hjhornbeck

Are people still debating this? Here's my contribution: even if you believe substrate independence, you can still argue LLMs cannot be conscious. How?

1. Seizures change the discrete firing timings of neurons in the short term.
2. Seizures can effect consciousness.
3. Therefore, short-term discrete firing timings are important for consciousness.
4. LLMs cannot model short-term discrete firing timings.
5. Ergo, LLMs are missing a key ingredient of consciousness.

That's just a summary, the full argument is at the end of this blog post:
https://freethoughtblogs.com/reprobate/2025/12/26/llms-creativity-free-will-and-cognition/

Alas, I have yet to hear a good counter-argument to it. Maybe some day...

#AI #LLMs #consciousness #cognition

@shadow53@floss.social Are news reports allowed? If so:

All the developers I talked to were excited to try using LLMs at work at first, or were at least curious about them. Their feelings about the tools, based on their personal experience, are now overwhelmingly negative. ... The problem all the developers I talked to agreed on is that the more they relied on AI to code, the more the skills they’ve honed for years deteriorated. This is by now a well studied phenomenon sometimes referred to as "cognitive debt” or "cognitive atrophy.” The idea is that people who use AI to automate certain parts of their job lose the ability to do those tasks well, therefore de-skilling themselves.

https://www.404media.co/software-developers-say-ai-is-rotting-their-brains/