There is a fundamental flaw in the idea that consciousness can be defined "functionally" (i.e. "it is what it does").

Consciousness is a purely internal state - we infer it in others through communication, but it is fundamentally something someone experiences about themself, not something defined by how other people perceive them.

Because it is an internally defined property, it *cannot* be defined on the basis of "what it does". It must be defined, at least in part, on the basis of "what it knows".

To take a simple example from robotics:
I have a robot with one gripper and two sensors that moves through its environment. One sensor (A) tells the robot whether its gripper is full or empty. The other sensor (B) tells the robot whether or not it is in the presence of something its gripper can pick up (an object, P).

The robot has three rules.
1. If no P, move in a random direction.
2. If gripper is empty and P sensed, pick up object and then move in a random direction.
3. If gripper is full and P sensed, drop object and then move in a random direction.

This robot has no concept of anything in its world except P/not P, gripper full/empty, and "move in a random direction".

Yet, externally, the effect of these rules is that the robot builds piles of objects [1].

Attributing consciousness to an LLM is the equivalent of saying our robot *intends* to build piles of objects.

1/3

Triggering article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/nobody-knows-what-theyre-talking

#LLMs #consciousness #robotics #theoryofmind

Joan den ostiralean, Raymundo Báez Mendoza (Georg August Universität Göttingen, Alemania) izan genuen Achucarron, portaera sozialaren eta Theory of Mind delakoaren oinarri neuronalak aztertzen dituen mintegi batean. Eskerrik asko zure ikerketa gurekin partekatzeagatik! 👏

#AchucarroSeminars #Neuroscience #SocialCognition #TheoryOfMind

re: every "AI/chatbot" shill who got one shotted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

#AI #chatbot #theoryofmind #collegeeducatedidiots
#aishill #monorailsalesmen

Is empathy political?
A thread on autistic empathy.

A still-quite-popular belief about autistic people is that we lack empathy.

I think this is faulty logic.
Here's why:

A thread 🧵

1/10

#ActuallyAutistic #Neurodivergent
#DoubleEmpathy #TheoryOfMind

When I praised Peter #Vermeulen's critical insights on the concept of #TheoryOfMind in #autism science, quoted in translation in the English Wikipedia, I lamented that they were from a #French book that hadn't been translated into English. Someone (I forget who) challenged me to read it in French, learning the language on the fly. Encouraged by having an easier time than I expected reading Vermeulen's bio article in the French Wikipedia with the aid of word lookup — and by my belief that English is functionally not a Germanic language at all, but a Romance language in Germanic disguise — I decided actually to go for it.

But now that a copy of the 3rd edition of "Autisme et émotions" is actually on my desk, I've discovered that there is an unexpected new angle. This book is itself a translation, INTO French, of Vermeulen's #Flemish original, "Autisme en emoties"!

This will be an even more interesting experience than I expected.

@autistics

https://theconversation.com/no-autistic-people-are-not-mind-blind-heres-why-272848

#ActuallyAutistic
#autism
#TheoryOfMind
#empathy