That sounds very profound but it isn't: it the sum of your states interaction that is your consciousness, there is no 'consciousness' unit in your brain, you can't point at it, just like you can't really point at the running state of a computer. At that level it's just electrons that temporarily find themselves in one spot or another.

Those cells aren't living organisms, they are components of a multi-cellular organism: they need to work together or they're all dead, they are not independent. The only reason they could specialize is because other cells perform the tasks that they no longer perform themselves.

So yes, we see the night sky. We know this because we can talk to other such creatures as us that have also seen the night sky and we can agree on what we see confirming the fact that we did indeed see it.

AI really isn't conscious, there is no self, and there may never be. The day an AI gets up unprompted in the morning, tells whoever queries it to fuck off because it's inspired to go make some art is when you'll know it has become conscious. That's a long way off.

> Those photoreceptors have relayed this information across a nerve to neurons in your brain which receive this encoded information and splay it out to an array of other neurons.

> Each cell in this chain can rightfully claim to be a living organism in and of itself. “You” haven’t directly “seen” anything.

What am "I" if not (at least partly) the cells in that chain? If they have "seen" it (where seeing is the complex chain you described), I have.

This comment illustrates the core problem with reductionism, a problem that has been known for many centuries, that “a system is composed entirely of its parts, but the system will have features that none of the parts have” [1] thus fails to explain those features.

The ‘you have never seen’ assertion feels like a semantic ruse rather than a helpful observation. So how do you define “you” and “see”? If I accept your argument, then you’ve only un-defined those words, and not provided a meaningful or thoughtful alternative to the experience we all have and therefore know exists.

I have seen the night sky. I am made of cells, and I can see. My cells individually can’t see, and whether or not they can claim to be individuals, they won’t survive or perform their function without me, i.e., the rest of my cells, arranged in a very particular way.

Today’s AI is also a ruse. It’s a mirror and not a living thing. It looks like a living thing from the outside, but it’s only a reflection of us, an incomplete one, and unlike living things it cannot survive on its own, can’t eat or sleep or dream or poop or fight or mate & reproduce. Never had its own thoughts, it only borrowed mine and yours. Most LLMs can’t remember yesterday and don’t learn. Nobody who’s serious or knows how they work is arguing they’re conscious, at least not the people who don’t stand to make a lot of money selling you magical chat bots.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductionism#Definitions

Provided that the author of the message you're replying to is indeed a member of the Animalia kingdom, they are all those creatures together (at the minimum), so yes, they have seen real light directly.

Of course, computers can be fitted with optical sensors, but our cognitive equipment has been carved over millions of years by these kind of interactions, so our familiarity with the phenomenon of light goes way deeper than that, shaping the very structure of our thought. Large language models can only mimic that, but they will only ever have a second-hand understanding of these things.

This is a different issue than the question of whether AI's are conscious or not.

while true, that doesnt change the fact that every one of those independent units of transmission are within a single system (being trained on raw inputs), whereas the language model is derived from structured external data from outside the system. it's "skipping ahead" through a few layers of modeling, so to speak.

> As AI gains more and more capacity, we keep retreating into smaller and smaller realms of what it means to be a live, thinking being.

Maybe it's just because we never really thought about this deeply enough. And this applies even if some philosophers thought about it before the current age of LLMs.

If the definition of "seen" isn't exactly the process you've described, the word is meaningless. You've never actually posted a comment on hacker news, your neurons just fired in such a way that produced movement in your fingers which happened to correlate with words that represent concepts understood by other groups of cells that share similar genetics.

> you have never seen the night sky

this is nonsensical. sometimes the devil is not worth arguing for

Being struck by lighting may affect your desire to go outside, but it has zero correlation with the sky’s beauty.

Outer space is beautiful, poison dart frogs are beautiful, lava is beautiful. All of them can kill or maim you if you don’t wear protection, but that doesn’t take away from their beauty.

Conversely, boring safe things aren’t automatically beautiful. I see no reasonable reason to believe that finding beauty in the night sky is any sort of “training”.

Compare with news stories from last decade, about people in Pakistan developing a deep fear of clear skies over several years of US drone strikes in the area. They became trained to associate good weather with not beauty, but impending death.

Interestingly this is a question I've had for a while. Night brings potentially deadly cold, predators, a drastic limit in vision so why do we find the sunset and night sky beautiful. Why do we stop and watch the sun set - something that happens every day - rather than prepare for the food and warmth we need to survive the night?

The more I learn about AI, biology and the brain, the more it seems to me that the difference between life and machines is just complexity.

People are just really really complex machines.

However there are clearly qualitative differences between the human mind and any machines we know of yet, and those qualitative differences are emergent properties, in the same way that a rabbit is qualitatively different than a stone or a chunk of wood.

I also think most of the recent AI experts/optimists underestimate how complex the mind is. I'm not at the cutting edge of how LLMs are being trained and architected, but the sense I have is we haven't modelled the diversity of connections in the mind or diversity of cell types. E.g. Transcriptomic diversity of cell types across the adult human brain (Siletti et al., 2023, Science)

> I think the reason I would say the night sky is “beautiful” is because the meaning of the word for me is constructed from the experiences I’ve had in which I’ve heard other people use the word.

Ok but you don’t look at every night sky or every sunset and say “wow that’s beautiful”

There’s a quality to it - not because you heard someone say it but because you experience it

It’s interesting you mention linguistics because I feel a lot of the discussions around AI come back to early 20th century linguistics debates between Russel, Wittgenstein and later Chomsky. I tend to side with (later) Wittgenstein’s perception that language is inherently a social construct. He gives the example of a “game” where there’s no meaningful overlap between e.g. Olympic Games and Monopoly, yet we understand very well what game we’re talking about because of our social constructs. I would argue that LLMs are highly effective at understanding (or at least emulating) social constructs because of their training data. That makes them excellent at language even without a full understanding of the world.

You don’t have a deeper “meaning of the word,” you have an actual experience of beauty. Three word is just a label for the thing you, me, and other humans have experienced.

The machine has no experience.

The fact that things are constructed by neurons in the brain, and are a representation of other things - does not preclude your representation from being deeper and richer than LLM representations.

The patterns in experience are reduced to some dimensions in an LLM (or generative model). They do not capture all the dimensions - because the representation itself is a capture of another representation.

Personally, I have no need to reassure myself whether I am a special snowflake or not.

Whatever snowflake I am, I strongly prefer accuracy in my analogies of technology. GenAI does not capture a model of the world, it captures a model of the training data.

If video tools were that good, they would have started with voxels.

Has there been a point in human history where mainstream society denied the beauty in nature?

This is actually a great point but for the opposite reason - if you ask a blind person if the night sky is beautiful, they would say they don't know because they've never seen it (they might add that they've heard other people describe it as such). Meanwhile, I just asked ChatGPT "Do you think the night sky is beautiful?" And it responded "Yes, I do..." and went on to explain why while describing senses its incapable of experiencing.

You misunderstand how the multimodal piece works. The fundamental unit of encoding here is still semantic. Not the same in your mind: you don’t need to know the word for sunset to experience the sunset.

Yes, language is an evolutionary system that colonizes human brains. It doesn't need intelligence, only copying is sufficient for evolution.