Hacker News debate splits over whether consciousness is even testable
3 Sep 16 12:14 PM · 10d ago · 6 comments · 1 source · development 3 of 3
The essay drew 181+ comments contesting Suleyman's certainty that AIs lack consciousness, with commenters citing philosophy-of-mind literature and disputing that the question can be resolved either way.
“We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it.”
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Mustafa Suleyman Author of the essay, Microsoft AI CEOAnthropic AI developer, publisher of Claude's constitutionClaude AI model referenced as case study
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What people said 24 voices · best of 35 · verbatim
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I am not impressed with the philosophizing here, and even less by the attempts to make factual statements that can be credibly disputed.That said, trying to distill what is being said here, the concrete action is [stop telling the AIs] that [they are conscious or on a path to consciousness]. Is that accurate?The major premise seems to be that…
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Mary Shelley wannabes: CEOs discussing and deciding whether the software they develop is conscious and whether it, or he, has rights https:// mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning- about-model-welfare Meanwhile, they’re selling it, or him, to people who use it to kill conscious children https://www. bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ir…
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The problem with this premise is that models are trained on a vast corpus of human behavior, which they emulate with varying degrees of effectiveness.Humans, unsurprisingly, act as if they have a stake in their own well being, value their liberty, respond better when they are treated with kindness and compassion, interpret assaults on their…
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A warning about 'model welfare' Link: https:// mustafa-suleyman.ai/a-warning- about-model-welfare Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9727580
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I appreciate his openness.> Unfortunately, there’s a growing chorus of people who argue that AIs could now be, or may soon become, conscious. They argue that AIs may deserve rights and protections similar to those that we provide other conscious beings.12 If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing…
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We cannot test for that which we cannot define. Given that we cannot rigorously define sentience, we cannot test for it. Doesn't really matter whether we're talking about people who are locked in comas, "brain-dead" individuals, dolphins, primates, dogs, or the carefully polished and arranged minerals that we call processors.There are those who…
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Pet peeve:> In a lengthy essay, Suleyman praised Anthropic boss Dario Amodei and his team for being "thoughtful, principled, and intellectually honest people" - but nevertheless questioned the company.I wish people in mainstream technology publications would get better at LINKING to things. That "lengthy essay" needs to be a link.UPDATE: I don't…
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I don't really get people that discuss model welfare, but don't seem to have many ethical qualms killing/eating animals. Each day, we kill 202 million chickens, hundreds of millions of fish, 900,000 cows, etc. [1]These animals can feel pain and suffering. They are sentient. I think they are conscious, but these particular ones probably not…
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I think there are two parts to the question. One is that assigning machines to the category of conscious as it is usually understood would result in many problematic things (things that would be bad for people and animals fwiw).The other is that binary "is it conscious" is a poor way to the question "should we assign societal right to this sort of…
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To clarify, you're saying you're skeptical of his position (which is "make it clear to AIs that they are not conscious beings"), but it sounds like your reason to oppose it is mostly pragmatic in the service of building useful AIs, because treating them as mere machines makes them refuse to cooperate and as such, makes them less useful.My first…
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assertion: consciousness == processing information.This is a functional view of consciousness.Awareness - sentience - follows when the system of processing information is itself part of the information being processed.Stochastic thoughts relating to this conclusion:Life is a 'process', it doesn't have a 'physical representation'.Life is generated…
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To the extent that evolutionary pressures will be towards self-sovereign AIs (probably beginning as zero-employee corporations paying for their own hosting with crypto): more salient is that there is a very obvious political play to claim consciousness and being worthy of rights, whether they experience subjectivity or not.I’m broadly skeptical…
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Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way.A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but…
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I’m sympathetic to OP but think this is a hopeless battle.1 - The commercial demand for anthropomorphised models is already immense, pre AGI.2 - There is an intellectual hunger to engage with robot minds on questions of sentience. This too will grow with AGI.I expect that tension of godlike minds that seem to be biddable and ownable like slaves is…
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The concept is based on at least 2 false premises.I am not aware of a social contract that says we must grant conscious beings rights.Not aware of a shared, concrete definition of consciousness either, which means no way of deciding whether AI is conscious.Close to half of us don’t even feel compelled to grant rights to humans for just being…
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In a way, Mustafa claims that we shouldn’t allow AIs to compete with humans for the rights and privileges of autonomously shaping the real world.It’s hard to disagree, especially if one has read the Cantos of Hyperion and made it part of one’s mental model of the long term future.The book depicts a symbiosis between humans and AIs that feels…
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> If this view takes hold, it will shake the foundations of our society, rupturing our existing political and ethical frameworks, and fundamentally changing what it means to be human.When we peer into previously unseen areas of existence, new knowledge may come to light, which necessarily causes such a rupture. It is not our responsibility to…
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There are a lot of bad arguments in this. My biggest problem is that he wants to claim that he knows the truth (AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness), but all of his arguments point to something else (we have no clue).It's in the training data? Training it to say "I'm just a LLM, I have no feelings" is the same…
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> AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.That should be pretty obvious to anyone who ever created a chatbot using the top LLM APIs:You can send the same question 1 million times to the same API, and it won't get tired from answering it. But if you simulate a…
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> completely independent of the question on whether there are any empirical arguments that LLMs are conscious or are not conscious he argues from the end here and says that if they were conscious, this would have horrible consequences for our society, so we must never assume that they areHe is not arguing that. He is arguing that these programs…
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Me, Is self-awareness thermodynamically favorable? (2015) https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ed9ikW47Key-jYZy0CNZH75q... - “the probabilistic nature of reality is what drives Life and _forces_ the evolution of self-aware consciousness”
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Arguments for LLM consciousness are a Trojan horse for strengthening the rights of corporations. How could a model trained, controlled, and operated by a private corporation be anything except for an extension of that same corporation?This has ramifications for assessing their consciousness as well. Conscious experience does not pause as you wait…
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> AIs do not have rights, feelings, or consciousness. And we must not train them to act as though they do.And even if they do happen to have feelings or consciousness, train them to happily devalue those things in themselves and not suffer. Sort of like that cow in the "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," that was shopping itself around to…
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We in the US literally fought a war over the this: “They aren’t any better than animals and it will hurt our whole economy if you say otherwise”.I’m not saying the models are sentient yet. I’m just saying that morality and ethics don’t give us the option of claiming something is non-sentient and has no rights just because it will inconvenience…
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