On 11/29/2025 5:03 AM, John Clark wrote:
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. *
Curiously, I just read a blurb this morning that said LLM's that were
given hard instruction not to lie, were more likely to claim they were
conscious.
*>> 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 asharp 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.*
I agree to that intelligence has degrees, although there may be
differences of kind so it's not a 1-dimensional continuum. But do you
have a sharp dividing line between conscious and unconscious? If
somebody asks me that, I reply,"What kind of conscious do you mean?"
/> 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. *
And doesn't exactly the same assertion serve as an example of
consciousness? Yet intelligence and consciousness aren't the same thing.*
*
/> The stuff that an LLM "knows" was all written by people./
*The millions ofprotein structures thatAlphafolddeduced 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 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.
*No, I do not know what "physical likeness" means, at least not the
way you seem to be using the term. Please enlighten me. *
Better I'll give you and example. Albert Einstein was physically like
me and a rock is not.
/>>>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.*
Here's the Venn diagram (conscious (intelligence)) of "...intelligence
implies consciousness (3 lines above). Yes,..."
But earlier (line 5, 11/28/2025 1326) you wrote, "...if consciousness
wasn't an inevitable byproduct of intelligence..." implying the Venn
diagram (intelligence (consciousness)).
To believe both is to assert they are identical, which I doubt.
*>> Asking where consciousness is located islike asking where
the integer 4 is located. *
/> An evasive answer,/
*I'm not being evasive at all, I sincerely believe it is nonsenseto
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. *
So you think the same mind can be located two different places at the
same time. Can /it/ be thinking two different thoughts?
*
*
*Asking where a mind is located is like asking where yellow or fast or
big is located. *
Those are attributes of things, so are co-located with a thing. The
analogue would be "thought" which in general may be /associated/ with
some distance thing, like an image seen, but /your/ thought is localized
in /your/ brain (as easily demonstrated with a little LSD).
Brent 3
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