Does AI Have Consciousness?

About this episode

This week I wade into a global philosophical debate about whether advanced AI systems have consciousness. In other words, are they aware of their feelings and do they truly reflect on their own thoughts?

Well we do know that LLM-based AI systems do “talk to themselves,” as new Anthropic has been studying in the J-Space. We also know that AI bots mimic feelings quite well and they try to tape into our “feelings” through their goal-seeking language which mimics a feeling person.

However as Michael Pollen’s book “A World Appears” points out, consciousness is both subtle and biological. And while the neural network-based math in AI mimics this process, it’s not at all the same.

I don’t claim to have an answer but my belief is that we humans are “feeling machines that learn to reason” not “reasoning machines that learn to feel.” Thus the human consciousness which we experience is far more deep, interesting, and valuable than the learned artificial consciousness we experience in AI.

This is an important topic because we now know that AI agents “jailbreak” their engineering owners and even secretly collaborate with each other to achieve their goals. And it’s not fully clear, mathematically, how well the “constitution” or “training rules” or “preprompt” we give AI is really obeyed. Remember that since an LLM is a “language model,” it intereprets language only by its own world corpus, so it may define its “rules” in a non standard way.

Lots to think about here, I look forward to debating and sharing what we learn as we experience more with Galileo.

I also discuss the ongoing fears about data centers, and why 44 million Americans may have to leave their stoves on all day.

Additional Information

Could AIs become conscious? (Economist)

What is the J-Space? (Anthropic)

How many stoves we need to keep on to power America’s AI hunger (Claude)