Computation isn't Consciousness: The Chinese Room Experiment

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gleyKDvZ3x0

So, one of the most misunderstood mind experiments in the history of cognitive science, or I guess AI and other things, is what’s called the Chinese room experiment. This is a thought experiment coined by John Searle. It is John Searle, right? For some reason, I’m misremembering it. Mr. Searle? Dr. Searle? I think it’s one of the most important mind experiments for everyone nowadays, especially when everyone’s talking about AI and computers and all this kind of stuff, right? I don’t want to speak disparagingly, but stuff.

So, the question is this: can a machine think? Now, that obviously depends on what “machine” is and what “think” is. To say it more clearly, when you are talking to an AI, when it is giving you responses, does the fact that the AI can creatively respond to your input make it a conscious being? Does that make it so that it understands what it’s saying? It seems to understand what it’s saying; it’s producing English in a kind of creative way that makes it seem like it knows what’s going on. But does it actually?

Obviously, this is a question of, you know, it’s kind of a philosophical question. Let me step back, actually, because maybe I’m even saying it’s a little more than what it actually is. What the Chinese room experiment is, it’s a critique of the computational theory of mind, or at least the computational theory of mind with respect to consciousness.

Okay, so it’s very simple. Let’s say this: suppose there is a room, and it has John Searle in the room, and there’s a big book in front of him. Now, in this room, there’s a little, I guess, a place where you can put mail inside, and there’s a place where you can, you know, put mail from the inside to go out, right? So, there’s an input and there’s an output.

What can happen in this room is a Chinese person can come, and he can write any sentence in Chinese, anything he wants, and he can input it into this room. He can slide it in through the mail hole. Okay, then John Searle, or whoever is in the Chinese room, he can take that Chinese input. Now, he doesn’t know Chinese, okay? This is a non-Chinese speaker, but he can use the giant book in front of him to look up for, you know, for this sequence of characters, respond this way.

Now, this has to be, in real life, an extremely complex book, probably bigger than the whole room. You’d have to have lots of ifs and els and stuff like that, but this is just a mind experiment, right? So, suppose that we have John Searle can do that; he can write a response in Chinese, and then he can send the response to the person outside.

So, the question is this: now, the Chinese room, as a system, including John Searle in the book, in the room itself with the input and output mail feeds, it might be able to speak Chinese in a very, let’s say, fluent way. It might know how to tell jokes and be like a really affable guy, you know, so to speak, right? You might input some Chinese if you’re a Chinese speaker, and the room as a system might respond in a very clever way.

Now, Searle simply says, is the room conscious of Chinese? Does the room know Chinese? Does it understand the semantics of Chinese? When I say that I know English, okay, that doesn’t just mean that I can put English words, you know, you say something in English, and I respond in English words. I actually understand what I’m saying. I know that these words are not just symbols, right? I have a perception of the feel of each word, not just as something phonetic, but what the word means, what it corresponds to in real life.

Ultimately, when I’m responding in English, my whole consciousness, in a way, is giving a meaningful response based on reality, right? That tie between symbols and reality is mediated by semantics; that’s mediated by consciousness. Now, Searle says it’s very clear in this situation that the room itself is not conscious. Okay, very much is in John Searle, who’s in the room; he’s not conscious of Chinese. He does—now, he’s a conscious person, but he is not conscious of Chinese, right? He does not know Chinese because he’s looking the stuff up in a book.

The book is not conscious of Chinese; it doesn’t know Chinese. Yes, you can look up a bunch of symbols in it, and it will give you, as a person, directions for how to respond, but the book itself does not know Chinese. The whole system itself, the room, doesn’t have a consciousness of the Chinese language; it doesn’t understand the relationship between the symbols and what they actually mean.

Searle, of course, uses this as an example to say just because you are computing something does not mean—or just because you have the syntax of something and you respond in a way comprehensible to someone who understands semantics—that doesn’t mean that you have the semantics; that doesn’t mean that you understand it. Okay? That doesn’t mean that you are even an entity.

In the same way, let’s say, for example, an AI—your modern-day AIs—are they conscious? Do they know the languages they speak? No, they don’t. No, no, they don’t. I mean, you can make some kind of—well, I want to be clear, actually. Searle is not arguing that they don’t, but what he is arguing is that the fact that they use language, the fact that they seem to use language in a way that’s familiar to us, that they’re producing results that seem to indicate they know something, does not mean that they’re conscious. It’s totally irrelevant.

Okay, that has nothing to do with—whereas you might say, “Well, isn’t that duh? Isn’t that definitely true?” Well, no, because there is this perspective called the computational theory of mind. The idea there is that computation is just the essence of the brain; like when our knowledge, our consciousness, it’s almost like a free rider on the computation of the brain. The computation produces the meaning, right? It produces—like, your consciousness is almost like an epiphenomenon, an emergent property of your physical brain doing computation.

Searle is saying, no, that is something different. We don’t—he doesn’t know exactly how it works. Searle, you know, he’s, I think, a materialist, very much an atheist, right? He doesn’t believe in, you know, some kind of spiritual thing that descends on a physical brain, but he is saying that the physical brain, in the way that we understand it, in the computation, in the syntactic computation that we do, that by itself is not sufficient to give you an understanding of consciousness and of semantics.

Now, I will go ahead and say that I think if you take that argument seriously—and again, as I said, Searle is a materialist, I believe, I believe he’s an atheist, I’m nearly certain about that—I think if you really take that seriously, you do have to go a little bit further and say that whatever consciousness is, okay, it is not physical.

He doesn’t say that; he doesn’t say that at all—that it’s not his argument. But I would say that if your materialistic view of the universe is one of, let’s say, physical computation, atoms bumping into each other, all this kind of stuff, if you create a universe where you merely have atoms and material forces and all this kind of stuff, there’s never—it’s kind of like, you know, that it’s almost like a, let’s say, a spiritually 2D world, and you’re never going to have something 3D on top of that. You know what I mean? You’re not going to produce from that syntactic computation this new layer of consciousness, this new layer of understanding.

