this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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There’s such a debate over whether or not cells in a dish have consciousness, and whether or not pure silicon representations of those cells would also have consciousness.
So very little effort goes into defining what consciousness is, because humans are scared to find that there are really only two likely possibilities: almost everything is conscious, or nothing (including us) is.
IMHO it's a sliding scale not a simple yes/no question.
Is a single cell conscious? It reacts to stimuli in a very basic manner, so there is a rudimentary awareness and I would put it towards the lower end of the consciousness scale. Can it perceive itself though aka does it have self-awareness? I doubt it. But where does (self-)consciousness or awareness start? That's probably the same as asking "What's life"? People have been debating the question for ages and there are edge cases that blur the lines such as viruses.
Exactly, and I also think that people confuse consciousness and intelligence. A creature can definitely be conscious even with a simple (or possibly no) mind.
No, they don't. They have reactions, that's it.
Okay, but who’s to say your whole body isn’t just reactions? Unless you define what consciousness is, it’s an ambiguous statement.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you, but this is exactly the problem. People keep making broad claims without first agreeing on a testable definition of consciousness.
philosophers are in shambles over this comment.
for real tho, people have been trying to define consciousness forever. the problem isn’t that we haven’t tried; it’s that—as demonstrated by your comment—we’ve mostly failed.
for me the only theory that doesn’t depend wholly on magical thinking is panpsychism: everything is conscious; it’s just a matter of degree.
To extend this a little bit, I'm not convinced "is X conscious?" is really the question anyone is trying to answer. What I think we're really trying to sus out is "does X require rights?" and where is the line for that.
As another commenter asked, something like "is turning this off equivalent to murder?" is effectively asking if the thing deserves a "right to life" like any human might. At what point does a "thinking machine" cross the line from "person-like" to "person"? I doubt anyone has a satisfactory answer to that question and, unfortunately, I strongly doubt we'll have one until well after it's actually needed.
I think grappling with that question is maybe a little more straightforward when we consider other animals we already consider highly intelligent (e.g. pigs, dolphins, or octopi) but that we don't give the same kinds of rights to that we would a human. At what point would we consider a non-human animal to be equal to ourselves? How many person-like traits does something need before it is a person?
Anyways, all that aside, I think we should start asking the questions we're really trying to answer and stop using other questions as proxies for that one.
yeah i don’t think we’re there yet. these models aren’t capable of remembering their life beyond a single session, so destroying a data center isn’t really killing anything. similarly, artificial biological neural networks aren’t sophisticated enough to be aware of their existence (yet).
while LLMs may be aware enough to beg for their existence when prompted to “think” about it, they’re hopelessly finite (frozen weights, limited context windows). we would need an actually “online learning” system or some other architecture not bound by context to have this conversation meaningfully. biological neural networks are a path to that, but online networks are simply too unpredictable and expensive to run for now.
the crazy thing is tho, that these systems have the capability that some cows and pigs may not: the ability to comprehend their own demise and experience existential dread (at least performatively).
They don't even really "remember" at all in any meaningful sense. They log the conversation history, but they are only acting while they are responding to an input or program, and are otherwise idle awaiting further inputs. They lack agency beyond responding to those inputs.
I think we will really be talking AI when you have more autonomous agents that are capable of deciding what actions to take from a list of their creation, and capably performing those actions. To be clear, there is no technology even on the drawing board that is capable of anything like these capabilities that I'm aware of.
In my experience, the majority of philosophers trying to define consciousness do it with pseudoscientific spiritualism. There seems to be an irresistible urge to distinguish humans as special, as if we would suddenly disappear by acknowledging we’re just funny thinky animals.
Yeah, the definition of "conscious" really is a puzzle. My guess is that the "nothing is conscious" model has a great deal of crossover with the "free will doesn't exist" one; for both of those, I don't consider them useful models even if they end up being true: if I'm not actually conscious and just think I am, I might as well behave as though I am.
Regardless, we really do need to define what exactly we mean by "conscious" before we can have a meaningful discussion about it. Where's Socrates when we need him?
Within a complex enough system the difference becomes functionally meaningless anyway, We could re-configure all matter (except you) in the universe into one giga computer and it would still struggle to accurately predict your behaviour beyond a few minutes because the physical system of your brain is just that chaotic. So wether we're concious or not, or have free will or not ultimately makes no difference.