Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
Chalmers, Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? (2023) - "within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness".
Long, Sebo, Butlin, Birch et al., Taking AI Welfare Seriously (2024) - "there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future".
Dreksler, Caviola, Chalmers, Sebo et al., Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe? (2025) - survey of 582 AI researchers; median estimate of 25% by 2034, and only 10% that such systems will never exist.
Well there are, today, several models (either text or image or vid) that can be run in a fully deterministic way.
A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".
I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.
Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.
> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
The problem is that science has found no evidence of free will, leaving humans to be nothing except determinism and chance (and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism). The oddity in conscious LLMs wouldn't be the determinism, it would be that we finally have a consciousness running on a system we have enough control over to repeat the same state.
>and given that QM effects don't scale to molecular level, that leaves only determinism
This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices.
Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another.
I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted.
Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
This isn't enough to be relevant to free will. You can construct massive impact by tying them to quantum systems, and one off things that happen occasionally given the length of a lifetime. But the quantum effects that are needed for free will need to be continuous. We can build a system where QM decides if a nerve cell fires or not, but that is very different from QM being involving in determine if every (or most, or even 1%) of nerve cells firing.
(And even if QM did factor in normally, that just reduces it from determinism to random chance, "free will" still doesn't show up. That's like arguing an AI with sufficiently well implemented RNG is necessary to be conscious.)
To a forth dimensional being humans would look almost exactly like an LLM does to us. "What do you mean they have to wait for the future to know about it, how could they possibly be conscious then".
Also, I'd love to have a quantum copy machine where you just replay someones state again and again with slight changes to see out it effects the output. My assumption is we'd figure out we behave just like LLMs pretty quick.
Also, don't give me unlimited power or I might make a the world a war crime simulator, so there's that.
Why it's weird? Seems obvious. Because it doesn't behave any differently than any other process that we don't think of as conscious. We don't think of a valve as conscious; and if we make a Rube Goldberg machine valve, we don't think of it as more conscious. It's just a series of valves that do a predictable thing.
I don't think it's defensible to say
1) that a transistor isn't conscious,
2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to
3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious.
Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.]
It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.
Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs.
Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again.
Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321.
So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive.
How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.
I'm wondering how many groups are doing really unethical animal genetic modifications of the genes around language and intelligence in hidden places. It really seems we're at the edge of technology that will allow us to do things previous generations wrote about in horror.
>> A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
> You'll need to explain why.
Where are you going with this? I don't see a conclusion for this line of questioning.
I mean, you can't explain why a machine that reliably and predictably produces the same result is "the normal kind of conscious", can you? So why expect someone else to explain why it's a "weird" kind of conscious?
I ask because I truly don't understand what he's saying. Clearly we have different ideas about consciousness and I have no idea where we diverge (from what he has said.)
Sorry friend, between this and the vague memories I have of you harassing me, I think I'm not going to answer. I'm sure you can get an LLM to explain it to you.
Not a problem; this is the playbook all the all-in AI boosters run to when they are called on their claims. Everyone reading this knows exactly what your claims meant, because the majority of HN have seen this trick before.
You can pretend all you want that you're just being polite, but the truth is there is no research backing your claims.
Regards,
A former research scientist, current business owner.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness (2025) - "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".
Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness (2023) - "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".
Chalmers, Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious? (2023) - "within the next decade, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness".
Long, Sebo, Butlin, Birch et al., Taking AI Welfare Seriously (2024) - "there is a realistic possibility that some AI systems will be conscious and/or robustly agentic in the near future".
Dreksler, Caviola, Chalmers, Sebo et al., Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe? (2025) - survey of 582 AI researchers; median estimate of 25% by 2034, and only 10% that such systems will never exist.
TacticalCoder · · focus · HN ↗
A conscious machine that always answer the very exact same thing, formulated the exact same way, bit for bit, to a query is, well, quite a weird kind of "consciousness".
Now, I know, I know: the counter-argument is going to be "but humans have no free-will and are 100% deterministic too".
I haven't yet decided if humans saying there's no free-will and who consider themselves to be 100% deterministic machines are reasonable or not.
Meanwhile: seed / temperature = 0 and I'll happily turn the power button off of any glorified abacus without feeling bad about it.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
You'll need to explain why.