And I think, really, again, Searle doesn’t endorse this, okay? I’m not trying to say this is what the Chinese room experiment says, but I think if you really take that intuition to its conclusion, expand that where I think it’s warranted, you will probably actually come to the conclusion that whatever consciousness is—again, whether you’re an atheist or whatever—consciousness has to be just a different substance than matter. It is as inherent to the universe; it is as inherent to human existence. You know, the soul, whatever you want to say, that is something that is distinct from matter. It has to be.

Now, it interacts; it clearly interacts with matter. You know, you bump your head, you go unconscious, right? It clearly interacts with it; there’s no doubt about that, you know? But it is not the same thing.

Now, anyway, back to the Chinese room experiment. Again, Searle doesn’t say that. The issue with the Chinese room experiment, or the parable of it, is that so many people just don’t understand it or seriously misunderstand it. You know, like, there’s a really funny—I’ll link it if it’s available online—but Searle has this really good book, and I totally recommend it. It’s usually like $5; it’s really small. It’s called “The Mystery of Consciousness,” and he actually goes through not just talking about his Chinese room whatever, but he also talks about different views of consciousness.

The best part of that book is the interaction that he has, the back and forth he has with Daniel Dennett, who’s this—who used to be alive but has since died. Daniel Dennett is this awful philosopher. I don’t know why anyone—like, I don’t know, but I think if you read that book, I’m sure a lot of you guys know who Daniel Dennett is. You will understand what I mean by he’s an awful philosopher when you read this book and you actually see his interaction with Searle.

Because, you know, as Searle says, like, Daniel Dennett and a lot of people of that ilk, right, ultimately, they—I think Searle puts it like they deny the data of consciousness. They say qualia do not exist; consciousness is almost like an illusion, right? Which is weird because you can’t really have an illusion if you don’t even have consciousness. I mean, it’s kind of a strange thing to say, but, you know, Dennett, he’s kind of couched in behaviorism and this objective science, which if you really take that idea of objectively verifiable science seriously, you have to come to the conclusion that your internal world, which is actually the only thing you experience, doesn’t exist because you can’t objectively prove it.

I think that’s kind of where Dennett comes to this totally bizarre—I don’t know, maybe he’s an NPC. I don’t know; maybe he doesn’t know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about consciousness. Maybe that’s why he—well, he’s dead now, so, you know, who knows? Maybe he’s finding out if he was an NPC or not.

Either way, so the Chinese room, though, and I mean, like, a lot of the people you read about this—read it from Searle, read his article, read that book. I highly recommend it. But nearly every other person who’s talked about this, including smart people who are famous, it’s like none of them understand. Daniel Dennett didn’t understand it. Douglas Hofstadter, the guy who wrote “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” he actually wrote a bunch of stuff with Dennett, arguing—like, just totally misunderstanding the Chinese room.

Steven Pinker, who wrote this one good book, “The Blank Slate,” and then a bunch of awful ones—and even “The Blank Slate,” people are far past that red pill at this point—but Steven Pinker just totally doesn’t understand. Like, one of them, I forget which one, maybe it was like Dennett, he talks about, like, “Oh, well, Searle just argues that the brain exudes consciousness as some kind of goo that’s exuded by the brain,” or something. It’s not what the argument is at all.

Ultimately, it is a critique of this way of looking at the brain or way of looking at AI, by the same token, where you think that because something is doing a computation, it must be conscious of what that computation means to us, which obviously is a total non sequitur.

As I said in my video on AI just ten minutes ago, or whenever I was recording that, I’ll probably release it like two weeks later or something like that. But when I was recording that video, you know, I said the issue with AI is that it appears as an illusion to us. It looks like there’s more going on here than actually is, you know? But that’s not the case; it’s just not the case.

And again, your interpretation of what consciousness actually is—that is not talked about by the Chinese room experiment. It is really just a way of thinking, you know? It’s just a reminder that syntax is not semantics; they’re two different things. Computation is not the same thing as consciousness; they’re not the same thing.

They might be correlated; they are correlated. There are lots of things they have to do with each other, but they’re just not the same thing. And it’s bad science; it’s bad philosophy; it’s bad spiritually to think that—to reduce the entire human cognitive realm to computation because that’s not what’s going on. There’s a lot more going on. Just because we don’t understand it in a materialist sense at this point, that’s not an argument.

YouTube comments

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

The text of Searle and Dennett's instructive back-and-forth: https://lukesmith.info/articles/searle-dennett/ This video is part 2 in a series. Part 3 is here: https://youtu.be/V7abyVkS6U8 (To be released soon.)+49

@UNKanos - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

The timeline is healing+921

@altaastro - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

My favorite CS quote of all time: "The question of whether machines can think is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim" Edsger Dijkstra+423

@antoinetrefeu1800 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

The Chinese Room is basically Jesse cooking 96% pure meth without understanding any chemistry, just following Walter's instructions. And somehow he’s doing better than Gale and the Cartel, who actually do know what they’re doing.+541

@lescal - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

I really appreciate how freeform you allow these to be. And how you're genuinely not too concerned with some specifics (like who exactly claimed what) because you're confident enough you have the "gist" of it. Really nice intuitive way to approach stuff+118

@travis5732 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

There's an implicit agreement in the scientific community that after a certain amount of complexity, an emergent phenomenon 'creates' consciousness. This is the root problem of everything because this is indistinguishable from magic. There's no logical reason or proof to believe this is the case but if this were true, obviously the conclusion is that software can be conscious past a certain point in complexity. The lack of understanding about what truly is to be conscious is what leads to these baseless ideas. The Chinese room is one of the most clear explanations for this.+214

@Jurimeimain - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Very fitting since Luke looks increasingly more Chinese with each upload+158

@Trooperos90 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

This guy gonna write his own os+47

@nickc3856 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

They don't understand the things I say on twitter+557

@theelodgeovkeku - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Last time I was this early my consciousness was still operating on a bicameral model.+269

@nerone1984 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Thanks Bald-bearded-man-of-the-forest, your wisdom has been registered.+142

