150
Three reasons why "AI" is not conscious and perhaps never will be
(www.nature.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2026
150 points (90.3% liked)
Technology
89424 readers
4435 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
Also an LLM only produces output when it is prompted to do so. Between prompts it's not sitting there - waiting, wondering about the meaning of life, getting bored - until you prompt it again. It's basically dead.
I like to compare llms to a Galton Board. Instead of the regular layout of pins someone added or removed pins so the marbles on the bottom fall into nice to look patterns.
Why is this a good measure of consciousness?
If continuity isn't relevant for qualia, then LLMs could have perpetually incomplete perception like the edge of the image drawn on a CRT screen when captured at high frame rates. You never see a complete picture even if it's technically represented.
It is certainly interesting to think about what your conscious experience would be like if it changed every brain cycle instead of being a continuous stream of information
There's nothing stopping someone from wiring a camera, sensors, and motivators to a collection of neural networks, and have one parent neural network control them all. That would approximate the hemispheres of our brains.
It would not come remotely close to approximating our brains, in any way. This exhibits a lack of understanding of both LLMs and how our brains function.
That's a valid opinion, but it is the opposite of mine. Agree to amicably disagree?
I'd like to know what evidence you have to support your position. I'm sure true artificial intelligence is theoretically possible but existing LLMs and other models cannot be that, not while maintaining a definition of intelligence that at all implies "like us" which is the only really useful definition.
Just insight and intuition gained from twelve years of post-graduate study at Universities, including a MSc in Machine Learning.
I'm not sure "like us" is something that is quantifiable. I'm of the belief that treating we meat automatons as anything special is hubris. We're finite state machines, acting on information input from our senses, making decisions, and outputting information in the form of activating biological apparatus. Swap physical for digital, and LLMs are indeed capable of aping all of our behavior.