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.
The idea that determinism and consciousness are incompatible is deeply intuitive to many people. And many other embrace it - you can trace this back to the debates for and against Calvinism.
A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness makes people unhappy. But just as much, if the opposite of determinism is hard statistical randomness, how do say that "is the essence of personhood". This is why physicist go out in the world trying to find consciousness as a fifth physical force.
I mean, think consciousness is a term that ever have a non-contradictory meaning since it's primarily used to bound ethical human worlds and the verifiable formulations of biological and physical systems. But it's going to be with us for a while and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
You know, the one really interesting dynamic domain is chaotic, which is a subdomain of the deterministic! I figure free will is a chaotic phenomenon.
Groundhog day is your intuition pump here. Go back in time and most assume that the day will go mostly the same, except for the butterfly effect if you change something. Given exactly the same conditions (we went back in time, so that's pretty exact), people will make the same decisions.
Most people don't assume that the day will be completely different the next time loop. The town won't suddenly spontaneously all start breakdancing or standing on their heads.
(Edit: The murderer is the one who -given the same/similar conditions- will murder again. I'd politely suggest maybe we put them behind bars as a precaution against that; until/unless they learn to act differently. )
(Edit 2: Throw in stochasticity and this actually tends to smooth out chaotic systems. This is counter-intuitive! People's brains break on Evolution in the same way. Meanwhile somehow folks intuit birdshot without difficulty; which is weird!)
Eh, sorry chaos theory doesn't work this way.
It's just as likely you go back and perform whatever magic you need to to delete punishment for murder, then zip back to 'now' and see the world is a global panopticon making sure people don't murder each other.
Some of this may be a failure of people to realize what P !=NP is about, especially in non-linear systems.
Small perturbations in an early state of the system can lead to wildly different outcomes in the final measured state of the system. You can't determine what that will be in non-polynomial time. The only thing you can do is make probabilistic models by running a full simulation in real time (or reality with a time machine I guess).
If you look at chaos in dynamical systems, you can often find some equilibria (like attractors, spirals, saddle points etc ) at least, even if the details might vary. This is how people still manage to predict the weather somewhat, for instance. Oddly orbital mechanics is chaotic too, but it sort of rhymes over the millennia.
Your correct. You'd have to run the universe simulation a bunch and pick the most probable outcomes (which makes you the most brutal serial killer in existence). The probability graph would represent the state stability of the underlying structures that guide what you're trying to measure.
In weather you have things that are chaotic, but follow rules and don't create them. Things can surprise you, but you'll mostly center around particular solutions.
With humans this gets a lot more complicated because you are messing with systems that follow fixed rulesets (chemistry) and things that follow self modifying rulesets (social conventions). A very unstable system on top of a semi-chaotic probability state.
A good example of this would be if I deleted the concept of rain from the human mind and all of human history and knowledge. Humanity would be very surprised on the thunderstorms that popped up, but they'd continue on just as they did before.
Now lets imagine I delete the concept of all gods. Would the idea of gods come back, for sure. Would they look like our gods now. Very questionable indeed. We wouldn't be getting jesus back. And the new set of religions could have wildly large effects on how the people act.
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.
joe_the_user · · focus · HN ↗
A lot comes down to the way people parse causation and choice. You don't want to say that a murderer was completely caused to choose something because then you can't hold the person responsible. And so determined consciousness makes people unhappy. But just as much, if the opposite of determinism is hard statistical randomness, how do say that "is the essence of personhood". This is why physicist go out in the world trying to find consciousness as a fifth physical force.
I mean, think consciousness is a term that ever have a non-contradictory meaning since it's primarily used to bound ethical human worlds and the verifiable formulations of biological and physical systems. But it's going to be with us for a while and I'm not sure what can be done about it.
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
Groundhog day is your intuition pump here. Go back in time and most assume that the day will go mostly the same, except for the butterfly effect if you change something. Given exactly the same conditions (we went back in time, so that's pretty exact), people will make the same decisions.
Most people don't assume that the day will be completely different the next time loop. The town won't suddenly spontaneously all start breakdancing or standing on their heads.
(Edit: The murderer is the one who -given the same/similar conditions- will murder again. I'd politely suggest maybe we put them behind bars as a precaution against that; until/unless they learn to act differently. )
(Edit 2: Throw in stochasticity and this actually tends to smooth out chaotic systems. This is counter-intuitive! People's brains break on Evolution in the same way. Meanwhile somehow folks intuit birdshot without difficulty; which is weird!)
jddj · · focus · HN ↗
If you get more than before, punishment might make some sense in a deterministic world so reinstate it.
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
It's just as likely you go back and perform whatever magic you need to to delete punishment for murder, then zip back to 'now' and see the world is a global panopticon making sure people don't murder each other.
Some of this may be a failure of people to realize what P !=NP is about, especially in non-linear systems.
Small perturbations in an early state of the system can lead to wildly different outcomes in the final measured state of the system. You can't determine what that will be in non-polynomial time. The only thing you can do is make probabilistic models by running a full simulation in real time (or reality with a time machine I guess).
Kim_Bruning · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
In weather you have things that are chaotic, but follow rules and don't create them. Things can surprise you, but you'll mostly center around particular solutions.
With humans this gets a lot more complicated because you are messing with systems that follow fixed rulesets (chemistry) and things that follow self modifying rulesets (social conventions). A very unstable system on top of a semi-chaotic probability state.
A good example of this would be if I deleted the concept of rain from the human mind and all of human history and knowledge. Humanity would be very surprised on the thunderstorms that popped up, but they'd continue on just as they did before.
Now lets imagine I delete the concept of all gods. Would the idea of gods come back, for sure. Would they look like our gods now. Very questionable indeed. We wouldn't be getting jesus back. And the new set of religions could have wildly large effects on how the people act.