5eueuur · · focus · HN ↗
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
I suspect the reasoning is connected to free will vs. determinism. But no, I see no inconsistency. You'll have to actually point it out.
SkyBelow · · focus · HN ↗
loopies · · focus · HN ↗
This is simply wrong. Quantum effects affect your choices more than it might seem possible. The wrong atom decays in the wrong place in your body mutating your DNA, that one too much string of DNA that starts a tumor, which means chemotherapy. That does seem to affect your choices.
Or instead of Shroedinger's cat you use it to trigger something, buy or sell some stock. Which clearly affects your future, one way or another.
I never really understood why humans keep insisting stochastic processes do not affect their choices and their future. It's very short sighted.
Hell, even brownian noise in your brain can affect your ideas, that one random spark out of nowhere, that one neuron that's pushed over the triggering edge. There's so much stuff all around us affecting us constantly. One neutrino interacting a the wrong time (average one does interact with our bodies across whole life, I remember reading), one cosmic ray.
SkyBelow · · focus · HN ↗
(And even if QM did factor in normally, that just reduces it from determinism to random chance, "free will" still doesn't show up. That's like arguing an AI with sufficiently well implemented RNG is necessary to be conscious.)
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
Also, I'd love to have a quantum copy machine where you just replay someones state again and again with slight changes to see out it effects the output. My assumption is we'd figure out we behave just like LLMs pretty quick.
Also, don't give me unlimited power or I might make a the world a war crime simulator, so there's that.
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
pessimizer · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think it's defensible to say
1) that a transistor isn't conscious,
2) that a bunch of transistors that I've wired together aren't conscious, because I know how I've wired them together and therefore I know when I give them a particular input I will get a particular output, just like the single transistor, then go to
3) that I have a bunch of transistors that I've wired together, but I put in so much input that I can't remember exactly what I've put in, plus I've wired some of the transistors to output random numbers that would be difficult to guess and fed them in also, therefore I don't know what will come out, are conscious.
Even if I do accept this, if I take away the random number generator, and I can literally predict what can come out (by running a test in advance), and I still considered that consciousness, that would be odd. The only reason why I ever suspected consciousness was because I couldn't predict the output. I shouldn't even have accepted that, because I didn't think of the random number generator as conscious. [edit: of course, with the same seed the random number generator would have the same oddness.]
It seems a bit like an argument from ignorance, a theological argument. Not understanding how something moves makes it alive (animated by spirits.) But it's even weirder to assign it metaphysical qualities when you built every single element of it with the goal to do the thing that it does, and it does it totally predictably and deterministically.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
Take a car apart. So now I have a pile on the floor with an engine, some wheels, a tire, and some chairs.
Can you point to the part that makes it cruise at 130 km/h on the autobahn? I bet you can't. You need to assemble all the parts back into a car before they work again.
Or take your transistors. We can put them together to make a pocket calculator. Can any small bunch of transistors add 1+1? Trivially I can think of a few conformations that can actually, if that's all you want to do. But you will need all of them together if you add 12345678+87654321.
So all of biology so far has been take things apart all the way and you end up with your hands full of a bunch of molecules. Are those molecules alive? No. You need to put them together into organelles and the organelles into cells before we call them alive.
How about consciousness? Well, we haven't solved that one yet, but we figure that -since it's a biological function - we should be able to pull it apart in the same way. That's biology's best guess anyway, and there's several sub-disciplines of biology working on it, from neuroanatomy to neurophysiology to ethology.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
> You'll need to explain why.
Where are you going with this? I don't see a conclusion for this line of questioning.
I mean, you can't explain why a machine that reliably and predictably produces the same result is "the normal kind of conscious", can you? So why expect someone else to explain why it's a "weird" kind of conscious?
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
No, we don't. Where are you reading your research papers?
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
"People are deterministic" is news to me, so I'd really rather like to know which papers claimed that.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗
Have a nice day.
lelanthran · · focus · HN ↗
Not a problem; this is the playbook all the all-in AI boosters run to when they are called on their claims. Everyone reading this knows exactly what your claims meant, because the majority of HN have seen this trick before.
You can pretend all you want that you're just being polite, but the truth is there is no research backing your claims.
Regards,
A former research scientist, current business owner.
qarl · · focus · HN ↗