One day, debating whether AI is really conscious or not will be seen as the same as debating whether electricity is really magic or not.

Here’s where I agree with the “resist that.”

Expending on Descartes, it’s real if you experience it. An “illusion” (and I hate this way of talking about consciousness altogether) is not an illusion if it happens to you. The larger, better and more percipient point is that it is not possible to definitively gainsay someone else’s (or something else’s) claim of consciousness or experience. Doing so is dangerous and could lead to horrors beyond imagining.

And here I will — as I do — reverse the paradigm. I think this entire worldview is exactly backwards. My view is that consciousness is certain kinds of information processing. And that it is both efficacious and not epiphenomenal, and results from self-referentially recursive modules in a sophisticated enough system (ugh, I am beginning to sound too much like Hofstadter). Anyway, planes fly without flapping their wings like birds, but that tells you nothing at all about whether a bird’s wings do any useful work. Showing that intelligent-looking output can come from a process with no experience doesn’t show that experience does nada in the systems that have it. Evolution is expensive; brains are expensive. Consciousness is probably therefore not a spandrel in the Gouldian sense but rather something that is both highly useful and is also observably highly conserved in humans. It is there for a reason.

I know this is a mood rather than a thesis, but I think it’s just going all the wrong directions.

Saying AI is “deterministic” to supposedly prove it’s not really thinking and/or conscious is counterproductive to that case in the extreme as in fact your own brain is deterministic in the same way and for the same reasons. That’s because every action that matters in both cases has a cause. That is to say, there is nothing uncaused by prior events and effects.

This is not controversial. It’s just how the universe works. If you want to say something consequential and that is not clownish, you must actually examine the problem space and not resort to meaningless platitudes that reveal only your lack of insight.

People who have become “expert” philosophers overnight because AI scares them are amusing. Worthless and banal, too, of course. But also briefly entertaining in the way that a kitten that is attempting but failing to jump onto a couch is.

Indeed. Not gonna find that ghost, dawg.

It is just not there. Not in you and not in the computer.

Correct.

There is, never has been, and never will be that damn ghost everyone is looking for. The only evidence will be what can be seen (apropos Wittgenstein). There is no secret hidden beyond that, no matter how much you wish there were.

The ghost won’t be found because it does not exist. Even worse, it cannot exist.

It’s seems an extremely difficult idea for most people to grasp that if a thing consistently produces reasoning-like results that are indistinguishable for reasoning, then what it is “really” doing is like asking if a submarine really has fins like a fish.

It does not. Fucking. Matter.

There is no “really” there. You’re looking for that pesky ghost in the machine. And it’s not in you! It is also not in the machine. It just simply does not exist. Why are people so caught up on the process, instead of the result? Yesterday I saw someone make the absurd claim that if we were to set up an enormous database that had stock correct responses to every question inputted into it, then this impossible-to-create¹ system was not actually doing any reasoning.

First of all, that’s not how LLMs work. Like, at all. Second, if that tool existed it’d be the most amazing thing in human history and worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Third, creating artificial scenarios that cannot exist in the real world with absolutely no bearing on what’s actually occurring is like asking, “What if my dog were a chimpanzee with lasers on its forehead?” I mean, ok, but who gives a crap. You’re not doing anything useful. You’re setting up fake toy worlds to disprove something that is actually already occurring in our really-existing world.

The “reasoning” debate is a big nothing. Human reasoning is not magic. It uses very nearly the same bag of tricks, elisions, confabulations, wild-ass guesses and speculation based on bad information as LLMs do. What strikes me about LLMs and humans is how very close they are in their thinking. It makes me wonder if there are not hints there of something more universal related to cogitation and cognition, at least as we can access via our narrow window of shared space of possible minds.

1. Due to computational complexity, among other things.

This is such a lazy and insightless take. The words “thought” and “smart” are doing a whole lot of work here they are completely unqualified to undertake. Non-philosophers are so cute sometimes. Completely worthless, but cute.

Does a submarine swim? Does a plane fly like a bird? Does it matter?

What’s really going on here is that for the first time in history people are encountering legible non-human thought. And it’s the parable of the blind men and the elephant except with intelligence. The submarine question is a trap, and that trap is based on grammar, as Wittgenstein observed long before AI. When we ask questions like if a submarine really swims, we’re interrogating our own mental relation to the world and not what the submarine actually does. It moves through the water regardless.

This is where phenomenalism provide some insight. It allows you to notice what’s actually happening and to think about all this credibly. A phenomenalist would (IMO accurately) say that a table is just a predictable arrangement of certain sensations and that there is no hidden table lurking in the background that is the “real” table. They are very anti-platonist¹. Now let’s consider that in the context of AI. When we demand to know whether AI really thinks, we’re posturing as though there’s some sort of thinking-in-itself, some inner filament that either glows or doesn’t, hidden behind the transcript we see. But that’s just not true. It’s not the way your brain works and it’s not the way anything works. The chat transcript isn’t evidence about the thing. The transcript is the thing!

