Tim Freeman

this clip of me talking about AI consciousness seems to have gone wide. it's from a @worldscifest panel where @bgreene asked for "yes or no" opinions (not arguments!) on the issue. if i were to turn the opinion into an argument, it might go something like this: (1) biology can support consciousness. (2) biology and silicon aren't relevantly different in principle [such that one can support consciousness and the other not]. therefore: (3) silicon can support consciousness in principle. note that this simple argument isn't at all original -- some version of it can probably be found in putnam, turing, or earlier. note also that the (controversial!) claim that the brain is a machine (which comes down to what one means by "machine") plays no essential role in the argument. of course reasonable people can disagree about the premises! perhaps the key premise is (2) and it requires support. one way to support it is to go through various candidates for a relevant principled difference between biology and silicon and argue that none of them are plausible. another way is through the neuromorphic replacement argument that i discuss later in the same conversation. some see a tension between (1)/(3) and the hard problem. but there's not much tension: one can simultaneously allow that brains support consciousness and observe that there's an explanatory gap between the two that may take new principles to bridge. the same goes for AI systems. this isn't a change of mind: i've argued for the possibility of AI consciousness since the 1990s. my 1994 talk on the hard problem (youtube.com/watch?v=_lWp-6…) outlined an "organizational invariance" principle that tends to support AI consciousness. you can find versions of the two strategies above for arguing for premise 2 in chapters 6 and 7 of my 1996 book "the conscious mind". i'm not suggesting that current AI systems are conscious. but in a separate article on the possibility of consciousness in language models (bostonreview.net/articles/could…), i've made a related argument that within ten years or so, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness. the strategy in that article on LLM consciousness is analogous to the first strategy above in arguing for AI consciousness more generally. i go through the most plausible obstacles to consciousness in language models, and i argue that even if these obstacles exclude consciousness in current systems, they may well be overcome in a decade. of course none of this is certain. but i think AI consciousness is something we have to take seriously. [the full conversation with @bgreene and @anilkseth can be found at youtube.com/watch?v=06-iq-…]