This reminds me of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47897647, where a quantum computing demo worked equally well if you replaced the QC with an entropy source.

Someone should try to replace the neurons with urand and see if the chip can still play Doom, in the spirit of the qday prize winner.

> but to my dilettante, critical eye it really looks as though there is a hell of a lot of learning happening in the convnet also.

Yeah it feels like they constructed the conclusion and worked backwards from there. I'm not seeing how their claim has much merit.

What is the source line at the end representing there? I've read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and while it definitely contains (and I see it as a major cultural anchor for) animals bred to desire being eaten and be able to say so, it doesn't contain that particular scene (at least in the version I read). Is that line Baggini noting that his scene was inspired by the Adams book?

Did Priscilla also want to be living in absolute misery every single day of her life? The way animals are treated while they are alive is my main objection to our farming practices and the reason why i don’t eat meat.

At the end of the day vegans play the same game as meat eaters where some line is drawn. For meat eaters it is with livestock meats and for pescatarians that is no go, but fish are alright. And for vegans that is all off limits. Except of course the life we deem base enough to not care it is being eaten alive. Slaughter all the lettuce you want. There are no lettuce advocates.

All this to say the moral arguments are sort of silly and illogical. Unfortunately for us all, we exist where we do in the food chain, having to consume life to live, unable to secure our resources from the sun and inorganic resources which would be more morally righteous by all measures. Things could be better but they also could be worse. At least much of our prey receives veterinary care and is killed via airgun vs having to rough it and be eaten alive.

as an unintentional and perhaps unethical vegetarian of many years who hasn't read this book: eating dead things gives me the creeps because it makes me consider my own death and consumption which is unappetizing

is this from Baggini or Adams?

> skeptical that the author has actually looked into the details.

Nevermind the experiment.. same deal for a lot of people who are only interested enough to offer opinions about consciousness and theory-of-mind without doing any of the boring background reading.

The bottom line in TFA is maybe just about unapologetic carbon-chauvinism. But although OP has "been in the AI space since ChatGPT first dropped" and "bothered by this for months", they don't seem aware of terms or the usual problems with this position. Your average non-technical scifi reader has a more nuanced take than AI bros puffing up blogs for linked-in traffic

People having been saying for aeons that consciousness originates in the (mammalian) cortex and not in the brainstem. To justify killing all sorts of animals ;-)

The whole thing makes one thing extremely clear: people are very good at moving goalposts. We've blasted past the 'turing test' for all practical purposes, but we moved the definition of 'true intelligence'. Consciousness and intelligence have long seen as higly correlated or even the same thing. But now we have need of a separation between the two.

If we eventually (we're not there yet, I think) create a true intelligent AI it will probably be a long time before people will accept that creating an intelligent being probably means it should have 'rights' as well.

We're definitely not there yet, but at what point does turning off an AI become the same as killing a being? I think that's not being talked about enough. Sure LLMs are just prediction engines. But so are we. Our brains are prediction engines tuned by evolution to do the best possible prediction of the near future to maximize survival. We are definitely conscious. But a housefly, is that conscious? What makes the difference? it's hard to tell.

Otoh, an AI has no evolutionary reason to have the concept of fear/suffering so maybe it's more like the douglas adams creature that doesn't mind to be killed?

> Consciousness is not produced by the cortex but rather by the brainstem, where signals from all over the body converge (e.g. pain, hunger, itchiness, etc).

Which just begs the question of how pain or hunger is any different from a reward function, the very thing neural networks are based on. Or how it's even different from fungi growing towards food (pleasure), while avoiding salt (pain).

The mind of the dualist is a radio so uncomfortable with its own circuitry that it invents a broadcasting tower to explain the music.

And even "human-like" had some pretty strict definitions back in the day, and probably still now for some people. The people working the fields in the American South certainly weren't thought of as having the same "personhood" on any level as their owners.

This does not follow. Just because biological brains can be conscious does not mean that all of them are, the same way that not every computer is running windows XP.

Why would you expect more concern from people about biological computing? It's not even demonstrated feasibility yet, while LLM based "AI" is already widely used.

How much commentary do you read on biocomputers? There are a lot less people talking about biocomputers than there are talking about AI in general. Remarks on the matter across the board are almost exclusively concerns and skeevishness, proportionally it's not even close.

