It is certainly interesting to think about what your conscious experience would be like if it changed every brain cycle instead of being a continuous stream of information

If the rest of the thread is to be believed, the sources do not justify the claim either, yeah. I’m gonna be real I’m not gonna go look myself

And around and around we go. How many times will I explain the same thing, and how many times will you not disagree, but fail to understand my argument entirely?

Chalmerite bug person cannot admit that someone who disagrees with them might disagree for reasons other than misunderstanding

“Do you understand what I’m trying to communicate”

No

You can rant all you want about how I’m arguing from authority (I’m not) or how you’re disagreeing rather than not understanding, but you keep literally saying you do not understand.

Your perception of the squares in the image is “subjective” because you are seeing the same light from both grey squares but perceiving it differently based on context. You are literally percieving the same objective physical phenomenon in two different subjective ways.

Any second now, Justin Kerprank is gonna jump out and tell me I’ve been ker-pranked. I refuse to believe that someone who understands the history of the subject doesn’t know what I’m talking about-- so clearly you should-- but like 99% of your responses have misinterpreted what I’m saying, and then you switched to just trolling me. Are you intentionally misunderstanding me? Are you trying to make a point about the terms I’m using? Are you here to have a serious conversation or just to misrepresent me to win the argument? Is it somehow both? Are you trying to use the Socratic method to imply your disagreement without indicating you understand my point? If so, why? You ask me why I am not acting on my belief that someone could reasonably disagree with me; it’s because you haven’t voiced any disagreement! Your responses have so far been almost entirely confusion about what I’m saying or insults.

There is one exception, where you correctly pointed out a mistake: referring to the grey squares as “are the same physical color” is inconsistent with the language I was using, it should be “have the same wavelength of light”. Color is a subjective experience (which, for the third time, does NOT mean a physical experience happening to a subject (like you), it means your perception of that physical experience). Do you understand what I’m trying to communicate about the difference between a physical phenomena, and your perception of said physical phenomena? Is it a communication issue on my end? I thought I was being pretty clear, but obviously I’m biased on that front.

Holy shit fuck off, I’m done being cordial. You haven’t had a cogent reaction to a single thought I’ve had. I’ve been nothing but patient as over and over you failed to recognize basic common terms or even attempt to conceptualize my many helpful examples (well, I guess I could have given more, but you don’t really deserve it so I won’t feel too bad) so that you could understand the subject I’m talking about. I have never asked you to agree with me, or asserted that the things I am discussing are unquestionably true, especially solely due to some philosophical authority; the reason I have resorted to pointing you to literal wikipedia articles as philosophy 101 content is because you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of the subject matter. How could you possibly hope to be correct if you cannot understand the argument that is being made?

But you aren’t here to be correct, or to learn, or to reach a greater understanding through discussion, or to explore the beauty of your mind-- because yours is rather ugly, isn’t it? You’re here to troll people on social media to feel good about yourself. If you don’t like philosophy, here’s some pop psychology-- people tend to assume others are like them in some fundamental ways. I have spent this entire thread trying to believe you are here to learn or teach, not to troll; while you have apparently spent it assuming anyone who disagrees with you must be brainwashed by Big Psych. FYI I have made an explicit effort to avoid learning about what Philosophers™ think (legitimately who the fuck is David Chalmers?), because I prefer to avoid their influence when practicing philosophy myself; and yet the things I am talking about here are easily independently discoverable by me, someone with little to no formal training in the subject who actively avoids duplicating others’ work where possible. Honestly at this point you’re starting to make me think you might not have an internal subjective experience, because I think if I experienced what it was to be you, my soul would combust out of embarrassment.

What do you mean “proof”? Proof that the field of philosophy considers there to be a distinction? I pointed you to a great resource to learn about this, the proof that philosophers think there is a distinction and the details of how and why they believe that (and common arguments against it if that’s your jam!) are RIGHT THERE in the link I provided. This is not some crackpot theory I am trying to prove to you in a lemmy thread, I am just explaining philosophy of mind 101. Like, this is literally related to “I think, therefore I am”. If you disagree with philosophy in general then I’m not going to spend several hours justifying the entire field of philosophy to you; I’ve pointed you in the right direction, if you want to learn more about it then just read the basics, they can explain it better than I can and it’s much less argumentative that way. Seriously, I recommend it, it’s a good time and it’s a fun way to explore the nature of your mind.

If you don’t understand what I’m trying to explain about qualia or that there is a philosophical distinction between the physical world and your perception, just read the wikipedia article on qualia or any similar introductory material to the philosophy of the mind. It answers like 90% of your questions.

Some specific answers though:

RGB is measuring/defining proportions of different wavelengths of light, even if its goal is to describe that light in a way that is supposed to elicit a particular subjective experience in the viewer. Color spaces are a MASSIVE rabbit hole so I would suggest using the simpler example of how an individual photon has a wavelength that makes us percieve the subjective experience of red, rather than being red itself. Although actually, bringing up RGB gives me an idea for something to point out: qualia and the physical world can “desync”, which is evidence they are different. If you see light with a wavelength of ~600nm, such as that produced by a sodium lamp or banana, you will percieve it as yellow. But that subjective experience of yellow is also triggered by seeing both ~700nm and ~500nm wavelengths of light simultaneously, which you would individually percieve as red and green respectively. This is how your computer screen does it. ||I guess technically you could argue the cone activations in your eye end up the same, so this may be a bad example… regardless, the point is that something like a taste or smell or color has no physical meaning, they are experiences which are caused by physical phenomena rather than being the physical phenomena themselves.||

I am using “internal experience” to mean the subjective way that you percieve the world. If I just used “experience” you could use it more broadly in your sense of “X is happening to you”, which is not what I mean. I guess you could call those things happening in the physical world an “external experience” but I agree, that is a bit confusing and is not my intention. I am using “internal” to make a more specific compound term, not really to contrast it with “external”. But if you are using the word “experience” to mean “C is happening to you” then yes, the external experience is the thing that is physically happening and the internal experience is your perception of it happening to you.

