What is it with these mooks and their dipshit-ass doofy metaphors that aren’t clever, smart, interesting or accurate? These people are such intellectual lightweights the Casimir effect could buffet them into another dimension.

What people are asking about LLMs is whether the physical computational process itself has experience. So the actual correct Victorian parallel would be Victorians wondering whether the telephone infrastructure itself could be an experiential phenomenon which essentially nobody back then wondered or asked.

Second, there is no empirical test for consciousness. None. Whether something is “really” conscious or not is simply not an answerable question at this time. It might never be. The spirit world is a testable set of hypotheses, as opposed to consciousnesses. And so far, there has not been a shred of evidence that it exists across millions of trials over hundreds of years. Further, it’s not clear what the difference is — if any — versus an entity being “really” conscious and only pretending to be. These questions have no resolution. As with quantum mechanics, if you profess to understand it, that only means you definitely do not.

And thus, the tard-ass idea that the future will obviously see how silly we are is completely unsubstantiated. Humans have a history of both over-attribution of consciousness and under-attribution. That is to say, it was once believed that animals’ and babies’ cries of pain and terror were just mechanistic, while some believed that mountains and clouds were certainly conscious. You know a belief is bunk when you could just as easily swap the opposite statement in — that is, it’d be equivalent to say that the “dismissal of consciousnesses” would be obviously as ridiculous to our descendants as “definitely conscious.”

Not everyone can be intellectually competent. But are these people even trying here? They sound like children.