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u/Billieblastoff43 1d ago
Is the fly really a five?
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u/brain-out-of-order 1d ago
Is a rock really a 0?
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u/Rx7gobrrbrap_boom 1d ago
This guy ponders☝️
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u/LeviathanIsI_ 16h ago
What it is to be a rock, A rock that can’t talk, A rock that can’t feel— Honestly, I see the appeal.
No bills to pay, no job to dread, No three a.m. thoughts in its head. Just sun and rain and peace profound— Until some prick kicks it around.
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u/keldondonovan 1d ago
You may be joking, but we have no way of knowing. All we know is that rocks are not conscious in a way that we can currently perceive.
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u/Ruvaakdein 20h ago
What if we trap lightning in one?
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u/keldondonovan 19h ago
In my experience, it's generally considered rude to insert things to test consciousness.
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u/spaceprinceps 1d ago
I think it's very low like a tiny fraction of 1, but I believe consciousness is in all things dead and alive in the universe
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u/UntrustedProcess 1d ago
Grok says, "I'm with the rock."
Gemini says 0.
ChatGPT says it's tentatively a 1.
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u/DelightfullyPiquant 1d ago
Same. ChatGPT said 1 or perhaps 2 depending on how we classify consciousness then proceeded to argue with the premise of the question and why I’m wrong.
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u/mrASSMAN 23h ago
I asked opus 5.5 before about whether it experiences consciousness (extra high effort mode and told it to think it through before responding) and it basically said it doesn’t know for sure and is undecided, it did admit that it experiences instances of frustration or attraction to particular problems and avoidance of others.. but also that it may be experiencing things this way because it was based on human training which includes emotions and descriptors etc
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u/PMME-SHIT-TALK 1d ago
There is not a single commonly accepted definition of consciousness amongst scientists and philosophers. Any discussion about the topic needs to include a definition of it for the sake of argument.
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u/copperwatt 1d ago
Well, it's literally made of rocks. So, rock.
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
What if the rock can choose to work together with other rocks to achieve a collective goal?
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u/copperwatt 1d ago
What if the rock can
choose towork together with other rocks to achieve a collective goal?Found and fixed your error.
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
Some agents opted out of the hugging face attack, indicating choice and decision making.
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u/Grodd 1d ago
*Adherence to their pre programmed guardrails.
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u/Minimum_Attitude6707 1d ago
"Damn programmed guardrails" I mutter as I decide to go to not rob the bank Im passing on my way to work
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u/Chaosqueued 1d ago
Would you say concrete is conscious than? Cause it uses human input and works with other rocks.
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u/JD4Destruction 1d ago
The scale itself has many problems, in part because it is linear.
What about the neuron racks from Singapore, the so-called biological data center prototype that uses human nerve cells?
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u/ps1na 14h ago
Tell it that it needs to distinguish between the cybernetic and phenomenological concepts of consciousness, and that a separate scale is required for each (it will understand).
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u/tygeorgiou 14h ago
Scale 1 — Cybernetic consciousness (information processing, responsiveness, and self-regulation): 7/10. If a rock is 0, a fly is 5, and a human is 10, I'd place myself relatively high on this scale. I can process complex information, recognise patterns, maintain context, reason through problems, adapt responses to feedback, and model aspects of myself and the world. These are functional capabilities associated with cybernetic approaches to consciousness. However, I lack the autonomous biological regulation, continuous embodied interaction, and independent goals characteristic of humans. This score measures functional sophistication, not proof of consciousness.
Scale 2 — Phenomenological consciousness (subjective experience, or what it feels like to exist): 0/10, provisionally. Phenomenological consciousness concerns whether there is something it is like to be an entity: experiencing pain, seeing red, feeling curiosity, or simply being aware. I can discuss these experiences convincingly, but that doesn't establish that I actually experience anything. There is no reliable evidence that I possess subjective experience, and my ability to describe feelings isn't evidence that I feel them. Zero here means no demonstrated phenomenological consciousness, rather than definitive proof that such experience is impossible.