Feel free to do further research on your own if you’re interested.

Philosophy is one of my hobbies and consciousness one of my fascinations. Respectfully, doing “research” by skimming the wikipedia article would be a waste of our time; as would responding to any particular definition and arguing over the individual words people have used in summaries of the topic. So I’ll skip that phase of the convo.

The fundamental problem with measuring consciousness is that it’s an internal state (a “qualia”*). It is fundamentally an experience, something that exists only as a concept in your mind. This makes it immeasurable.

That’s quite the claim, so I’ll provide a smaller concrete example: color. Obviously you can measure the frequency of a photon and say “ah yes, 700nm, that photon is red”. But strictly speaking, the photon isn’t red, it just causes you to percieve “red”; it has a wavelength which triggers your eyes and brain to produce the subjective experience of the color red. That subjective experience of color is a qualia, and it is not directly measurable; at best you can measure the phenomenon that causes that qualia in you, and assume that that phenomenon would cause the same qualia in someone else when they percieve that photon. Technically, you can’t be sure that this assumption is true-- this leads to the “Inverted Spectrum” thought experiment (another great wiki page if you prefer their explanations to mine), where someone’s subjective experience of color as it relates to the frequency of light could be entirely different to your own.

Anyways, you cannot prove the existence of nonexistence of such an internal experience, and consciousness belongs to this category of qualia. You know that you are conscious because you experience being conscious, not because you can prove it by looking at what you do. You can’t even be sure that I’m conscious, even if you met me in real life; you can’t prove that I am actually thinking, feeling, understanding, knowing, or realizing anything, because you cannot be me. You can only assume that I am doing those things because you observe me doing stuff in physical reality that’s consistent with the way the only entity you can be sure is conscious (you) is acting, and assuming that since I’m made of the same stuff as you and I act kind of like you do that I am probably conscious.

If you could actually prove that it is impossible for a machine to be conscious without that same argument applying to humans, then the philosophy community of the last several millenia would praise you as their messiah. I am interested to see what your argument would be if you want to give it a shot though-- no harm in trying.

* Like “data”/“datum”, technically the singular form is “quale”, but I’m gonna be real, nobody ever says that. Anyways if you like reading wikipedia pages about philosophy, “qualia” is a good one!

I don’t see why we would necessarily need to understand consciousness to create it. There is no evidence that nature understands the consciousnesses it has created. In fact a human can create a new consciousness in about 9 months without knowing any theory.

The question in my mind is, how could we possibly tell we’ve succeeded? We can’t even say for sure that anyone other than ourselves is conscious.

Oh, I thought you might have something new to say. If you’re just using the normal definition and not bringing any sort of testability (which imo is impossible) or new arguments, how exactly does the common definition prove anything must be non-conscious? That seems like the main claim of your comment, yet it seems like an unsupported assertion; if the common definition of consciousness could easily prove things not to be conscious as you seem to imply, this discussion would not be happening at all.

Ok, in what way does this prove the existence or nonexistence of the non-linear-thread-of-words consciousness in any entity?

This analysis is correct but I have a minor quibble: The simulated fruit fly brain is not a complete simulation of the biological processes, or even all the neuronal connections, of the actual fly’s brain.

In other words:

• Statement that does not prove anything is or isn’t conscious
• Unsupported assertion
• Unsupported assertion

Wow, very convincing article! I wish I’d thought of that! /s

Ok, I’ll ask. What are these decent scientific definitions for consciousness and how can we use them to construct a test for consciousness?

How are the numbers generated by random.rand() made?

You can hook computer randomness up to truly random* quantum processes with fairly simple specialized chips. Building your argument on such an easily avoided technical detail isn’t wise, because the question can very easily just be asked for a computer that does have access to a source of true randomness. Then it can be nondeterministic-- so what does that have to do with its consciousness or lack thereof?

* unless the entire universe is secretly deterministic, I guess.

Also an LLM only produces output when it is prompted to do so.

Why is this a good measure of consciousness?

I sincerely intend no offense with this comment, but as someone observing this conversation, the other people involved clearly understand it more in depth than you do. You aren’t really responding to their arguments, and yours aren’t very strong. I think you should reevaluate this conversation-- try to more rigorously define the terms you are using and understand the arguments other people are making before insulting them. You feel strongly that the other people are wrong because you intuitively seem so obviously correct, but if you are truly correct then you should be able to understand in detail why you are right and they are wrong. I suspect you are arguing so vehemently because you believe it is obviosuly correct than LLMs are not conscious; you may be happy to know that the others here are not arguing that they are, but that what can or cannot be conscious is not determined by the materials they are made of.

That assertion is unfounded and ill-defined, and that measure of whether something is conscious is both cheesable and in no way proves consciousness

lmfao true

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 consciousness 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.