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?
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.