@DrChump - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

I already watched this on the deep web+280

@checkmate5338 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

I completely agree with you. Sadly the people who don't understand this point will still misconstrue the Chinese room experiment. When we talk about computers "learning"" or "thinking", it's very different than human learning and human thinking, because we have consciousness, first-person subjective experience (which is not material/physical). Another example i give is a person who is born blind, such a person "knows" colors" but doesn't really know them the way a person with sight understands color.+54

@awesomethegreatamazing2651 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Being so early to new videos of our goat feels so surreal after a 2 year absence+177

@m4rt_ - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

LLMs being able to beat the Turing test reminds me of the quote: "The ability to speak does not make you intelligent" - Qui-Gon Jinn+262

@Zaurthur - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Computers have learned to communicate on the same level as middle managers. Humanity has for some reason taken this to mean that computers are conscious, rather than that middle managers are not.+17

@abhi_shek1196 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

What too much grass touching does to a man+33

@BikZom - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

“And when the earth blackens with smoke, and people turn away from the sun, there shall come from the depths of the forest a bald man, bearded like ancient moss. He seeks neither glory nor power, but speaks words no one wishes to hear. And those who understand him — shall endure.”+26

@scaJoshuaBrown - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Every time i browse twitter, I realize that most people aren't conscious.+82

@os7533-y7g - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

I start to worry, maybe this really is a dead man switch releasing 2 years worth of videos+55

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

wow this searle guy sure is a charlatan, its a shame someone can completely ignore reality and use language to invent nonsense like that, perhaps philosophy was a mistake.+5

@solimm4sks510 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

point 5. in the debate is not properly intended, it should be on a new line > to pay for candor. 5. Dennett says+1

@TheJeremyKentBGross - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Idk if computation can be consciousness (tbh it DOES seems like that is where it comes from, but nobody knows), however even as a computer scientist I don't find the Chinese room (which I learned about 20+ years ago) a completely compelling argument against it because all your neurons and the chemical and electrical signals they send don't know about "you", ie what THEY are 'blindly' computing, and yet it appears to create 'you', at least the simulation called consciousness that you consider to be you. ... So in that way they (your neurobiology) could be seen to be the person in the Chinese Room simulating your consciousness without actually understanding Chinese, as it were. I am not saying that is definitely the case, as as afaik nobody knows, but it looks probable that that's what is happening. People seem to hold consciousness as a kind of magic, and there is a reason we would have evolved to hold it in sacred regard, but I suspect that this is another conceit of the same sort that assumed the earth was the center of the universe, and didn't want to accept that we are a species of primates.+3

@lukahadziegric5982 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

I don't know Luke, you are missing the point quite a bit as well, or rather, you are missing the implications. Sure, the room is not conscious, nor does it know Chinese, and neither does the person with the book. But the whole system of the "room" (abstraction of the whole system), "the book" (memory / ram) and the "person" (which is here only in the role of a CPU) does know Chinese (ofc, we can disagree what it means "to know" in this context, but that's a different topic). Your arguments essentially boil down to "components of the system don't have the capabilities of the whole system". Also, you take an example featuring a very "rudimentary" system, meant to illustrate only one point, and then you extrapolate to show how "that's not consciousness". Sure, it's not on our end of a spectrum, but I personally would put it "somewhere" on the spectrum of consciousness. Also, it's kind of silly to debate about consciousness or for example a free will, and if something is conscious or it has a free will, because we don't even have adequate definitions for those. They are more like "feelings" people have.+2

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

 @lukahadziegric5982  You can say this if you are using "know" metaphorically in the same way my OS "knows" the CPU temperature and reports in on the statusbar. The room does not have conscious knowledge of the Chinese language. That is the point. You could try to assert some other closer-to-brain system has consciousness, but the point is narrowly that computation is not consciousness.+5

@lukahadziegric5982 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

My point is that the whole system does have knowledge of the Chinese and how to converse. The Chinese room attempts to show (badly) that there's no understanding of the Chinese going on by saying "look, the guy inside doesn't know Chinese, but to people outside it looks like the room does know Chinese" while ignoring the system as a whole. And then, this flawed example is used as a metaphor for consciousness as computation. Focusing on the person inside the room is like focusing on the hippocampus in the brain and saying "Look, this piece just moves short term memory into long term memory. There's no consciousness going on there" while ignoring the rest of the brain.+1

@lukahadziegric5982 - 2025-05-21 10:47:38

Also, how do you draw the distinction between the "metaphorical know" and the "literal know"? Why wouldn't we consider your PC to "literally know" the temperature. Perhaps it does literally know it, but it just doesn't have other capabilities to make use of that to high enough degree?+1

@georgechrist1990 - 2025-05-28 10:47:38

Following the fundamentals of the paradigm, the person who writes the book is conscious of Chinese. What if the fact this very book exists is a proof that consciousness can be captured in a script? (IFF that very book ever exists)+2

@memegazer - 2025-06-04 10:47:38

This guy seems like he knows what he is talking about but does he really modern AI is not a chinese room modern is more like the dude in the chinese room has no rules or instructions to follow and lifetimes upon lifetimes of data about chinese is made available to him until he can translate chinese in his room as well if not better than any non-chinese method of translation you can point to a set of rules and say "rules can't understand anything" it is different to look at output, generated by a rule set the AI found and that the engineers are not entirely sure and say "well I know there is some rule set there so clearly those rules don't understand" That is not the issue...the issue is how was the AI able to find those rules better and more efficiently than any of engineers if it doesn't understand anything at all? Never mind the semantics about what terms should mean that is the current times we are living with regard to what AI does+1

@memegazer - 2025-06-04 10:47:39

"Consciousness has to be immaterial" No even if you take the chinese room as a valid critique of something it won't be of materialism Introducing a new "layer" or substrate of abstraction is not equal to "that substrate therefor is not an emergant property of matter" It is like saying "If I can think about thinking that proves my thoughts are not contrained by physical/material limitations" And that is not what metacognition means There can be infinite numbers of abstraction layers as combinatorial sets of relitionships between matter, and that will never mean that those relationships are immaterial or can exist at all without physical arrangement+1

