On Fri, Nov 28, 2025 at 9:36 PM Brent Meeker <[email protected]> wrote:
*>> 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? * > *Yes certainly. I've asked the question "are you conscious" to every LLM I can find and every one of them insists that it is not conscious, which didn't surprise me one bit. AI companies do not want their customers to have an existential crisis, therefore they do their best to hardwire an unequivocal "NO" response to any question of that sort. * > *>> 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. * > *I don't believe there is a sharp dividing line between something that is intelligent and something that is not, instead there is a continuum. And I don't believe there is a sharp dividing line between fat and skinny either, nevertheless an 80 pound man is unequivocally skinny, and an 800 pound man is unequivocally fat. * *> Do you have a definition?* > *I'm not going to give you a definition because any definition I give you would be made of words, and I have no doubt you would demand a further definition of at least one of those words, and round and round we'd go. But there is something much better than a definition, an example; a rock is not intelligent, Albert Einstein was, and a bacteria is somewhere between those two extremes. * > *> The stuff that an LLM "knows" was all written by people.* > *The millions of protein structures that Alphafold deduced and that had puzzled humans for decades sure as hell were NOT written by people. * *>>>>> In part I believe my fellow human beings are conscious because the >>> are physically like me and I'm conscious. * >>> >> >> *>>>>Physically like you? * >> >> *>>> Yes. Capable of movement, speech, directed action. * >> > > *>>A machine can do all of those things. * > > > Sophistry. You know damn well what physical likeness means. > *No, I do not know what "physical likeness" means, at least not the way you seem to be using the term. Please enlighten me. * *>>>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.* > *Please point out my error. * > *>> Asking where consciousness is located is like asking where the >> integer 4 is located. * > > *> An evasive answer,* > *I'm not being evasive at all, I sincerely believe it is nonsense to try to specify where a mind is located because that can only be done with a noun, and you are not a noun, you are an adjective, you are the way that matter behaves when it is organized in a Brentmeekerian way. Right now there is only one chunk of matter in the observable universe that is organized in that way, but that need not always be the case. * *Asking where a mind is located is like asking where yellow or fast or big is located. * *John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis>* rv7 3ez > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv29c23_1h8bo9arRAwU%3Drb%2BGSSSBunmB0XJ%2BVQjYHekwg%40mail.gmail.com.