So then, is it a question of volume? Ask yourself, within the last 2 years, have you thought about LLMs or biocomputers more? Probably the former, right? LLMs are ubiquitous within day-to-day life and massively marketed to the public and biocomputers are esoteric lab experiments that most people come across in a once-in-a-blue-moon news article. We talk and think about things that we are adjacent to, those form our preoccupations. Why aren't people who speak up about the Israel/Palestine dynamic speaking up more about West Papua? Or the mid-19th century geopolitical relationship between Cambodia and Viet Nam? Epistemological asymmetry.

If ai running on silicon can be conscious - does it imply that the same calculation done by a human with pen and paper is also conscious?

I think they _could_ but I doubt our current activation functions are sufficiently nuanced to allow consciousness that we would recognize.

same question, I thought a long while before clicking publish contemplating if I were sounding too larp-philosophical but it had been bothering me far too long

Fine, I tweeted something about it.

> Why aren't those people voicing more concerns?

They like money

Not really. Are jelly fishes conscious? Are carrots conscious? Those are biological and serve complex functions.

Okay fine, I'll voice my concern: I'm concerned.

Anyone who believes that humans are conscious has to believe that mosquitoes are conscious too, right?

For what it's worth, this happens every time there is a new technological innovation. Are human brains hydraulic systems? Are humans just a computer? Are they an LLM?

These technologies give some insight, but the answer is always not really. It would be good if we studied actual human brains in some detail if we want to know these answers.

Every day we demonstrate what a cultural lack of liberal arts does to people.

They aren't. However there is a coordinated effort to push this pseudo-philosophy on masses. On the one hand it degrades the idea of human consciousness or soul, calling it a fiction. On the other hand it props the AI, calling its pile of transistors almost brain-like.

... which is exactly how we know that LLMs are not conscious. We can't really explain consciousness. We can absolutely explain LLMs. The math is heavy and massive, but explainable. We can explain it layer-by-layer until we show that at its most basic level, it is still just a series of 0s and 1s.

Or not a problem at all.

People smuggle in so many assumptions when they use words like consciousness or thinking or soul or personhood, I've never met a lay person who could talk clearly about ai safety issues unless we switched to language like process.

Consciousness is an absolutely terrible term that's going to get us all killed by Ai. I know a huge swath of people who think its nbd to torture Ai because it doesnt have a soul, well I see a LOT of non-theists smuggling soul rhetoric and thinking in via consciousness and that's a problem.

I don't believe in souls at all. When you believe in souls then you need to believe on afterlife. You need to believe things that no one can proof, see, meassure,...

When you believe anything has a soul you entered religion and be in the same room than people which believe on their invisible friends.

I feel that "YouTube makes you an idiot" is a misdiagnosis. And one I hear frequently.

Books can make you an idiot too- I think of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" or "Grit" or any number of pseudo-science best seller books. These books end up capturing the public imagination in big ways too- Grit caused some government policy in the US around when it was popular.

The difference, I suppose, is that YouTube works faster by having many different people presenting the same bad ideas that the algorithm has helped you to buy into.

On the other hand there are amazing and useful YouTube channels that I use all the time like Practical Engineering, Crafsman, Technology Connections, Park Tools, SciShow, Crash Course, and on and on.

I really do suck at DOOM - and I did read the paper about BNNs, so I anticipated how it works, doesn't make it any less interesting [0]

Playing DOOM is playing DOOM - if it's through your keyboard or mouse of progressing through the game states to move forward - hope that makes sense.

0 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.11632

I don't think the average YouTube influencer is growing 200,000 human neurons.

This did have some real scientific backing. Even if the 'result's are hyped.

It is little extreme to call this false because it appeared on YouTube.

Converting an image to numbers, doesn't automatically scream, this isn't seeing.

The brain does a lot of manipulation of the input images, the pixels from the retina, that doesn't sound far from just linear algebra.

This is where I'm at as well. I don't think we'll see true AGI until we go beyond silicon. It can't grow on it's own, and we'd burn the world down trying to get it to scale.

A living bundle of neurons that can grow and learn is exciting to think about.

It's also terrifying to imagine the ramifications considering how things are going with silicon based AI.

Username checks out.