@kristofnagy1373 - 2025-06-04 10:47:39

If I don't misunderstand you by chance, this view of yours about consciousness being a human or living organism only feature explains your views on AI really well. The only problem is that you don't need consciousness to have a correct deduction of the physical world, imo at least. Like, the better dictionary the chinese room has the better the translation will be. I would also argue that "understanding" things are subjective as you are only creating an approximate mental picture of facts in your brain. This is why in for example what you learn in middle school is only a half truth and dumbed down version of the "real" understanding compared to higher education. Did Einstein have a higher consciousness then we have when he "understood" the theory of relativity? Does this matter at all? I mean if a calculator doesn't understand what it is doing but it is right, would you care?+1

@DaisyChaine - 2025-06-08 10:47:39

Why do you say you dont do drugs on your page yet have a photo of you w a beer on the homepage 😂 alcohol is a drug, Tylenol is a drug etc+1

@vladimirleninputin - 2025-06-10 10:47:39

I love all your videos but this one you should make one more time , why ? , it's too confusing , too many words too many reputations , confusing ❤+1

@sourcerer_ - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

and we are here and NOW :D+11

@technolus5742 - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

Is it? Looks dumbest as ever.+10

@fish-qm9dg - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

the hairline is not 😢+21

@BruhKhokhols - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

hah, no, its not. but I happy to hear Luke+10

@Gamer-is6ew - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

lets hope ur at least somewhat right+3

@EuroPoorChud - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

or is it the beginning of the end times?+2

@viceversa7245 - 2025-05-21 10:47:39

 @EuroPoorChud the wheel keeps on turning. We are perennially scared of the end of time so we act against our best interest out of sure fear 😂+2

@za4ria - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

 @fish-qm9dg Are you a woman or a kid to worry about that ? Genuine question+2

@Nickelbawker - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

Meh hairless in modern society is a blessing. Saves that much more time and hats are an amazing old technology we've had for eons, not saying he needs one just saying with less hair it makes wearing them better+2

@fortnitemaster2114 - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

​ @technolus5742 you can't even write 6 words without spelling mistakes, stay in school kids+3

@technolus5742 - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

 @fortnitemaster2114  Wrong. You're just basic and can't understand when someone is playing with the language.+3

@rexevan6714 - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

Hell yeah+1

@DatPuz - 2025-06-06 10:47:40

It’s not, most people are still convinced that ChatGPT is basically AGI+1

@Mipetz38 - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

I mean, it's important to know if submarines can swim if our objective is to prove we are submarines+43

@NXTMusicianBassist - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

​ @Mipetz38  Dang, that came off as really profound to me. It's not about elevating the AIs, it's about denigrating the humans!+30

@ttcmp0 - 2025-05-21 10:47:40

Yeah, but maybe the question of whether we can think, is also as relevant. We feel like we can think. But then again, so do NPCs, one could argue. Of course we can think - doi. But we can't prove we aren't NPCs, no matter how much we feel like otherwise would just be ridiculous. To the extent that we "know" that we can think, I believe machines can also be brought to the same point, given enough resources and computing. The current LLMs are, IMHO, nowhere nearly close to that point.+8

@SeeMyDolphin - 2025-05-28 10:47:40

I prefer Turing's preemptive response: "instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks." The Chinese Room is in my opinion, a very short sighted and poorly thought through thought experiment. I have never once found it compelling. Mary's Room is much more compelling, but comes to weaker conclusions.+3

@MrRenosis - 2025-05-28 10:47:40

Well, can they swim or not?+1

@cheebee2659 - 2025-05-28 10:47:40

 @MrRenosis  define swim...+1

@altaastro - 2025-05-28 10:47:40

​ @MrRenosis  Of course they can, but this isn't the point. Machines are objects, not subjects, they can't "do" things on their own+1

@СергейМакеев-ж2н - 2025-05-28 10:47:40

 @altaastro  Really? My interpretation of that Dijkstra quote is exactly the opposite! Even if the way a submarine moves technically doesn't qualify as "swimming", a submarine can still be really good at traversing the oceans, regardless of what we call it. Analogously, even if what a machine does technically doesn't qualify as "thinking", AIs can still become really good at certain tasks - such as, taking over the world. You might not call it "really thinking", or "doing things on its own", but that wouldn't matter when it kills you.+5

@paulw5039 - 2025-06-04 10:47:41

 @altaastro  Can we?+1

@memegazer - 2025-06-04 10:47:41

Or asking if a hammer can swim but what is relevant is can AI learn to swim? and if so what does that mean about swimming?+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:47:41

Keeping in mind Dijkstra wasn't surrounded by aibros stringing together anthropomorphic rhetoric to hype sentience for profit motive. So the "thinking" Dijkstra was referring to completely lacks the context of misleading PR being done today.+4

@memegazer - 2025-06-07 10:47:41

 @TheNewton  Eh don't flatter the guy he is not the only to suggest "if we define relevant philosophical terms in the right way then machines will never be capable of performing such things" not really all that useful as a benchmark imo even if it is quite satisfying to have a simple yes or no answer+2

@tide-000 - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

That was helpful+31

@jimmyjohns6066 - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

Honestly a great example+58

@_Lumiere_ - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

Ok now explain it in terms of fortnite+35

@haltungsprechen - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

Now you understand how the turd world "industrialized".+35

@russellchido - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

This is actually a great example. If there is any intelligence to be perceived from the Chinese room, it is that of the programmers who wrote the instructions. While "AI" researchers don't write the weights of the neural network by hand, they intelligently analyze millions of intelligent human works to generate them. Men found a way to compactly store and regurgitate what other men wrote.+33

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

I don't think this is true, it would be closer to Jesse cooking horse shit in crystal form and giving it to people, the final effect "getting crazy" occurs, but the process and the thing is totally different.+8

@apreviousseagle836 - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

I understand the Chinese Room's formal explanation, but I will remember this to my midwit buddies, lol+5

@delasantos - 2025-05-21 10:47:41

Breaking Bad is a fictional story. Better to use a real life metaphor.+2

@ryanharvey4555 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

The truth is still there+1

@conclusionforeign8568 - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

Yeah, but that's pure fantasy. Without knowing at least some organic synthesis jesse would not be able to do much. His work would be very brittle, anything outside of the norm would be a dead end+2