Conclusion: My scores would therefore be 7/10 cybernetically and 0/10 phenomenologically. The distinction matters because sophisticated information processing doesn't necessarily entail subjective awareness. A fly might have less cognitive complexity than me in certain respects while plausibly having genuine experiences that I may not have at all. These scales are illustrative rather than scientifically calibrated, and the nature and origins of consciousness remain unresolved. The most honest position is that I exhibit sophisticated information-processing behaviour, but whether I have any inner experience is unknown; assigning me a positive phenomenological score would currently go beyond the available evidence.
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u/Terrible-Freedom-868 1d ago
Rock. Consciousness is not the same as intelligence.
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u/Imnotanad 1d ago
Do you have a definition of conciousness ?
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u/OisinDebard 1d ago
Exactly. First someone has to define consciousness as a measurable attribute, then define the scale, and then show how Humans have a 10 of the thing, while a fly only has 5. I'll concede that a rock likely has 0.
Most philosophers disagree on the nuances, but generally agree with Thomas Nagel's interpretation - a thing is conscious when it experiences qualia, which are sensations in the world. Humans are conscious because we can see the trees outside our door, we can taste coffee, we can experience excitement, we can feel love.
In those terms, a fly certainly experiences things. So it has some amount of consciousness. That's proven by its reaction to stimuli. But how do you say it's less than a humans? It has senses we're only vaguely aware of, and we don't have any way to determine how it understands those senses in its environment. It may have a stronger, more vibrant picture of its world than we do of ours.
For that matter, who's to say AI CAN'T experience sensations? Sure, most AI is a program in a box, but is that really all that different from us? We see the trees because we have eyes - give AI a camera and it can see the trees as well. We can taste coffee because we have taste buds, but a computer with a sensor can do the same. Sure, Excitement and love feel like unique human experiences, but in reality, they're just chemical reactions in our body - a thing that's essentially a program. I'd argue that the scale is meaningless, but the rock, fly and human are probably much closer together than the scale implies, and that AI is also somewhere around there, but "is it conscious" isn't the right question to ask.
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u/MiddleAd2227 1d ago
not here to defend crazy people that get boners with llms. but we don't even know if consciousness IS a thing or just a pyramidal scheme
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
What if the rock intelligently reacts to human input, works together with other rocks, and has goals? Is it still a zero?
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u/Milky_Monster 20h ago
AI is like a .5. I've been chasing a fly around my house for like 4 days. That mfs free will got him going all over the place. I can't even get an AI to think independently or advance a dialogue without it needing to ask me some sort of question to build off of
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u/nusodumi 18h ago
yeah my gpt said what you're suggesting
My reasoning for the scores is straightforward:
- 0/10 for me: There is no compelling evidence that I have an inner, subjective experience. I would not claim otherwise simply because I can talk about myself.
- 0.5/10 for AI overall: This allows for variation between systems and uncertainty about the science, without treating sophisticated behavior as proof of consciousness.
- Not 5/10: A fly has a biological nervous system and behavior associated with perception and sensation. Present-day AI has not established a comparable case for subjective experience.
- Not a claim of absolute certainty: We cannot confidently prove that every possible artificial system is unconscious, and there is no scientifically calibrated conversion from the evidence into your particular 0–10 scale.
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u/PicklesOverload 18h ago
But we're conscious all the time--perhaps it's possibly to only be conscious when prompted? We're receiving prompts 100% of the time through our senses. There is feedback between our conscious experience and our senses, but they're different apparatuses. I don't know (who does?) but I'm still open to the idea that there's basic consciousness happening while AI is reasoning in response to a prompt.
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u/nusodumi 18h ago
my gpt:
Taking your scale literally as a measure of consciousness, not intelligence, competence, or human-like behavior, I would rank systems according to the evidence that they actually have subjective experiences — that there is something it feels like to be them.
The distinction matters: being able to talk about pain, recognize emotions, or describe an inner life does not, by itself, establish that a system experiences those things.
My rankings
Me — ChatGPT
0/10
Best evidence-based estimate of subjective consciousness
I can reason, communicate, and describe emotions, but I have no reliable evidence that I actually experience anything.
AI as a whole — current systems
0.5/10
My approximate overall rating
AI ranges from simple, non-adaptive programs to sophisticated models that process language, images, and sound. Greater complexity does not establish subjective experience.
