How are people STILL making the same tired arguments in 2026? I got paywalled before I reached the third reason but this is like baby's first intro to the consciousness debate and it utterly fails as a logical argument. Both of the points I was allowed to read (intelligence =/= consciousness and silicon =/= brain matter) say very little about the nature of consciousness.

It's correct that intelligence is not proof of consciousness-- but this fact says nothing about proving non-consciousness of any entity, only that it is not sufficient to prove consciousness. Even working on vibes, the correlation goes in the direction that implies a link between intelligence and consciousness, although again, the correct message to take here is "intelligence does not prove consciousness", not "intelligent things [are / are not] conscious". There is simply no proven causal relation.

The "computers aren't brains" argument is also incredibly dumb. There are some fun thought experiments here, but tl;dr there is nothing proven to be mechanically special about brains as opposed to any other physical system that would cause consciousness. A non-physical difference (ie. a soul) would be a good thing to point to, but proving the existence of a soul or some similar unique non-physical property of humanity is pretty much exactly as hard (maybe harder!) than proving the existence of a conscious experience.

Note that this does not mean I believe that LLMs are conscious. I'm simply pointing out that this article is built on arguments that are so flawed, and well-known to be flawed, that treating it as a serious addition to the conversation is worse than valuing AI slop. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

It's a computer program and some data - nothing more.

I'll happily treat it anyway I see fit at the time - including powering it off without loosing any sleep over it.

If LLMs are conscious then openAI and anthropic are slave traders :) I don't know why they keep perpetuating that story

Painful watching people who have clearly never bothered to read even the shortest excerpt of philosophy try to have a philosophical discussion

earlier this year, AI company Anthropic in San Francisco, California, published research claiming to have identified computational signatures of a form of consciousness in its Claude model1.

These AI companies happily let their AIs escape containment to hack sites so they can claim yet another headline as if its an ad. This claim too will be made of the same bullshit, its just "please give us more money"

LLM/AIs cannot ever be conscious, but the clump of flesh that can play Doom is. This is clearly the correct answer based off of my opinions about consciousness.

It's a silly argument.

LLMs are designed to mimic smart humans. Any test devised to find the dividing line will fail because at some point there will be a pretty large group of humans that would fail that test.

Meaning that we need a definition of consciousness that can't be mimicked by text or voice alone, and isn't going to exclude people who are just naturally unintelligent.

Case in point, some days of the week, the elected - elected! - head of state of a major county couldn't pass a Turing test. You expect the people that voted for him to pass that test any day of the week?

The test ought to be using observation of a quantum state. Can a 50 IQ human observe something thet collapses the wave form? Yeah. Don't take skills to observe. Great, now see if an LLM can do that.

Nobody can even agree on a concrete definition of consciousness so I'm not going to bother reading these 'reasons'.

I'm not really sure what the point of having a conversation about consciousness is. As far as I'm aware no one has ever actually been able to define consciousness in such a way that it could be tested for.

So how could we possibly know one way or the other?

Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness

Oh great so we've only just started the article and we're already mudding the waters. This bodes well. There is no reason to necessarily believe that a system has to be conscious in order to be intelligent. We have multiple examples of consciousness without intelligence (see my fat cat) so there's no reason to believe that the inverse can also not be true.

LLMs have only gotten to a few trillion parameters, whereas a human brain has 100 trillion synapses. They’ll catch up to humans soon enough if only the tech bros can get a trillion dollars for each trillion params.

It's a computer for god's sake. It's no more "intelligent" than an electric mower or a car. Without human intervenion, ai technology wouldn't advance or change.

Edit: i'm done arguing, you guys are nut jobs. Ai or any other non organic organism cannot be sentiant, conscience, or intelligent without human interaction or molecular life.

I will be using my real sentiant, free will, conscience, intelligence to not reply to any comments on this.

Those who think that generative AI is 'conscious' don't understand that it can only do what it is trained on. It can produce impressive outputs only because it fuses together data taken without permission from millions of people, not because it's intelligent or conscious in its own right.