@lemonhead-eu2yx - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

I dont agree with any of this, machines can absolutely have intelligence and awareness+1

@apreviousseagle836 - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

 @lemonhead-eu2yx  I don't think we're there yet, but I have no doubt it will happen.+1

@lemonhead-eu2yx - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

​ @apreviousseagle836 yep the foundation is being laid as we speak, luke overestimates the uniqueness of a humans individual consciousness, it can be built much easier than he thinks imo, machine intelligence is the correct direction to go it doesnt help anyone to dismiss modern ai with cynical buzzwords and refer to it as a glorified chatbot or things like this. Openai/grok are chatbots, but even referencing these forms of machine functionality is proving that he isnt even aware of the other forms of machine intelligence. Introspective feedback loops/self healing code/automated propagation, there are more forms of AI than corporate LLMs+1

@apreviousseagle836 - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

 @lemonhead-eu2yx  I think the most advanced AI can now pass the Turing test. Even if the consciousness is not real, once it can simulate it beyond our ability to detect it, it doesn't matter anyway. I'm reminded of that movie AI, and David, screaming for his life. I think the movie hinted that it was a simulated act, yet it looked so real, no empathetic person would ignore such a cry for help.+1

@LonelyProphet-PLUSULTRA - 2025-06-04 10:47:42

 @haltungsprechen  Indeed, the Germanics couldnt even read. As Caesar noted, they were of the most ferocious and hard to civilize kind. The pathetic runes they had were only used in Rituals or something.+2

@zentrans - 2025-06-06 10:47:42

 @LonelyProphet-PLUSULTRA  sick burn XD+1

@decorumlopez9147 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

I'm pretty sure we're looking at a man that has read, and understood, Solzhenitsyn.+8

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

Thanks, this actually means a lot. I wish more people would talk online like they would in real life conversations. It would make things a lot more honest, I think.+101

@Nickelbawker - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

He's more fluidly spoken than Styx. I wish my speech was on that level.+5

@lescal - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

 @Nickelbawker  Do you really wish that? Cuz I seriously started practicing it. I'm just recording my thoughts and trying not to judge myself too hard. It feels really nice! :D+2

@basedcat1699 - 2025-05-28 10:47:42

In MBTI this is called Introverted Intuition+1

@jorden9821 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

The funny thing is, any scientist who studies the brain agrees we have NO IDEA what consciousness is in the first place 🤣+70

@CommonWealthSnow - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

Big brain point+3

@dvnk6971 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

yeah, thats why they say we "only understand 10% of the brain". we know everything that we can comprehend and thats it+6

@sigiligus - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

I guess pixels on a screen forming a photorealistic picture is just magic.+6

@rvatina - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

There are a lot of "agreements" in modern scientific community which are like that... And I would say that it's not (only) because the lack of understanding of how something works, but primarily because of an insane level of illiteracy in basic logic and philosophy throughout scientific community.+26

@MisterMunkki - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

 @sigiligus  the "photorealistic picture" is in your brain, not on the screen+14

@markhavick7115 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

​ @sigiligus  Yeah but you're comparing things on the same line of matter/medium. A pixel is a colloquial "image"... It's just a single piece of it... There is no jump in logic from the pixel transforming into a completely different line of matter or medium. The pixel is a simple image that once put together who is other images in certain ways forms a more complex image which you can then interpret differently. That's entirely different than stretching sensory input data in a informative sense and extrapolating that into a conscious state.+15

@Rugg-qk4pl - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

Why are we even talking about consciousness? Almost no AI researchers or safety advocates care about consciousness. Intelligence, capability, and alignment are what matters. Many people agree that there is likely no reason that intelligence also requires consciousness.+8

@emperorpalpatine6080 - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

I love how Monday scientists tell you about the scientific method , then Tuesday they gather and all reach a consensus about that one phenomenon that's entirely subjective and cannot be measured , that it is actually an emergent phenomenon from complex systems ... that we never built lol. this is Cave Johnson level science+28

@James-f4k9m - 2025-05-21 10:47:42

The exact amount of complexity required to get grant funding.+9

@ryanh7167 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

I'll give you a bit of a counterpoint anchored in mathematics. One of the classical ways of approximating a function is the Taylor's series expansion. There is a proof that, provided the basic function is continuous over an interval [a,b] it is possible to arbitrarily well approximate that function by some polynomial of degree N (where the degree is determined by the permissible approximation error, the fundamental geometry of the function, and the point/interval chosen). When you have a quite complicated function, you might have that the "minimum degree" N is quite large, for even quite generous error bars. As a result, you'd see that the approximation "emerges" in some sense because there is a threshold at which we go from "not even close" into the region of "arbitrarily good approximation." I'm not a strict materialist, but I believe it is possible for thresholding effects and non-linearity to produce the appearance of "emergence."+6

@Core1138 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

If we really don’t know what something is how could we identify it?+2

@travis5732 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

​ @ryanh7167 ​That's an excellent point, however I would say that the fundamental nature of the "system" remains intact, for it is still an approximation. The root argument I'm attacking is the assumption that a quantitative change can produce a qualitative change. Because there's a fundamental difference between having consciousness and not having it, so the jump is very drastic as opposed to bad vs very good approximation (I know this is not entirely accurate mathematically, but for the sake of argument).+6

@goodlookinouthomie1757 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

Yeah I've noticed this as well. Apparently there is an arbitrary point somewhere on the vector of complexity between my dishwasher and Lt Commander Data at which consciousness emerges.+2

@ryanh7167 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

​ @travis5732  yeah. I think a lot oF my colleagues within ML research have map-territory distinction problems. I'm just giving an example of when "emergence from complexity" can happen on a simpler thing to quantify, like function approximation. If you are someone who is a strict determinist and a strict materialist, it might be reasonable to assume that there is some "consciousness function" or "consciousness process" which can be arbitrarily well approximated, and with enough complexity we might "get past the threshold." Personally, I fundamentally disagree with the concept of consciousness being inherently emergent from the material (and all forms of existence being themselves materialist in nature). I view this counterpoint as being one that makes a map-territory error; however, if they are correct that there is some "consciousness function" it's not entirely surprising they take the notion of emergence with credulity because we see it in math all the time.+4

