I quickly read this post and Anil Seth’s essay and I don’t see the part where they argue for the thesis. I see various statements about how human brains work and about how computers work, but I don’t see how they connect the dots to ”...and therefore computers can’t be conscious.”
For example, the articles make the claim that brains make no clear separation between hardware and software. Okay, that seems to be true. But so what? Why should I believe that a lack of hardware/software distinction is a necessary property for consciousness to arise?
I feel like I’m missing a lot of what they’re trying to say, but I also feel like that’s the authors’ fault, not mine, because the pieces (especially Seth’s original essay) are structured in a way that makes it really hard for me to identify the central arguments.
Thanks for the comment, Michael. I read the post and Seth’s original essay, and listened to the episode of The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Seth. I would agree the title of the post is a bit of a misnomer. I think one may update towards a lower chance of digital systems being conscious as a result of Seth’s arguments, but they are far from conclusive. I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. However, I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
For example, the articles make the claim that brains make no clear separation between hardware and software. Okay, that seems to be true. But so what? Why should I believe that a lack of hardware/software distinction is a necessary property for consciousness to arise?
I quickly read this post and Anil Seth’s essay and I don’t see the part where they argue for the thesis. I see various statements about how human brains work and about how computers work, but I don’t see how they connect the dots to ”...and therefore computers can’t be conscious.”
For example, the articles make the claim that brains make no clear separation between hardware and software. Okay, that seems to be true. But so what? Why should I believe that a lack of hardware/software distinction is a necessary property for consciousness to arise?
I feel like I’m missing a lot of what they’re trying to say, but I also feel like that’s the authors’ fault, not mine, because the pieces (especially Seth’s original essay) are structured in a way that makes it really hard for me to identify the central arguments.
Thanks for the comment, Michael. I read the post and Seth’s original essay, and listened to the episode of The 80,000 Hours Podcast with Seth. I would agree the title of the post is a bit of a misnomer. I think one may update towards a lower chance of digital systems being conscious as a result of Seth’s arguments, but they are far from conclusive. I only know I am conscious right now (and I am very confident I was conscious moments ago). So I think a system which is more similar to me at a fundamental physical level should have a higher chance of being conscious. However, I have no idea about what this implies in terms of concrete probabilities of consciousness. As far as I can tell, the available evidence is compatible with frontier large language models (LLMs) having a probability of consciousness of 10^-6, but also 99.999 %.
Relatedly, I liked the article The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate Consciousness by Alexander Lerchner, and the reply to it by Shelly Albaum.
I just linkposted this to the EA Forum.