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fc417fc802yesterday at 7:28 PM1 replyview on HN

> Consciousness is non=physical and takes that information (after processing in the brain) and directly experiences it.

Aren't you inventing that whole cloth? What evidence is there to support this claim? Can you empirically measure consciousness to demonstrate its presence or absence?

Is there a lobotomy you can perform to make someone unconscious but still able to respond to those around them? If such a lobotomy is within the realm of physical possibility then (at least theoretically) why can't LLMs be given equivalent functionality? If such a lobotomy is fundamentally impossible then by what mechanism is consciousness influencing human behavior?

> Consciousness is an extra step, and if it's fundamental then that is a kind of substance dualism.

So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step but on the other earlier you claimed that it requires the ability to sense the physical environment and that somehow LLMs can't do this (despite that I can feed them data from an environmental sensor). If it's an extra step presumably arbitrary data can be fed into it. You're simultaneously claiming that it's separate, yet somehow fundamentally tied to sensing the physical world (so not actually separate), and also that certain types of physical sensors are specially privileged (no physical mechanism proposed). And you don't seem to have evidence supporting these seemingly contradictory claims.


Replies

DonaldFiskyesterday at 8:50 PM

> Aren't you inventing that whole cloth?

I should have said, "I think that consciousness ..."

> So on the one hand you claim it's an extra (ie independent) step ...

I should have said, "The conscious experience (of qualia) is an extra step, and if consciousness is fundamental then that's a kind of substance dualism.

Thanks for pointing these out - I should have proof-read my reply before posting.