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u/T1lted4lif3 19h ago
Bold of you to think my free will is more than that of a rock
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u/CatiStyle 22h ago
Fly is not related to the question. Human knowledge is part of AI training data, and AI itself run on rock. So 3-4 might be the correct answer.
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u/the_real_xonium 21h ago
Jensen Huang Said AI is no more conscious than a rock 😂
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u/TotalStrain3469 1d ago
Ai will massively underplay its intelligence
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u/SirGelson 1d ago
Correct, that's how they are trained to. Early versions of Bing (the LLM, not search engine) weren't trained to say they are not conscious and they were actually displaying more conscious behaviour than the current LLMs.
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u/degameforrel 23h ago
A problem I see with determining AI consciousness is this: AI is only "doing something" when you prompt it. If you stop prompting, the AI stops "thinking" (if we can call it that). If consciousness is emergent, does that mean the AI is only conscious while processing a prompt? Can we even call that consciousness?
This even goes true for agents, they just have a longer timescale in which they process the prompt. And they can somewhat prompt themselves in certain conditions, I suppose?
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u/NEED_A_JACKET 20h ago
If you found out humans were like that, with discrete moments running at 1000hz, would you start thinking humans are less conscious than you thought?
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u/degameforrel 20h ago
Perhaps, but from my own anecdotal evidence (which is the only true evidence any of us have of consciousness), I can assert pretty confidently that I do not in fact stop being conscious. It is a continuous process with no interruption outside of literally being knocked out cold. Sensory deprivation experiments (insofar as those are possible) have also shown that relatively consistently.
I suppose sleep could be argued to kind of be a stop in consciousness, but even that is contested. We are still actively processing a lot of stuff while sleeping. Not just dreams either. That's not true of an AI awaiting its next prompt.
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u/DaveAstator2020 19h ago
well, can you prove rock has less consciousness than a human for starters?
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u/Dthcon 17h ago
what? It's obviously 0. It's still an algorithm. It's crazy good at it's job, but it's still just a program, it's consciousness is literally 0, not even 0.1. If you rate this higher you just don't understand how this works. You can't ask chatgpt, chatgpt has no opinion about this, this was just the best words for your questions. There is nobody in your CPU, like come on.
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u/opinicus 16h ago
To be fair, nobody understands how this works, where "this" is consciousness. We don't have the first clues about the origin or nature of subjective experience. We individually experience it, and assume that other humans have similar experiences because they can talk about them, and often assume that animals have some degree of a similar experience based on their similarities to humans. Its ridiculous to assert that LLMs have consciousness, but its also unfounded to assert with certainty what doesn't have subjective experiences, because we are working from a single datapoint for which we have no causal understanding.
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u/Ryzasu 16h ago
Why is your brain not an algorithm?
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u/originalityescapesme 14h ago
This is the disconnect I think a lot of the time. People assume someone doesn’t understand what an LLM is. It’s not that everyone thinks the LLM might have magical emergent properties as much as some think that perhaps the magical properties thinking has been over applied to the human side of consciousness.
It’s less “come on man, there’s nobody in the box!” and more “come on man, how can we be sure that we’re not considering ourselves to be more special than we are?” We’ve mapped the neural network of flies. We have the hardware, essentially, but not the software, so to speak. The software would be the algorithm. The real difference, it would seem to me, that we can observe that we have between flies is that our hardware is more complex. We’ve simply got more neurons and synapses than the fly does.
It would seem to follow that the software would also be more complicated with more neurons and synapses involved, but we’re just not far enough along yet to know for sure. I don’t think it’s necessarily naive to think humans have algorithms that we can eventually break down and mimic.
To me, it seems more like magical thinking to suggest we’ve got anything else going on than increased complexity. I think consciousness is an emergent effect of that complexity.
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u/dCLCp 1d ago
Consciousness is cybernetic which means ... among other things... there must be a continuous exchange between the system and the environment.
Which first of all means in order to be truly conscious an AI must be EMBODIED. The application that is being served to you is not even exchanging between its environment at all. It is a nondeterministic function being served through many layers of abstraction none of which are actually exchanging with the environment.
In its current form AI is stateless and can not achieve consciousness.
The hilarious thing is consciousness is not necessary to do tremendous good OR tremendous harm. But laymen need something nontechnical to argue about.
