I agree. I haven't read any more than the first paragraph yet (but I will, after work). The only way that 'AIs are not conscious' can be true is if we decide, with high confidence, that they are lacking some essential property that is not lacking in ourselves. There is no convincing philosophical position that supports this (convincing to me, anyway).

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randomImmigrant 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Hmm let me try then. AI agents do not experience real time. This is understandable given their design, but it’s also something we have good empirical evidence for. They cannot, especially over the long horizon, track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks. And they are not off by a few minutes but often bizarrely off, even mixing across past present and future.

Biology, on the other hand, is nothing but timed processes in a loop, the most obvious to us being the circadian cycle. As estimators of wall clock time, biology isn’t great, but when it comes to internal processes, and most certainly learning, memory, sensing, locomotion… biology is rhythmic in behavior, and the rhythms go all the way down to gene expression. More, these rhythms are, except during sleep, constantly entraining to signals from the environment that indicate time, most importantly light.

I think it’s a fairly unremarkable claim that agency and consciousness are temporal processes that depend on systems having an internal sense of time. How else can you anticipate? How can a system that can be literally turned off ever succeed in an environment where time never stops?

	▲	ooloncoloophid 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I agree, there is certainly a clear operational difference in how human brains and these models produce language. I'm not convinced, though, that experiencing real time is a requirement of conscious thought. A cognitive system (assuming these models and the brain are both examples of this) needs to proceed from state A to state B as it processes information. The time interval between these states can be arbitrary, it seems to me (setting aside problems with disconnecting the mind from its substrate, which does of course need rhythms at various frequencies; oxygen at a higher frequency than sugar, and so on). I'm not sure that going from A to B quickly, or slowly, or with intervals of a thousand years affects that entity's consciousness in of itself (even though it might be difficult to put ourselves in the shoes of such an entity).
	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		>AI agents do not experience real time. For around 8 hours a day, neither do you. Not sure if this has anything to do with the subject at all. >track how much real time has passed as they complete their tasks. Humans don't do this either. You use context clues from the world around you. If I lock you in a room with no windows or a dark cave your timing senses can go all fucky really quick. >is nothing but timed processes in a loop, I mean, so is an agents harness. You can make as many loops as you'd like here. There are a whole lot of holes in your claims.