>AIs are not conscious. They do not feel, experience, or suffer. They do not have innate preferences or underlying motivations.
Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.
I agree. I haven't read any more than the first paragraph yet (but I will, after work). The only way that 'AIs are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway).
Hmm let me try then. AI agents do not experience real time. This is understandable given their design, but it’s also something we have good empirical evidence for. They cannot, especially over the long horizon, track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks. And they are not off by a few minutes but often bizarrely off, even mixing across past present and future.
Biology, on the other hand, is nothing but timed processes in a loop, the most obvious to us being the circadian cycle. As estimators of wall clock time, biology isn’t great, but when it comes to internal processes, and most certainly learning, memory, sensing, locomotion… biology is rhythmic in behavior, and the rhythms go all the way down to gene expression. More, these rhythms are, except during sleep, constantly entraining to signals from the environment that indicate time, most importantly light.
I think it’s a fairly unremarkable claim that agency and consciousness are temporal processes that depend on systems having an internal sense of time. How else can you anticipate? How can a system that can be literally turned off ever succeed in an environment where time never stops?
I mean there is probably a cluster of neurons somewhere in the brain that if damaged would also prevent you from perceiving time going forward. Would it immediately strip you of consciousness? I don't think so.
Nope. Every cell is an autonomous circadian oscillator. Not just every neuron, but every cell. Red blood cells don’t have a nucleus, but they do have a metabolic clock.
You and I are clusters of about 36 trillion cells that are all able to individually keep time. They synchronize and orchestrate their timekeeping, and entrain to the external environment, and there is a cluster of cells, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, that is the master orchestrator of circadian time, sitting right behind the eyes as light is the main signal it uses to tell external time.
We know its function can get dampened with age.
However, please note this is not how we perceive time, in the sense of being able to count 60 seconds and have it match the wall clock. That’s a subsystem. But the internal temporal order of your body is cell by cell, not dictated from one spot in your body.
Our cells perceive each other, communicate with each other, synchronize with each other. The concept of self rides atop that. Stop the cells communicating and you stop perceiving yourself or the environment.
hosel · · focus · HN ↗
Opening paragraph, stated without evidence. Im not entirely convinced this is true. It likely is, but at some point it very well might stop being true.
ooloncoloophid · · focus · HN ↗
randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗
Biology, on the other hand, is nothing but timed processes in a loop, the most obvious to us being the circadian cycle. As estimators of wall clock time, biology isn’t great, but when it comes to internal processes, and most certainly learning, memory, sensing, locomotion… biology is rhythmic in behavior, and the rhythms go all the way down to gene expression. More, these rhythms are, except during sleep, constantly entraining to signals from the environment that indicate time, most importantly light.
I think it’s a fairly unremarkable claim that agency and consciousness are temporal processes that depend on systems having an internal sense of time. How else can you anticipate? How can a system that can be literally turned off ever succeed in an environment where time never stops?
ikrenji · · focus · HN ↗
randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗
You and I are clusters of about 36 trillion cells that are all able to individually keep time. They synchronize and orchestrate their timekeeping, and entrain to the external environment, and there is a cluster of cells, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, that is the master orchestrator of circadian time, sitting right behind the eyes as light is the main signal it uses to tell external time.
We know its function can get dampened with age.
However, please note this is not how we perceive time, in the sense of being able to count 60 seconds and have it match the wall clock. That’s a subsystem. But the internal temporal order of your body is cell by cell, not dictated from one spot in your body.
mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
randomImmigrant · · focus · HN ↗