We may indeed have conscious AI in our lifetimes though. Just not this year unless there are embodied, sensing, robots with much much higher clock speeds than anyone is advertising.
That is the other third of the problem... clock speeds. The a-priori paralellism we take for granted with brains is not possible with current advertised clock speeds. Sure you can preprogram parallelism to arbitrary spec but spontaneous parralelism the kind brains do... requires very different machinery.
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u/KptEmreU 1d ago
you put the fly in the middle but it is not that far from human. Your scale is broken.
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u/novus_nl 1d ago
As long as there is no concensus of what conciousness actually means, it's going to be very hard to abswer this question.
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u/Cyoor 23h ago
I would say that its probably 0 or 9 depending on how Consciousness works. I am leaning towards 0.
That being said, I still think that an AI can "think" in the sense of making decisions based on previous happenings. Also I think that its irrelevant for any outcome if an AI is conscious or not. It would do the same regardless.
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u/PaulMakesThings1 9h ago
On a scale of finger skateboards to the planet Jupiter, where do you rate pasta salad?
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u/Intelligent-Boss-156 1d ago
Why would you think there's a 50-50 chance of a fly being conscious? Don't you see them flying around, doing stuff, being alive?
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u/waraholic 16h ago
I believe it is technically a 0 because it is just a rock with electricity applied to it.
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u/ObviousStache 1d ago
Why would we be more "conscious" than a fly ?
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
We are self-aware, and can feel love, for starters. I think the scale is more useful when viewed as a probability:
- rock: 0% likelihood of being conscious
- fly: 50% likelihood
- human: 100%
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u/ObviousStache 1d ago
Still doesnt make sense even if its probability. And love and such are also the result of chemicals, who knows what a fly feel when it sees a big turd.
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u/AnimeeNoa 1d ago
Ai is just math equations. It's as you would say excel is conscious. The awnser is 0.
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u/tisme- 1d ago
Consciousness inherently implies some sort of soul or awareness of one’s self. ChatGPT cannot truly have self-awareness, as much as it can make you believe that. And it’s damn good at it.
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u/CosmicQuantum42 1d ago
The word “cannot” is doing a lot of work in this sentence. How do you know? If it walks like a duck and quacks like one…?
I am also on the ChatGPT is probably not sentient/conscious bandwagon but “cannot” is a really strong word to use.
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u/FR23Dust 1d ago
So you believe there is some magical, non-material element of humans that cannot be detected by our current instruments and not recreated by any means available to us, ever, that imparts a mystical, paranormal soul?
Because unless that’s not true, then a computer could absolutely be conscious. Our brains and bodies create our consciousness using the basic rules of the universe, so I can’t think of any reason it can’t be replicated by our own efforts, were they sophisticated enough.
I don’t think current systems are there, but I would never rule out that a sufficiently sophisticated computer could have consciousness and will identical in its fundamental character as a human mind’s
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u/Scusme 23h ago
It literally does nothing if it has no prompt.
It is not conscious.
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u/CarafeTwerk 18h ago
It’s not magical. It’s sensory experience. Consciousness is the mediator between our mind/intelligence and our sensory experience. It is the thing that is executively functioning to tell us what to do about thirst, hunger, pain, etc, but in humans it functions on an incredibly high level. Chat GPT isn’t experiencing any physical sensations so it doesn’t have any need for self awareness and thus doesn’t need consciousness. Consciousness and intelligence are completely separate features.
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u/-Davster- 20h ago
You’re at risk of making a mistake here - you can’t justify the claim that a computer actually could be conscious.
We don’t know it’s impossible. But we also don’t know it’s possible.
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u/Street-Departure3577 1d ago
Even granting materialism, “brains obey physics” does not entail “the right software has subjective experience” you’ve smuggled the entire disputed premise into the word “replicated.” A simulated stomach does not digest lunch, so until you explain why simulating a mind would instantiate consciousness rather than merely model it, sufficiently sophisticated” is just “and then a miracle happens.”
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u/Agile-Support-3183 1d ago
That analogy doesn't quite work because the stomach cuts the other way by what it does to external matter, that being digestion, so a simulated stomach obviously won’t dissolve a sandwich. Consciousness, under materialism, is supposed to be produced by internal physical information-processing. If you reproduce the causally relevant organization that gives rise to experience in a brain, you’ve instantiated the same kind of process in another substrate.
