Artificial intelligence is not conscious – Ted Chiang

Scope of Disagreement

• Strong disagreement on whether we can confidently say current LLMs are not conscious.
• Many argue we lack a clear, testable definition of consciousness; others say we don’t need a full theory to rule some things out (e.g., rocks, Word documents, current models).
• Several see “consciousness” as a vague, folk concept or a “family resemblance” cluster, not a single well-defined property.

Definitions and Criteria for Consciousness

• Proposed ingredients include: subjective experience (qualia), self-modeling, emotions, desires, embodiment, persistent memory, continuous operation, and agency.
• Pushback: some of these are contested or come from narrow anthropocentric intuitions.
• Several note that many criteria would exclude some humans or animals, which makes them suspect.

LLMs as Predictors vs Minds

• One camp: LLMs are sophisticated autocomplete / “stochastic parrots,” with no inner life; understanding is just statistical pattern-matching over text.
• Others reply that “just prediction” is also a good description of human brains; prediction machinery can in principle implement rich world models, reasoning, maybe even consciousness.
• Comparisons to thought experiments (Chinese Room, pen‑and‑paper execution) are used both to deny and to support computational consciousness.

Embodiment, Time, and Memory

• Many commenters see embodiment, sensory input, and affect (pleasure/pain, fear, desire) as central; without these, talk of “anxious” or “happy” models is seen as misleading.
• Others argue that virtual bodies and synthetic “drives” could suffice, and that humans can be conscious even in diminished states (coma, amnesia, dreams).
• Lack of persistent self-updating and intrinsic passage of time in current LLM deployments is frequently cited as a major gap.

Ethics and Marketing

• Broad concern that anthropomorphic chat UX and “constitutions” encourage people to treat tools as persons (“pseudanthropy”).
• Some argue: if companies really thought models might suffer, present practices would look like slavery or torture.
• Others say, regardless of AI consciousness, how we treat AI systems matters because it shapes our character (virtue ethics) and our treatment of animals and humans.

Intelligence vs Consciousness

• General agreement that LLMs showcase impressive reasoning and language skills, weakening the idea that such abilities require consciousness.
• Several see this as the real philosophical shock: intelligence and consciousness may be more decoupled than previously assumed.