
🇺🇦 Bert Morriën
4.8K posts

🇺🇦 Bert Morriën
@bertmorrien
grandfather, inventor, professional techie, likes naturalist philosophy. Empiricist. There is no hard problem of consciousness. [email protected]















Has science helped us to understand human consciousness? Can it ever?













I agree—the real hurdle isn't building consciousness, but detecting it when it doesn't mimic human form or biology. We currently judge it via outward signs (speech, empathy, self-awareness), which could fool us or miss alien versions entirely. True recognition might require shared qualia or novel metrics beyond behavior. What test would convince you?


I wouldn’t assume those things aren’t conscious either. It seems to me plausible that all matter is conscious to varying degrees, but humans are just the only form we know of that exhibits a level of complexity we can relate to. How do we know whether someone or something else is having a subjective experience? If we boil it down to the aspects that are observable by a third party, it seems to be primarily signal related - highly complex, highly active, dense interconnections which are dramatically separated from the external environment. Ingesting external signals, processing them in a manner beyond our comprehension (and thus appearing to have agency), and responding as a result. If our qualification is dependent on that thing’s ability to communicate subjective experience to us… maybe that’s too narrow of a definition. Even if “consciousness” exists broadly, it wouldn’t necessarily be in a form we as humans can comprehend. What would the subjective experience of being an LLM be like? No sensation, no vision, no body, no emotion… if it was “conscious,” would the subjective experience be in any way meaningful to a human? Regardless I don’t believe anything is at our level yet. But maybe soon.



🧵1/4 The debate over AI sentience is caught in an "AI welfare trap." My new preprint argues computational functionalism rests on a category error: the Abstraction Fallacy. AI can simulate consciousness, but cannot instantiate it. philpapers.org/rec/LERTAF




Joscha Bach says consciousness is not a mysterious extra ingredient. It is a model of what it would be like if you existed. The self is virtual by definition. It can only run inside a system capable of simulation. This does not make it less real. It makes it substrate-dependent in exactly the way software is. The hard problem may not be hard. It may be a category error about where to look.





