@datarama @xgranade animals quite demonstrably have feelings, which are built on a complex model of the world and of their role in it. get to know any of them well enough and it's easy to see their individual personalities. we've never even seen any claims to the contrary by anyone who'd actually tried.
@ireneista @xgranade well, there's a reason that philosophers call it The Hard Problem. I certainly can't claim to have even the rudiments of a solution.
Aside from an unsatisfying "I knows it when I sees it", I suppose the closest I can get is that consciousness is being aware that you exist. Not necessarily the capability for self-*reflection*, but the capability to have experiences.
(A dog definitely does. A bumblebee probably does. A nematode probably doesn't. A stone definitely doesn't.)
@ireneista @xgranade Have you read Thomas Nagel's "What is it like to be a bat"?
@ireneista @xgranade It is a quite good exploration of The Hard Problem. But one thing I took with me from it is this: A bat can meaningfully be called 'conscious' iff there is something it is like to be a bat. In other words, if bats have subjective experiences.
Nagle argues that:
1. It *is* like something to be a bat; bats do have subjective experiences.
2. This "something" is so fundamentally alien to humans (because of bats' very different sensory apparatus) that it is effectively impossible for humans to accurately imagine what being a bat is like.
3. These two are not in conflict: A human being unable to imagine what being a bat is like reflects limitations of human imagination, not of bats' experiential lives.
I don't think there is anything it's like to be a rock, or an LLM. But I think there *is* something it's like to be a frog (even though it's not at all like being a human).
Oct 24, 2026, 8:42 PM@datarama @ireneista @xgranade I've found philosophical questions about consciousness fascinating, mainly because my own experience of consciousness is unusual and probably involves other people.
But LLM consciousness debates tire me, LLMs don't seem to be any more conscious than any other kind of computer program, and it seems far more probable that people seeing consciousness in LLMs is to do with the way humans process language over any actual consciousness in the LLM itself
Oct 24, 2026, 9:02 PM@ireneista @datarama @xgranade And so Google fired the people who wrote it... le sigh
@ireneista @xgranade *Honeybees* demonstrably have individual personalities, with preferences and aversions that remain stable throughout life. I think this is something that just comes with having a brain over a certain complexity - and I think that complexity bar is a lot lower than what humans like to tell ourselves.
(I doubt a nematode worm has a personality, but I have no doubt at all that a frog does. I've known too many frogs to doubt that.)