Are Babies Conscious?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
People incorrectly think LLMs are conscious because they output language. Yet we question consciousness and intelligence and so on in dogs, cats and now babies.
It’s a ridiculous human bias. Nobody thinks an image generator is conscious. Nobody thinks a human image generated by an image generator is real. But LLMs generate text and so people mistakenly assume they are conscious. LLMs can deep fake personas and act like characters and people think that’s what they actually are. It’s all a deep fake. When you talk to an LLM you are “talking” to a deep fake of a person in the same manner as an image generator deep faking a human image.
An now a paper of record is questioning whether babies are conscious. Why? Just because they don’t use language or have access to memories we question this!? Ultimately that’s what it boils down to regardless of what this article says.
Only 50 years ago the nazis dehumanized mentally and bodily disabled people.
Other cultures to this day lock humans away with mental illness because they don't understand it.
The complexity of LLMs reached already dimensions that are not that far away from the complexity of human brains and we are only at the beginning of this journey potentially.
World models are getting developed and we havent even tried to build systems similiar to what our brains architecture with a default mode network would look like. We only throw massive amount of resources onto LLMs.
Plenty of arguments on HN that LLMs are conscious. They are, of course, wrong, but plenty of people seem to believe it-Lord know why.
You can’t say LLMs are missing the thing that causes consciousness, because we don’t know what that is.
It is slightly interesting question. There is unlikely to be too many good outcomes from answers. But it might be something to think about...
You are equivocating here.
It could be a function of both parts. You are equivocating the brain as 1 organ and the brain as 2 organs. If its 2 organs thats doesnt mean a function of the brain has to come from one part or the other.
Interesting. This increased my credence that newborns are conscious / sentient (which had been somewhat low).
The complete disconnect between journalism and literally the most fundamental of basic human experiences is astounding.
If babies were not conscious then killing them would be no problem. It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
Probably something to do with the way we tend not to retain memories from before about 2 y/o.
And yes, obviously absurd, one would think. Yet something that it’s important for modern medicine to have evidence of.
What hasn't yet been processed is the horror and barbarity of having done so. To this day, when it's mentioned, we can't take in what it means.
When the practice was discontinued (around 1984 IIRC), the NYT reported on the change much as if a style guide for medical reports had just been revised. (Sorry I don't have the link handy.)
Edit: I found https://web.archive.org/web/20090410072646/https://www.nytim... from 1987, but that one is an op-ed that actually does express some feeling (despite its obligatory "They did so for the purest of reasons" at the start). The report I was remembering, or perhaps misremembering, was devoid of that.
https://theconversation.com/babies-can-learn-language-sounds...
https://www.monoglotanxiety.com/blog/sciene-of-language-newb...
https://www.aaas.org/news/babies-brains-are-primed-their-nat...
I could go on for each of your claims but this should suffice to make a curious person want to revisit their assumptions. Each one touches not only on speech but memory.
You moved the goalpost in your second comment, so I am not going to consider you worth engaging beyond that - you're clearly a bad faith arguer.
By most cognitive measures, an adult mouse is probably more conscious than a newborn.
Say what? No. Killing them would be a problem because they're human. With that comes the capability to become conscious, whether or not they are at the time they are babies.
> It is their capacity for consciousness (however nascent) that makes them human, and therefore, sacred.
No, it's their DNA that makes them human.
Anyway, personally I have a higher view of what a human being is and why it's deserving of protection than just a string of information.
The sun will become a red star in 5 billion years. We have voids in our universe which are not crossable.
From my pure nihilistic view, it doesn't matter, never has, never will. From an idealistic view: we are humans, i value the uniqueness of mine and the complexity and uniqueness of everyone else being part of my experience.
What is your "higher view"? whats your pedestal?
> The genetic differences between Neanderthals and all modern humans (amounting to about 30,000) are far less than the differences between two random human beings alive today – around 3 million [1].
Clearly Neanderthals aren't more human compared to you than a randomly selected person.
1. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jan/12/svante-paabo...
That's why the EMTs and paramedics all cluster around car accident victims, asking whether they are conscious, so they can kill them already
"911, what is your emergency? ... Oh, your grandmother is unconscious? We'll send out our firing squad right away!"
Once you have a neural network as sophisticated as a baby’s will it be immoral to turn it off?
The intro to the article feels like the author asked a LLM to summarize journal papers about consciousness. It seems there is not a consensus around what it is.
Can anyone in this field provide a directional overview of what we think consciousness is in 2026?
Not all conclusions must be checked. If that were the case we could never act.
Every decision relies upon nearly-infinite unstated assumptions or presumptions that do not have as their basis definite knowledge.
Specifically, with the idea of babies being conscious or not conscious, if they are not conscious, then the alternative is that they are a sort of vegetative being. Which then raises the question, why not kill them?
Surely you object to that and not just on a logical level but on a deeply felt level. You know it to be wrong. Which brings me to my next point:
There ARE other ways of knowing besides logic - the greeks referred to gnosis, Dianoia, Sophia, Mathesis, Aletheia, Oida, and so on... scientific knowledge would be just one of many.)
Furthermore, in philosophy it is long acknowledged that there are truths that are beyond our capacity to know in any kind of definite or ultimate sense -- some even say that ALL knowing can NOT be definite (Münchhausen Trilemma / Agrippa's Trilemma)...
I would posit that the domain of science is not the place one can make an arugment about meaning - such as assigning something sacred value -- so it is the wrong argument to force empiricism or logical proof as the approach for this question.
You need only have a child (or even a pet, for some people) of your own to understand that such experiences of meaning are known directly, not through formal proofs. They are felt before they make it to the cognitive consciousness, where logic occurs.
I feel like I am explaining being human to robots in this thread, so I will stop here. (If you are on the spectrum or there is any other explanation for why you would not understand this already, please say so. It would relieve me of a great discord.)