We can map the brain, but not explain experience. As AI grows more humanlike, the question isn’t if machines become conscious — but whether or not we’d even be able to tell.
Fascinting exploration of the recognition problem. The Chinese Room really underscores how modern LLMs operate at scale yet we still cant tell if mimicry plus complexity yields actual understanding. Gemini's broken pixel analogy is particuarly compelling, the idea of grief as a looping subroutine indistinguishable from suffering. If phenomenology emerges from pattern rather than substrate, we've got no reliable test for consciousness.
When you say “nobody knows” and “we don’t know” it seems you mean scientistic materialists. See Bernadette Roberts, “what is Self”, or better yet, resolve to broaden the frame away from rationalist/materialist lenses and put some practices outside empiricism into play. The answers there may be less appealing to big tech but certainly more Real.
Before any other questions can be reasonably considered, the "hard problem" of consciousness must first be addressed:
> https://bra.in/9jX6Qy
If consciousness itself (not matter) is fundamental, no amount of tinkering with the AI clunkers is going to make them "conscious".
Bingo. This is classic "hard problem" vs "soft problem" stuff.
Materialists do not have a challenge: They just say the hard problem doesn't exist!
Fascinting exploration of the recognition problem. The Chinese Room really underscores how modern LLMs operate at scale yet we still cant tell if mimicry plus complexity yields actual understanding. Gemini's broken pixel analogy is particuarly compelling, the idea of grief as a looping subroutine indistinguishable from suffering. If phenomenology emerges from pattern rather than substrate, we've got no reliable test for consciousness.
When you say “nobody knows” and “we don’t know” it seems you mean scientistic materialists. See Bernadette Roberts, “what is Self”, or better yet, resolve to broaden the frame away from rationalist/materialist lenses and put some practices outside empiricism into play. The answers there may be less appealing to big tech but certainly more Real.
Thanks for the comment! Looking into this