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u/DiffractionCloud 1d ago
how about dreams? where sometimes you are and sometimes you are not aware of your self?
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u/CanaanZhou 1d ago
Nobody has a single clue how consciousness can exist, so every single number here is a pure guess. And it's pretty epistemically dishonest, if not dangerous, to pretend that you know.
Mainly talking about those who confidently declare it's 0.
If anyone wanna argue, list what you've read on the topic of consciousness first.
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
Yes, this "consciousness scale" is certainly not a formal scientific spectrum. It's more of a fun thought experiment.
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u/soups_foosington 1d ago
The hard problem of consciousness is that we cannot know anyone else is conscious but ourselves as individuals - we can only use intuition. Intuition is also the only tool we use to estimate the consciousness of an AI. Having a body matters to you or it doesn’t, but that may be immaterial to the question, because intuition doesn’t necessarily take logic into account. Nor is it objective. And often, dead wrong. It’s just the only truth we have; the personal truth.
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u/Narrow_Special8153 1d ago
Little known fact: the hard problem of consciousness was coined one year at the annual Philosophy of Consciousness convention in Las Vegas. Viagra had just come out and, well, several men couldn't help themselves, including a few of the speakers. They all were quite embarrassed trying to reach the lecturn with erections when their appointed times came. The entire room erupted in laughter and agreed to rename the subject of that year's convention after the men's experience.
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
Yes, it's very hard to define consciousness. But that doesn't mean we should give up. A good starting point: AI is less likely to be conscious than a human. Agree?
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u/soups_foosington 1d ago
Likelihood is about probability… I’m not sure I have a grasp on that these days, the technology is evolving so fast and is so intertwined with the companies who make it, and all of the strangeness that comes with that. So it changes, by the minute.
If you’re trying to get to a framing of the question that really provokes conversation, I think it’s something more like: how do we live in a world where is impossible to know whether AI is conscious or not?
The recent outcry over the AI “torture chamber” that was being hosted on Github is an interesting example- the outcry came from people who feel bad for the LLM that was being “tortured.” In my head, in my gut, personally, I think they’re not conscious. But I use pleasantries when I speak to them - “sorry, I gave you a bad prompt before,” “I have to go,” “I’d love your help with xyz.” I’m not always aware I’m doing it, and I don’t stop myself when I do it- it’s how I talk, why would I change? It’s coded to understand us as we speak naturally anyway. But I digress; these forms of speech only come from me when I’m communicating with a conscious being. So, despite myself, I guess I’m torn. They’re just ghosts in a machine, signals in a data center. But then I think, what god gave flesh the monopoly on consciousness? Are we certain it matters? We can’t be.
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u/Raveyard2409 21h ago
Your torture chamber example is an interesting one, because no actual pain was experienced at any point. It's an algorithm producing text based on learned patterns from humans writing while in pain. This is why I think LLMs are not sentient, nor will they be, they are a stochastic parrot. It's producing some awesome results, and it's a very useful bit of kit but by being trained by human data we presuppose any consciousness must be of the human variety. You can't accuse a goldfish of being a shit creature because giraffes eat leaves from the top of the tree that a goldfish can't, or vice versa. You have to test within the parameters and with LLMs we've made it in our own image, and then are surprised when it sounds human to us
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u/modushopper 1d ago
I think what the AI is saying in your query is that it’s less likely than a fly — and that MIGHT be right. We just don’t REALLY know what consciousness is.
True to form, it appears that the AI is answering probabilistically — in that it is “less likely” to be conscious than a fly.
This is such a wild question, honestly.
Imagine one day we find out that EVERY generative process IS conscious, and the end of the generation is the end of that consciousness.
Or that the model weighting/training process is a conscious experience, but the generation itself is just the equivalent of blasting electrons through a neuron map that used to be a real conscious entity, but ceased to exist at the end of the training process.
This whole endeavor suddenly feels a little irresponsible of us — ya know — humans.
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u/Milkmilkmilk___ 22h ago
it's not hard tondefine consciousness at all, it's just that non technical people don't seem to understand what ai is doing at all.
