this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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I dont personally think this is quite fair either. Here's a quote from the first link:
To me, as someone who has spent a lot of time thinking about consciousness (the fact of subjective experience) this seems like a perfectly reasonable take. Consciousness itself is entirely a subjective experience. There's zero evidence of it outside of our own minds. It can't be measured in any way. We can't even prove that other people are consciouss. It's a relatively safe assumption to make but there's no conclusive way to prove it. We simply assume they are because they seem like it.
In philosophy there's this concept of a "philosophical zombie" which means a creature which is outwardly indistinquishable from a human but it completely lacks any internal experience. This is basically what the robots in the TV series "west world" were - or at least so they thought.
This is all to say that there is a point after which AI system so convincingly mimics a conscious being that it's not entirely ridiculous thing to worry that what if it actually is like something to be this system and whether we're actually keeping a conscious being as a slave. If we had a way to prove that it is not consciouss then there's no issue there but we can't. People used to justify mistreatment of animals by claiming they're not consciouss either but very few people thinks that anymore. I'm not saying an LLM might be conscious, I'm relatively certain that they're not but they're also the most concsious seeming thing we've ever created and they'll just keep getting better and better. I'd say that there is a point after which these systems act consciouss so convincingly that one would need to basically be a psychopath to mistreat them.
I don't really agree, acting like a conscious being (because it's a language model) still doesn't make it conscious, perceived or not.
Have you read Blindsight by Peter Watts? It's an interesting book that touches on self-awareness and how we perceive it.
No, it doesn’t make it conscious - but you also can’t prove that it isn’t, and that’s the problem. The only evidence of consciousness outside our own minds is when something appears conscious. Once an LLM reaches the point where you genuinely can’t tell whether you’re talking to a real person or not, then insisting “it’s not actually conscious” becomes just a story you’re telling yourself, despite all the evidence pointing the other way.
I’d argue that at that point, you should treat it like another person - even if only as a precaution. And I’d even go further: not treating something that seems that "alive" with even basic decency reflects quite poorly on them and raises questions about their worldview.