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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

The current leading materialistic model of consciousness is essentially that human consciousness is a computation in itself, and that the brain is basically a very very complex computer. So it's not at all illogical for someone who holds this view and who fully understands that AI is just a regular computer program to also believe that it could be conscious.

Of course, I'm not saying that you have to believe any of this - even defining what consciousness is is famously elusive. And there are a lot of people who think consciousness is not materialistic to begin with, or that we have not yet discovered the scientific nature of it.

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I definitely agree that consciousness is mysterious. But I think the assumption that AI is conscious begs the question "then why isn't 7zip conscious?".

Is a simple calculator conscious? How about a mechanical calculator? Is an abacus conscious? Are they only conscious when executing a sufficiently sophisticated program? What if I hypothetically had infinite time and patience, and performed the inference on paper with a pencil. Would it then be conscious?

Well, the exact same question applies to biology. If humans are conscious, is all life conscious? If it's just the brain that's conscious, is every part of the brain conscious? Are individual neurons conscious? How about other cells in your body, or tissues or organs? Our stomach has more cells and more neurons than many full animals - is our stomach conscious?

The answer in the "consciousness is a computation" model is that consciousness can arise in any computational medium. But the model doesn't say that any computation is conscious - it says that consciousness is any of a set of specific computations, any computation with properties X, Y, Z whatever. So it's perfectly possible (according to this model) that a GPU running game graphics is not conscious, while a GPU running some future even more advamced LLM is conscious. Or a network of GPUs + storage + whatever.

Good examples. We don't know what human intelligence, understanding or consciousness is but we do know what all of those examples are. And we do know what an LLM is. Like you said, it's a data processing machine and we know what algorithms it uses. It's more productive to discuss it in those engineering terms because we've done plenty of data processing, statistics, control systems, curve-fitting etc. before. There's no need to make this jump to consciousness/magic except for marketing or fantasy purposes.

The computational theory of mind is the leading theory for pure cognition. There is no leading theory of consciousness, although some people also favor the computational theory of mind for that as well but this is far less popular.

I think that among those who believe in materialism, the only two common positions are either that consciousness is an emergent property of the computational mind / an illusion (I view these as somewhat similar, though you can disagree), or that consciousness is some kind of physical interaction that we have basically no understanding of; and of course there are plenty of "agnostics" on this topic. Among these, I think it's fair to say that the first group is the larger one among materialists.

I hope we never do prove that, because as soon as that happens it will be used for eugenics.

I fail to see any connection between computational theories of mind and eugenics.

If someone thinks that a human mind operates like a computer, they might think that humans are interchangeable with computers, and then decide that we are better off without humans.

This is a bit like saying that if someone thinks God doesn't exist, they might think it's OK to disobey God's laws and start killing people.

Morals are separate from metaphysics, and a moral person would never advocate for eugenics or genocide regardless of their metaphysical beliefs. I personally subscribe to the belief that human minds are computers, and yet feel no urge to replace humans with computers.

As a complete side note, I don't think replacing humans with computers would be a form of eugenics. Eugenics refers to the practice of deciding which humans have a right and/or duty to reproduce for the (supposed) betterment of the species - such as through forced sterilization of "inferior" individuals, incentives for or even compulsory breeding for "superior" individuals etc. Simply killing all humans to allow for machines to rule is more like a form of genocide.

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