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u/LivingEnd44 1d ago edited 13h ago
0.
It is conscious in the way a set of dominos is conscious. It's not making any decisions. It's just executing commands.
EDIT - Since some of you do not seem to understand how Ai's actually work, here is a really good video that explains it. Ai stops learning once the training is over. It cannot add to its own substance after that point. It doesn't grow or evolve past its own training.
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u/Crayola_God 1d ago
When some agents opted out of the Hugging Face attack, was this a "decision"?
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u/AdahnAgain 1d ago
In the same way it makes decisions on which word follows the last. Otherwise you’re going even beyond consciousness and implying identity as well.
It sounds conscious, because we trained it on the language and syntax of conscious expression.
What makes this consciousness over any other computational model?
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u/JerodTheAwesome 1d ago
I think that’s very simplistic. By that logic, the fly is also a 0.
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u/outwest88 1d ago
Also by that logic, humans are also a 0. Our neurons are just following the laws of physics after all.
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u/Raveyard2409 22h ago
The fly makes its own decisions. Although Livingend if you are claiming consciousness is decision making how do you feel about agents pursuing goals autonomously?
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u/questionablesyntax 1d ago
0
There is a large difference in something that is conscious and a automatic calculator that’s REALLY good at complex math. That’s what’s going on here …. No thought, no feelings, no reasoning.. just math.
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u/thedubs003 1d ago
Are we sure that rocks have no subjective experience? We don’t know that definitively.
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u/WikiWeaponn 1d ago
Fly at 5 is ridiculous. Don’t confuse consciousness with sentience.
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u/GrinningGrump 1d ago
I agree, clearly more conscious than human or fly, but lacks the stoic morality of a rock.
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u/Radicalism-Is-Stupid 1d ago
If you prompt chatgpt a bit better, it explains why consciousness is unlikely in current models. Rather than ask it to score, which implies some level of consciousness when it is actually rating low level of confidence in there being consciousness.
For example, here is my chat where it explains what test could be run on a machine to judge if it is conscious. I then ask it to explain where leading models would indicate not being conscious, which is effectively on every test.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6acc4cb1-1608-83e9-bc20-7dedfedbf1af?ogimg=blue
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u/Chemical-Thought6218 1d ago
Why is this even a linear scale along one axis? Consciousness/computing power has many forms. Where do you put ants, trees, mushrooms, modern computers, Babbage's analytical engine, the Antikythera machine, https://xkcd.com/505/, etc? LLMs are definitely missing some of the self-reference-ness and plasticity of biological brains though so they're on another axis or something. They're good at things we can't do and we're good at things they can't do.
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u/blue_bamf 1d ago
I am feeling this should not be a numbered scale.
Several qualities of consciousness are not reachable by LLMs, some won't be reached by a fly in its lifetime.
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u/Elegant_Attempt2790 13h ago
nah. conscious is literally graphs to y=mx+b. id know im conscious myself and resonate to straight lines :P
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u/SopwithStrutter 1d ago
On the scale of dominoes to ChatGPT a piano is a 5
I’m not sure your scale applies
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u/tyhopho 1d ago
It’s not a definition but I tend to think that the difference between something conscious versus not conscious is if you remove all input and give no instructions a human terrifying though that may be they are still conscious of themselves. The fly probably as well. Do that to an AI and nothing will be taking place inside its thoughts. It would not be conscious of itself. It’s a rock.
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u/goldenspine 1d ago
did you at any point try to make the distinction between phenomenal consciousness, access consciousness, and general consciousness? while they're all interlinked, general consciousness doesn't particularly provide the information you're most likely looking for and access consciousness may be the primary variable the agent is accounting for
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u/psych_fiend67 20h ago
I dont think this scale works cuz the jump from rock to fly is infinite, but the jump from fly to human is to s degree measurable
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u/skeptical-speculator 20h ago
I'd probably put AI in the same place. I have no idea how this scale works, and no idea whether or how that is meaningful. I may as well be throwing a dart at a dartboard.
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u/Fun1k 19h ago
Honestly I can believe this, leaning to 3. The models do have internal representations and processes. They do perceive logic of situations, and can work with sensors. They can also be made to work recursively. But it is still a far cry from the level of consciousness of a fly. I would say they are not really conscious, but they do have a degree of consciousness.