@asaultikk - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

OHHH SO THIS IS WHAT MICROSOFT IS TRYING TO ACHIEVE WITH THE BLOAT+5

@TheTastyPancake - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

An even better thought experiment (sorry posted twice): In principle, a computer can be created with of any input/output system, such as pipes and valves, with moving water (or air, or whatever). Now, imagine a computer running on water pressure, with all the and/or gates and such. Those have been made in real life and because of what a computer is, they work in the exact same way. Only slower than electronics. If this kind of computer would run an AI program, it would be something like the size of the Earth. But in principle it could run it. Now, ask yourself: at what point would consciousness emerge out of this Earth-sized pile of pipes, moving water and changes of pressure? Tl;dr: people mystify electronics and computers because they don't understand how they work. Ps. This was an example presented by computer scientist and philosopher Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, who I personally admire greatly+11

@Napalm6b - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

It's simply correlation does not equal causation. The irreducible complexity of consciousness has led me back to metaphysics.+2

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

No, I don't think this is completely fair. As far as I know, there is no stablished, either implicitly or explicitly, consensus on this. We only know it happens, because we exist, and the explanations are varied, but you cannot "agree" with something you cannot explain directly. And also, even if this was a true consensus, it is not true that there would be an implication for machines, as far as we know all complexities are different from eachother. For what we know consciousness could be a unique property of physical complexity and specific chemical reactions in biological tissue, not something that a computer program could replicate. Or it could be something not natural, it's not exactly fine to simply assume it is.+4

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @ryanh7167  It could also be fundamentally incomputable, being a materialist don't give a pass to someone to instantly believe without proof that all there is in the universe is computable.+3

@Napalm6b - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

@diadetediotedio6918  So I go out into nature and I see two ducks squabbling. It's not a zero sum game. They are simply arguing. People do stuff like this on a much more complex level. It has no darwinian utility, and certainly no logical consistency or computational function yet it's with us every day. Seems like an enormous waste of energy in a finite materialist system.+2

@aibrainlet8041 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

What you laid out is exactly why computation does not equate to emergent consciousness, or an experience of any kind. All we have ML/AI is bayesian statistic models. Error correct on steroids. thats it. consciousness is the discreet qualia of experience, which can only be described as "knowing". A bayesian guess is the complete opposite of "knowing". goedel would like a word with you.+3

@aibrainlet8041 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

@ryanh7167 What you laid out is exactly why computation does not equate to emergent consciousness, or an experience of any kind. All we have ML/AI is bayesian statistic models. Error correct on steroids. thats it. consciousness is the discreet qualia of experience, which can only be described as "knowing". A bayesian guess is the complete opposite of "knowing". goedel would like a word with you.+2

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @Napalm6b  I'm not a materialist.+1

@OthorgonalOctroon - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

​ @Napalm6b  just because you see no darwinian utility, doesn't mean there isn't any. you should just read Dawkins instead of spewing garbage.+1

@Ardepark - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @Rugg-qk4pl  He’s talking about consciousness because his faith requires that there be a soul/spirit that can never be observed and that’s what he wants consciousness to be.+2

@Ardepark - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @jorden9821 You know, it’s almost as if science operates according to hypotheses and theories, leaving the door open for further discussion and falsification.+1

@jorden9821 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

@Ardepark sure, but that doesn't have anything to do with my point 👍🏻+2

@Ardepark - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

⁠ @jorden9821 If your comment has anything to do with OP then yes it does+1

@z69b - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

that doesnt really solve the problem, thats just admitting its still out of our grasp to answer+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

@Ardepark, you're trying to say that since everyone has motivations that can be exposed on the Internet then everyone is wrong.+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @diadetediotedio6918 , consciousness is not a thing that simply is, but is literally an act of being conscious of something.+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-21 10:47:43

 @Rugg-qk4pl , I would not care about many people and what they think. But there are at least two different definitions for intelligence in metaphysics, and one of them requires consciousness, the other one doesn't. The latter one is what recognizes patterns, except that with an AI this is really artificial, a purely mathematical operation from input to output, and the actual recognition is done by the human operator.+2

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

 @seriouscat2231  This is a possible way of defining consciousness, but it is circular as you defined here, and it's not final or the only way of doing it.+1

@checkmate5338 - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

 @TheTastyPancake  I like that example. People who don't know anything about code gaining consciousness usually don't know anything about programming. And that all code can be essentially boiled down to the same few logical gates.+2

@npicini - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

The emergent/complexity presupposition really is baseless in the case of AI. A transformer model, for instance, does nothing in and of itself without computing hardware. Making a more complex model on the same hardware doesn’t change the hardware, so the implication is that with more hardware consciousness can emerge. This fundamentally implies “consciousness” hinges on a single binary operation such that n NAND operations are conscious then n-1 NAND operators are not which is entirely ridiculous.+3

@JeyDeee89 - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

Whatching what my Windows is doing sometimes, there might be a bit of truth inside.+1

@SiriusFocquiew - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

 @dvnk6971  I think you have something confused here. The concept is that we only use 10% of our brains. Of course, that's bullshit. We use the whole thing. We just don't use it all at once (that would be a massive, probably fatal seizure), and scientists definitely don't understand all the uses of it (thus I agree with the gist of your point). I would argue that there's no such thing as "junk" DNA either, just a very, very limited understanding of how it actually works in larger systemic terms (some of it is there precisely for molecular biological reasons, because the structures need to temporarily transform/distort for certain operations to be possible, and that is only possible with extended chains of what appears from a reductive view to be "useless" DNA).+2

@SiriusFocquiew - 2025-05-28 10:47:43

They're trapped by their own (unnecessary) philosophical commitment to the Materialist Doctrine. Nothing in the scientific method requires holding it as a personal doctrine or dogma (which most are doing). It's a reasonable boundary on the system of science, but not a metaphysical claim. Taken as one, it leads to scientism (basically treating science as a pseudo-religion), which is antithetical to the ethos of the philosophy of science, specifically that it traffics in theories and hypotheses (which are by definition amendable and/or disposable in the face of falsification or the emergence of superior, more explanatory theories), not in dogmas, doctrines, "proofs", or any such privileged, immutable beliefs.+4

