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Comment by melvinroest

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Comment by melvinroest

Here is a sketch of my argument. It would need tidying but that would require a lot of work.

I've been calling LLMs digital intelligence. That's in my opinion what they are and on the digital/conceptual realm they are better than humans since LLMs are better generalists.

But I'd never state their conscious. For me consciousness extends outward from myself, since I can't trust anything else. It starts with the question like: why can't I control the movement of another person? Why can't I transfer my mind to another body and theirs to mine? Why is it that whenever I sleep, and similar things, I end up back to this place called "reality"?

I come to the conclusion that I am conscious and I'm a conscious being in reality. I am human and I've been raised by humans. Now, technically, all humans besides me could be zombies. They could be non-conscious beings that simply can act like humans. I'm sure we'll be able to create them in a few decades. However, I'm incentivized for multiple reasons to believe they're not zombies. Therefore humans are conscious too. All of them. Can I know for sure? No since I can't even trust my own senses fully or my own thoughts (the whole Descartes thing) but I choose to trust those things too because I need some reasonable-ish foundation to work from.

If humans are conscious, why aren't animals like us? Surely great apes must be conscious at least to some extent. Hell, some of them even have better short-term memory than us [1]. Well, turns out, from an anatomy standpoint they look a lot like us. Fine, let's assume they're conscious too.

Now we get into the territory that anything that has a large enough brain must be conscious because that's how we govern our consciousness. So you can extend this to all kinds of living beings.

I did this from my perspective. Of course, you should do it from your perspective. The same argument could be made.

For as long as we can't manipulate conscious experience in some way shape or form, we have no clue whether anything that isn't like us can be conscious. We'd need to be able to merge and split conscious experiences or we'd need to be very strongly able to understand why that isn't possible. And I don't mean just at the biological level but at the experiential level. Currently conjoined twins, and what they tell us gives some insight (being able to sense the other part that's part of the other twin).

Other than that, I claim we have no clue what consciousness is other than that we're experiencing it. So to call LLMs conscious is way too big of a claim. But they are definitely intelligent because they come up with things that I wouldn't have and it's useful to me. Perhaps a practical characterization of intelligence but it works for me.

I think for anyone to say something useful from this you'd need the trifecta of deep neuroscience knowledge, deep philosophy knowledge and (at least) a strong understanding of how LLMs work.

Replies melvinroest · 2026-08-27
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