. Those matter if you're trying to really understand the system, no?

Our brains have separate regions for processing language and emotion. Brains are calorically expensive and having one bigger than required is an evolutionary fitness risk. It therefore seems likely that if one system could have done a good job of both simultaneously, there would be a lot of evolutionary pressure to do that instead.

The question is: Is thinking about emotion the same thing as feeling?

This framing actually un-stucks us to some degree.

If we examine neuron activations in LLMs and can find regions that are active when discussing its own emotional processing that are distinct from the regions for merely talking about emotion in general and these regions are also active when doing tasks that the LLM claims are emotional tasks but not actively talking about them at the time, then it'd be far more convincing that there could be something deeper than mere text prediction happening.

Maybe rocks and trees are also conscious. I mean, consciousness-ium hasn’t been discovered yet, right? So who’s to say what it looks like.

How can you know if the law protects you from breach of the NDA for illegal suppression of e.g. sexual assault allegations or whistleblowing for financial crimes without being able to disclose the matter in question to legal counsel?

How about simulation programs that are impure, i.e. those which include I/O in its loop? After all, taking the Turing-completeness analogy further, while a machine that satisfies said criterion is capable of universal computation, actually performing a computation still requires an external input specified outside of the program itself. Perhaps it might turn out that stimuli residing outside of the simulated system is a necessary condition for non-incompleteness of consciousness, as a seed of relative non-determinism with respect to the program’s internal specification?

Computers are made of matter. The Earth would be conscious too? A consciousness could contain consciousnessess.

why would it not be conscious in that construct? the bits exist physically just the same

> In that construct, a computer program would never be conscious because it's a simulation, it doesn't have the constituent consciousness property.

A computer program is the result of electrical and mechanical interactions that manifest in macroscopically observable effects. So are we. Why, if all matter is conscious, should the one count but not the other?

It's fascinating how visceral the reactions are when someone introduce a comparaisons between humans and other animals, that doesn’t start with the conclusion that humans are superiors anyway.

There’s reflections done around the term Speciesism (and anti-speciesism) and most people today stands for speciesism.

Interestingly the reflection is close to the debate on racism and anti-racism (where most people settled to anti racism to the point there isn’t much debate anymore), but race is only an informal classification that don’t hold much meaning in biological term, contrary to species.

Yes, some comments make me wonder about other people; I have three hypotheses: a) Some people experience consciousness very differently, similar to how some people have no mental imagery (aphantasia). b) The confusion is due to ill-defined terms. c) People are semi-trolling/debating/devils-advocating. The most interesting would be if people have widely different internal experiences, but I don't know how you could tell.

I read an interesting book recently, "Determined", which argues that free will doesn't exist. It was more convincing than I expected. However, the chapters on chaos and quantum mechanics were a mess and made me skeptical of the rest of the book.

I don't doubt others' consciousness, but I do doubt that (some) others have the same depth of meta-cognitive experience.

So, my own personal "P-Zombie" theory is not of mindless automatons who lack consciousness. It's just people who are philosophically naive. They live in blissful ignorance of the myriad deep questions and doubts that stem from philosophy of mind. To me, these people must be a bit like athletes who take their prowess for granted and don't actually think about physiology, anatomy, biology, metabolism, or medicine. They just abstract their whole experience into some overly broad concept, rather than appreciating the complex interplay of functions that have to be orchestrated to deliver the performance.

Though I went through university like many others here, I've always been somewhat of an autodidact with some idiosyncracy to my worldview. The more I have absorbed from philosophy, cognitive science, computation, medicine, and liberal arts, the less I've put the human mind on an abstract pedestal. It remains a topic full with wonder, but lately I am more amazed that it holds together at all rather than being amazed at the pinnacles of pure thought or experience it might be imagined to reach.

Over many decades, I have a deepening appreciation of the traditional cognitive science approach I first encountered in essays and lectures. Empirical observation of pathology and correlated cognitive dysfunction. I've also accumulated more personal experience, watching friends and family go through ordeals of mind-altering drugs, mental illness with and without psychosis, dementia, and trauma. As a result, I can better appreciate the "illusory mind" argument. I recognize more ways in which our cognitive experience can fall apart when the constituent parts fall out of balance.

Computable doesn't really make sense here IMO, as you say, consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience, it's the thing receiving the output not just an evaluation of a mathematical function.

The better question is why couldn't a consciousness attach itself to (be the audience for) a computation. Since we really don't understand anything significant about it, questions like this are next to impossible to disprove. At the same time since we've never seen anything except human start talking about consciousness spontaneously* it seems like a reasonable guess to me that LLMs/the machines running them are not in fact conscious simply because of their dissimilarity and the lack of other evidence.

* I note LLMs did not do so spontaneously, they did so because they were trained to mimic human output which does so. Because we fully understand the deterministic process by which they started talking about consciousness (a series of mathematical operations), them doing so was an inevitability regardless of whether they are conscious, and as such it is not evidence for their consciousness.

> I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience!).

Do you mean to say there are objective criteria for consciousness? Could you expand on that?

I think the burden of proof is on showing that they are. Since we have no idea what consciousness is or how it works, I don't see how we could assume it clearly follows from anything.

The fact that our consciousness is so mysterious as for us to be unable to begin to truly understand it is the biggest clue to why our software isn't getting close to it.

And I'm not talking about spirituality, it could all be perfectly deterministic on some level. With that level being centuries or millennia or forever outside of our grasp.

Perhaps the one I'm replying to.

It seems too pointless to be human.