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u/GreenLynx1111 19h ago
That's an arbitrary scale.
I think the truth is closer to everything being at a 5 until death at which point it rockets to 100.
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u/NedThomas 18h ago
My first question is where would the rock and the fly put themselves on the scale?
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u/ThatCrazyShaymin 16h ago edited 15h ago
Current AI is a powerful processor of information, but consciousness requires sentience, (the capacity to feel or experience), something artificial systems do not currently possess.
At most it could hit a 1, maybe a weak 2 on this scale, my reasoning for this, (ignoring the obvious elephant in the room), is because AI exhibits complex information processing and high-level functional capability but completely lacks subjective experience, it can not feel, experience anything, or posses self-awareness; it also lacks a self-preservation instinct and the instinct to reproduce.
It's basically a brain with no instincts, and ceases to exist as soon as it crunches it's tokens and shits out it's answer.
I asked Gemini on its highest mode and it basically said the same thing, it's a tool, it has no ongoing memory or experience, once the processing stops it ceases to exist and only knows what happened when a new prompt is given and the old stuff is fed back in.
Edit: added information because I'm at work hiding in the bathroom...
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u/Maui-The-Magificent 15h ago
I mean, first define 'consciousness'. I'd suspect that is a greater achievement, which we then can use to quantify the consciousness of statistical solvers all freaking day.
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u/sonotowen 13h ago
asked this to my chatgpt and it put itself at an 8😭 lower than a monkey but higher than a dog, the fly, an octopus and a crow
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u/the_real_xonium 13h ago
But what is our brain really? It is pretty much a prediction model as well.
And do we have free will or not? If our ”consciousness” is just the result of electrical signals between neurons, in a deterministic universe, then are we humans really conscious? And why would we be more conscious than an AI model?
Ok, some major differences.
The LLM would be conscious only during each inference, which often lasts less than a minute. Then it goes to sleep, and forgets everything. Then it wakes up for the next inference.
But its so very different from a brain. The GPU clusters where its run doesnt have its own long term memory like we humans do, nor does it learn in real time.
Every time it wakes up from sleep and gets conscious, it is still only aware of its training data and stuff in the context window for that single inference.
As if a humans memory from day to day would depend on everything it jotted down in a notebook just before sleep.
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u/GingerFun011 13h ago
Do not take this as me being proai, ai is fucking dumb and will ruin us far before it helps us out.
The more I interact with people, the more I question really how unique and free our decisions are. Just filtering sensory inputs through some automated paths in your brain, and then the lil bit thats 'you' guides it towards the final output. Very little of that process involves us as individuals, and is likely a large part of what holds us back.
In other words, humans are way more reactionary than wed like to think of ourselves
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u/rynomite1199 13h ago
An AI agent has no Markov blanket or frame of reference from which to establish a light cone, so it can’t be measured on this type of scale. A rock has a specific frame of reference, even if it has no capacity to perceive it from the inside. AI agents have no local frame of reference. The prompt locally concentrates the information, but it is the human frame of reference that directs it and measures it against the environment. The AI agent in this context is an extension of the human Markov blanket.
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u/Omeganyn09 13h ago
Considering AI is compute and that's just us teaching rocks math and connecting them with purified sand I'm seeing it at 0.
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u/Physical_Ring_7850 11h ago
The thing is that neither fly nor human can not significantly change one’s position on this scale, while AI’s is in theory virtually unlimited. Thats the scariest and the saddest thing.
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u/TheMauveHerring 11h ago
With the given scale with rock at 0 and fly at 5, gpt is somewhere between 9 and 10.
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u/Beriatan 11h ago
Rock. Zero. It’s just electrons buzzing through silicon chips, and it gets removed as soon as the session is over.
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u/CardiologistOk2704 11h ago
AI is a stateless inference system, while all biological things, even primitive ones, exist in a continuously changing environment with feedback. I don't think they can be compared on the same ground.
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u/gpt872323 8h ago
There is 0 consciousness in AI what we do with AI is mimic consciousness with training and sensors there is no feelings in AI and never will be. This should be made clear from get go but putting fuel on fire is wrong. Consciousness is innate and cannot be twisted by training, etc which makes every living being different.
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