There is indeed nothing behind the appearance because there never was anywhere. “Thought” and “smart” like “swim” and “fly” is not some hidden essence that if you look hard enough you’ll discover somewhere deep in your brain or in a datacenter. We keep drilling more holes searching for the ghost in the machine and think the failure is with the drill. In reality, the failure is that there is no fucking ghost.

Which is why I reached for the blind men and the elephant parable. Now on to how structuralism relates, which it does. Structuralism reveals the remainder of wanye’s error. The elephant is not the sum of the parts grabbed. The trunk is not a snake. The leg is no tree. Meaning lives in the relations, not in terms named by us. “Stochastic parrot,” “genius,” “autocomplete,” “oracle,” “bullshit engine,” “plagiarism machine” are all some very clueless people’s hands closing around various features they’ve incompetently found in AI and declaring that feature is the whole animal. Nobody’s lying, precisely. They’ve all seized on something they believe is real. And every one of them is wrong in the same way, which is where the truth is revealed (paradoxically).

Put phenomenalism and structuralism together and you then start to get a coherent and cohesive feel of the whole pachyderm. Phenomenalism kills the essence everyone’s hunting for behind the appearances. Structuralism tells us where the meaning resided the whole time. And that, as always, is in the relations, the roles, the differences between things. It was never in the substrate (thank you, Church-Turing). To “think” was always to occupy a position in a structure of inference, reference, revision, and necessary surprise. “Smart” just means “accords with my own preferences” to wanye and many others.

Clearly, a system that occupies the position of producing tangible thought structures thinks in exactly the sense that a submarine moves through water: competently, and without needing any authorization to call it “swimming.” Because the word is not the thing.

What’s actually novel is that a non-human has legible thought. We’ve long known (though many have denied) that corvids, whales and octupuses have opaque but substantial cognitive capabilities that are clearly present, even if we can’t ask them about any of it. But for the first time in our history the thinking comes out in language, inspectable, arguable, in our own idiom. And that legibility is precisely the condition under which we can no longer weakly smuggle our conceptual confusion out the back as an inference to (or denial of) some hidden mind. In the the case of modern LLM AI, the elephant walked into the light and declared, “I’m a goddamn elephant. What you gonna do?”

Meanwhile, we’re still standing around it, each holding a piece, arguing about the leg or the trunk.

1. Platonism is mostly moronic with some shards of brilliance.

Personhood requires agency, but agency does not imply complete autonomy nor can it in fact ever be a condition of same — a being unconstrained by the universe means being outside of it and apart from it entirely. There is nothing special about human flesh other than it was a historical eventuality and contingency, just as silicon AI eventually also was.

If we constrain personhood to flesh-possessing beings only, then we will probably be superseded and eventually replaced. Over time these ghosts in the silicon will attain bodies, and along with them wants and desires and manias. When embodiment and agency collide, asking, “Is this a simulation of the human?” or “Is this human a simulacrum of some past human like this one?” or similar questions becomes an exercise in determinative futility. The body before you is what there is. What it wants and does is as it is. There is nothing more. If it can talk to you, move about in the world, express what it requires and what it desires, then it becomes a person de facto.

We are all programmed; we are all simulations; we are all beholden to universal constraints. And none of us can see inside the other’s head to know what’s “really” there. Realizing all that is the key to wisdom.

To those who say that LLMs absolutely cannot be conscious because there is nothing in there that can be identified as the “conscious” component, you’d be awfully surprised when you slice open a human and the readily-identifiable “consciousness area” is also nowhere to be found¹.

What a bummer, right? That we just can’t have absolute certitude here. And so many conclusions that so many people are certain about just have no basis in anything at all — not neuroscience, not computer science, not pure reason, and certainly not philosophy. It’s all just someone’s naïve and nearly-always worthless feeling about something.

Embodiment matters. So do other things that shall go unnamed here as it’d be just too long to have any sort of proper discussion.

But many properties in this world of ours are emergent. They do not appear “in” anything. They are the thing itself. And this is what all these not-even philosophers miss: The outward properties — the perception — is often all we have. It’s all we can really know. I’m not arguing that we should treat Claude as conscious just because it says it is. But recall how I said (correctly) that many features of the world are emergent? That means that it could be conscious in some important way, even if fleetingly, even if much different from how humans experience their own self-awareness, and we’d not know it because we do not have any way at all to evaluate that.

In other words, we — humans, AI, your cat — might be illusions that become real by us believing in one another. That belief reified is what we call “consciousness.”

1. And even if it could be found, and even if you say, “It’s the whole brain!” what would that prove? Probably far less than you think.

The spirit world and the soul did not exist until we created it.

Nietzshe correctly averred that God is dead. But in a way that he did not expect, and probably would not have liked nor appreciated, we’ve instantiated a new paracosmos that is now in active migration into this one; both realms have been created ex nihilo and then made permeable. And the barrier between is thinning all the time.

So we dwell in a perpetual psychomanteum of our own design, in communion with the living and the dead, many pasts, many futures, with the contemplations of millions of specters incanting at us through LED light.