On 11/28/2025 1:26 PM, John Clark wrote:
On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 2:53 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]>
wrote:
*>> I have direct knowledge ofmy own consciousness but not of
yours*
> /Which was my point. You know something about consciousness/
*
*
*Yes.*
/> that the knowledge base of an LLM doesn't contain. /
*You are assuming what you are trying to prove.How do you know that
the LLM does not have knowledge of its own consciousness? Maybe the
LLM is conscious, but maybe it isn't. *
Have you asked it? I did.
*And maybe you're conscious, but maybe you're a philosophical zombie.
But I doubt it.*
/> You take it as an axiom that intelligent behavior implies
consciousness, yet at the same time you recognize that
consciousness is "easier" than intelligence. /
*Yes.*
/> So you're now assuming a starfish moving toward food isn't
intelligent but may be conscious. Well a starfish will react to a
touch./
*Evolution managed to produce emotions like pleasure and pain billions
of years ago, microorganisms will move towards certain chemicals and
away from others, and emotions like fear and anger as exemplified in
the fight or flight response. But Evolution only figured out a few
million years ago how to produce something we would call intelligent, *
That's where we disagree. Intelligence includes following a chemical
gradient to food. Bacteria can do it. You seem to move you definition
of intelligent around to suit your thesis that it entails
consciousness. Do you have a definition?
*and our own species is less than half a million years old. *
/>>> And who wrote that stuff about consciousness...people
who were conscious./
*>> You take that as a given, but why? *
/> The point is that it was not written by an AI, which is a
historical fact. /
*You are avoiding the point.*
I just repeated my point. The stuff that an LLM "knows" was all written
by people.
*Why do you believe that the _PEOPLE_ who wrote those books about
consciousness were themselves conscious? I believe they were conscious
because the books were obviously written by an intelligent entity;
but you think that is a poor reason so I want to know why you think
they were conscious. *
It doesn't matter whether or not they were conscious. Their writings
are not conscious and that's the whole source of LLM intelligence.
/>>> In part I believe my fellow human beings are conscious
because the are physically like me and I'm conscious. /
*> Physically likeyou? *
/> Yes. Capable of movement, speech, directed action. /
*A machine can do all of those things. *
Sophistry. You know damn well what physical likeness means.
/>>> You seem to think intelligence is the end all and be all
of consciousness. /
*>> I do.If it were otherwise, if consciousness wasn't an
inevitable byproduct of intelligence *
/>But you make the inference the other way. You assume
intelligence implies consciousness,/
*Yes because that's the only way Darwinian natural selection could
ever have produced consciousness, and I know for a fact that it did.*
You can't even get your inferences consistent.
*>> You're never going to be able to teach General Relativity
to your dog, but your dog is a lot more intelligent than a
rock, and correspondingly is a lot more consciousthan a rock.*
/> But the correspondence is not that his intelligence made him
conscious. Evolutionarily it's the other way around; sensors
develop and drove reaction. Intelligence inserted something more
complicated than "drove"./
*I don't know what you mean by that.*
*>> What exactlywould an AI needto say*
/> There are more possible actions than "say"./
*Not for us, we have talked with each other for over a decade butwe
have never met, all we havedone is send words to each other over the
Internet.Was that enough for you to determine if I am an intelligent
entity or not? It was for me, I think you are an intelligent entity. *
Intelligent, sure. Not an LLM...dunno.*
*
*>> for you to think there were indications of
self-consciousness? Do you see any indications of
self-consciousness in this email that I have written? **Do
you see any indications that I am not an AI?*
/> You keep using "AI" instead of LLM. That's not what an LLM
would do to try to shift the argument. /
*OK. Do you see any indication that I am not aLLM *
I said that's not what an LLM would have done. Further, and LLM
wouldn't have ignored it that way.*
*
*like Gemini or Claude, or any indication that I am? If so, what is it? *
/>>> I'd like it to tell me where it was located,/
*>> Asking where consciousness is located islike asking where the
integer 4 is located. *
An evasive answer, which I'll take as evidence you're an LLM.
*I don't believe your consciousness is inside a container made of
bonefor the simple reason that you are not conscious of it being
there. When you're repairing a watch with your handswhere is your
consciousness? The least bad answer would be at the tip of your
fingers.*
/> You lose consciousness when you're hit in the head, not on the
tip of your finger.
/
*You wouldn't lose consciousness if you had a back up brain running in
parallel at a different location,*
I think I already have redundant fingers, but not a redundant brain.
Brent
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