[-] arendjr@programming.dev -1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

This definition of consciousness essentially says that humans have souls and machines don't.

It does, yes. Fwiw, I don’t think it’s necessarily exclusive to humans though, animals and nature may play a role too.

It's unsatisfying because it just kicks the definition question down the road.

Sure, but I have an entire philosophy set up to answer the other questions further down the road too 😂 That may still sound unsatisfying, but feel free to follow along: https://philosophyofbalance.com/

It claims that none of our normal analysis and measurement tools apply to it.

I believe that to be true, yes.

That may be true, but if it is, how can anyone defend the claim that an AI does or does not have it?

In my view, machines and AI can never create consciousness, although it’s not ruled out they can become vessels for it. But the consciousness comes from outside the perspective of the machines.

[-] arendjr@programming.dev -3 points 10 months ago

I think the reason we can’t define consciousness beyond intuitive or vague descriptions is because it exists outside the realm of physics and science altogether. This in itself makes some people very uncomfortable, because they don’t like thinking about or believing in things they cannot measure or control, but that doesn’t make it any less real.

But yeah, given that an LLM is very much measurable and exists within the physical realm, it’s relatively easy to argue that such technology cannot achieve conscious capability.

[-] arendjr@programming.dev -3 points 2 years ago

There is a huge difference between how things should work and how they will though. Without any system of enforcement, I would call it nothing but wishful thinking.

In fairness, democracy was a kind of wishful thinking too, which is why I would propose a new form of monarchy instead: https://arendjr.nl/blog/2025/02/new-monarchy/

[-] arendjr@programming.dev -2 points 2 years ago

Also, writing memory safe code honestly isn’t that hard. It just requires a different approach to problem solving, that just like any other design pattern, once you learn and get used to it, is easy.

This statement is kinda ironic after you just said it’s “easier” to just ban the entire STL and dynamic memory allocation as a whole. You already left the domain of what most consider “easy” quite a while ago.

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