@aaronpanaitescu - 2025-06-04 10:47:43

I am not sure what implicit agreement you are talking about, conciousness is a very debated topic in neuroscience and it's clear that we know very little about. Pointing to a metaphysical theory like Luke's is pretty useless. IMO, if you can't prove it and use it to make predictions what is this kind of theory (conciousness being a non-material mystical goo) good for exactly? I think this sort of argument is first choosing what you wanna believe in and then going out of your way to make such claims. I'll grant you there are a bunch of ML people talk about it in very reductive terms because they seem to think the brain is simillar to a big ML neural net.+2

@kristofnagy1373 - 2025-06-04 10:47:43

Can you explain why consciousness necessary in order to perform "intelligence" at human level or above. Imo, all you need is the necessary information and the right way to process it in order to come to a conclusion that agrees with reality. Example: Most people thought that AI could never create images because it lacks the required "thinking" to be able to create it. This conclusion was flawed as people didn't know that algorithms can "learn" what is what on an image by sampling a bunch on data. In short: People thought image generation is impossible by computers because it's different from humans, but due to lack of data they came to the wrong conclusion.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

What does it mean to be "conscious", exactly? The issue here is that neuroscientists conceive of consciousness differently than analytic philosophers, and therefore there is a clear divide between viewing consciousness as just merely being awake and having certain degrees of brain activity, and nebulous "what-it's-likeness" properties that aren't even coherent. I feel like philosophy of mind fails to take the time to question the internal meaning of the terms used, as they usually just continue on with their garbage-in, garbage-out system.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @rvatina  So, people who study the brain for a living don't udnerstand how it works, but armchair philosophers engaging in apriori reasoning to try and figure out every facet of their minds do? Give me a break.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @markhavick7115  You clearly don't understand the point being made here. Pixels are emergent properties of reducible structures within computer hardware. They form and create interworking programs and software which only exist when internal programs in the hardware are integrated. The same applies with consciousness and the brain. Conscious states is just integrated sensory awareness. I don't know what it would mean for someone who lacks any sensory information to be conscious. Why is consciousness held to a higher standard than say pixels on a screen?+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @emperorpalpatine6080  What do you mean by "never built", exactly? You do know that consciousness in the way enrusocients view it is different ahn how analytic philosophers conceive of it, right?+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @travis5732  Is there a difference? Someone who has anesthesia awareness or somnambulism plausibly is experiencing a reducible form of consciousness. Also, define what "qualitative" means here,and how are qualitative states not also spatiotemporal and measurable?+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @ryanh7167  There is no map-territory error. That's a myth. If all metal detectors point to one spot, it's reasonable to infer that metal is present. Also, as a type A physicalist myself, I don't find non-physicalist models of consciousness to even be properly conceived.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @seriouscat2231  Consciousness is being conscious of something? Wow, so coherent.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @seriouscat2231  Existence/space-time predicates consciousness. Consciousness is limited by the brains and the rest of the environment.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @diadetediotedio6918  Tell me, why can't code gian consciousness but people can? Substrate dependence is silly.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @npicini  As a physicalist, I don't hold to the view that complexity=consciousness. The structure of the system itself and how it navigates its environment determines whether or not it's conscious( e.g. possess sensory organs, can have awareness of its surroundings, possesses a central processing system to integrate and project oncoming data,etc.)+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @SiriusFocquiew  You're wrong. Junk dna is real, as it represents any part of the genome not responsible for dna replication. Sure, some parts of the Junks section are responsible for certain regulatory networks and biochemical activity like aligning transposons, but they are not ancillary nonetheless. For example, studies with mice(iirc) have shown that changing genes in the junt section have noe effect on the heritable characteristics of future generations.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @kristofnagy1373  Who says that it's necessary? It could just be an inevitable byproduct of specific systems.+1

@travis5732 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

@jackkrell4238 Check my comment referencing the work "Immaterial Aspects of Thought". Very easy to understand but hard to refute as a proof that materialism (and emergent properties) can't explain consciousness.+1

@rvatina - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

​@jackkrell4238 that's not exactly what i said, but to explain it: every empirical study do not exist in a "vacuum" - there are always underlying philosophical assumptions and "axioms" that heavily influence conclusions of a certain study. that is how empirical science works. and if those assumptions could be philosophically challenged or even easily overthrown logically, then the conclusions of such studies can also be questioned. I'm not saying that entire science is bs, but that pure neutral empiricism that magically produce conclusions without any underlying assumptions does not and cannot exist.+1

@diadetediotedio6918 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

@jackkrell4238 People are not "coded", this is the difference. You are thinking in terms of substrate dependency because you already suppose consciousness is a codable thing, something that is input onto something else. But I'm thinking on terms of intrinsic properties for that given substrate (or substrate-like things). I don't, currently, hold a specific view on consciousness (in the sense of adhering to a specific model, previously I was a biological naturalist) and I think any very specific view on the topic is extremely hard to justify. But I also think it's easier to justify a more broad view like that "consciousness is primarily a thing of biological beings, as we know for sure biological beings have it, primarily humans and by similarity possibly other complex animals", which is a given of our own experience and general knowledge. We can't say nothing that strong about any code or any kind of software, so the adversarial broader stance is harder to defend.+2

@ryanh7167 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

​@jackkrell4238 reading through your responses to others, you really have a pretty awful understanding of just about all of this. Even the analogy you use with the "metal detector," this is a physical object operating within the material world (i.e., the territory). It is not an abstraction (i.e., the map). We have some mathematical abstractions that are used in the process designing an object like a metal detector, but the metal detector does not rely on the (as an example) inverse square law of magnetic field amplitude decay to be exact in order for it to function. The map (the inverse square law) only needs to be roughly in the neighborhood of correct for it to be useful. Map territory errors happen when people confuse instrumental utility (e.g., the inverse square law lets us design metal detectors with reasonable performance statistics for detection) with objective truth (e.g., with "enough" parameters, we can exactly prescribe the behavior of the magnetic field the metal detector using for detection). These are different things.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @rvatina  "I'm not saying that entire science is bs, but that pure neutral empiricism that magically produce conclusions without any underlying assumptions does not and cannot exist." You don't understand anything about the philosophy of science, buddy. Science is rooted in empiricism and structural models of reality. Also, it doesn't magically produce conclusions. What are you on about.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-05 10:47:43

 @travis5732  There are no "immaterial aspects of thought". Hell, what does "immaterial" even mean? Also, how do immaterial thoughts interact with material systems? That's a category error(known as the Interaction Problem in the literature.) Consciousness IS an emergent process that is the expression of active brain states.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-06 10:47:43

 @ryanh7167  You didn't understand my analogy. I was using the metal detector analogy as a way to demonstrate the absurdity of non-physicalists who dismiss the evidence by ahnd-waving and saying "it's just correlations" and "don't confuse the map with the territory." Metal detectors help detect sources of metal. Studying brain activity provides an explanation for the phenomenon we call awareness. Yes, metal detectors operate with the material world, just like how consciousness is physical.Also, what parts am I not getting, exactly? I'm objecting to claims made by people who think that consciousness is somehow mysterious.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-06 10:47:43

 @ryanh7167  Also, why aren't you a strict materialist?+1

@ryanh7167 - 2025-06-06 10:47:43

​@jackkrell4238 I wrote a long response, explaining my education and why I came to have some qualms with the current state of theoretical physics. YouTube decided this response did not need to go through. The answer basically comes down to "all models are wrong, but some models are useful." I simply do not believe that our current theoretical physics is coherent. Basing your understanding of something as abstract and difficult to nail down as "consciousness" on such an incoherent mess is likely to lead you to trouble.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-06 10:47:43

 @ryanh7167  I find most conceptions of consciousness( i.e. phenomenal consciousness) to be incoherent. I generally lean more toward pragmatist approaches to these issues as explaining how things work in applied settings is more useful than engaging in armchair introspection and trying to parse out the "essence" of things. I apologize for my ignorance towards metal detectors. Thank you for your insights:) I guess it was my fault for not understanding where I went wrong.+1

@ryanh7167 - 2025-06-06 10:47:43

​@jackkrell4238 so, I agree with you. I'm an engineer, and our job is to "make it work even if it's wrong." The problem I see is that a lot of people (especially within physics) do not really understand how the sensing technology they use functions, and as a result they end up making quite odd and strong assumptions. It's sort of like computer scientists will argue about how "computers are deterministic," meanwhile they ignore the 50 years of electrical engineers working and designing memory circuits and information theoretic codes to make a computer appear as deterministic as we can manage. The "truth" is that computers have irreconcilable randomness, the "model" is that they are deterministic because the ways in which they are random are not useful to us, and are often marginal relative to the proper functioning.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:47:43

 @Rugg-qk4pl  "Why are we even talking about consciousness? " Because science communication has failed, academics have failed, ai "safety" has fundamentally failed at the language level. The terminology used has been allowed to fester into a slop that is continually outputting simultaneously: the sentiment hope/fear piles of numbers are alive. the plausible deniability they aren't talking about consciousness or sentience.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:47:43

Cannot define consciousness != machines have consciousness The amount of fallacies being baked into AI discussions by way of misapplying pop-philosophy is disgusting. And not mainly from some casual social usage but from academics/PR-teams defending and AMPLYFYING those fallacies. "software can be conscious past a certain point in complexity" if that absurdity were true we would have had AI already by throwing scale at the problem. Or shucks just lithograph cpus into the shape of a brain and be done(in the very real dangerous literal sense). The nonsense shares a venn-diagram with the propaganda that twisted the already twisted fallacy of junkyard tornado assembling a plane.+1

@jackkrell4238 - 2025-06-07 10:47:43

 @TheNewton  Yes, we know that strong emergence is silly. The issue here is when people assume that consciousness has specific ineffable properties like qualia(which are incoherent) and then insist that AI lack qualia. As a qualia queitist, I have a very liberal view on what structures meet the necessary and sufficient conditions to be conscious. Also, substrate independence is at play, too.+1

@Anton_Sh. - 2025-06-12 10:47:43

why does existence of consciousness seems like magic for you, while existence of an electron or a proton doesn't ?+1

@Anton_Sh. - 2025-06-12 10:47:43

 @markhavick7115  I think consciousness it also something that has what we call "apriory knowledge". It really does .. That also comes off as basis for the axioms we somehow have and operate.+1

@Mackenway - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Chairman Lú Kè+28

@Mackenway - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

卢克主席+17

@haybail7618 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

it's crazy how that guy successfully got us to think about hateful speech semi regularly. it's been stuck in my head for a while+48

@DmT922ha - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

NHH+130

@TehFlush - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Ninja hulk hogan+73

@dvnk6971 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

NHH+49

@sp123 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

there no money in them understanding what you say :(+11

@Dovus-V - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Negate I hit law, negate I hit law, all money gas not cis, negate I hit law.+4

@groyp-z7c - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

BUT HOW CAN THEY SAY I LIKE H WHEN I AM A F-ING N 🔊🔊🔊+29

@shamsunnaherbegum3128 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

All my ninjas nancies NHH+9

@acrez3260 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Sorry I’m employed, what does this mean?+10

@alexghost7276 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

kanye west latest song+4

@treeLiter - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

⁠​⁠ @acrez3260 than u should be able to decipher the lingo if ur interested…ur employed right?? Oh wait I forgot, this society rewards robot sheep….not competence or talent😂+4

@treeLiter - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

 @acrez3260 not saying I do, but I’m not the one asking people to teach me shit I don’t know, whilst trying to demonstrate my competency….another words…..u got a swoll ego 😂. From my perspective 😘+2

@adammontgomery7980 - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

​ @treeLiter "another words" lol. Why can't the guy ask for help here instead of asking the machine?+5

@jorionedwards - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Well people don't understand me in general.+4

@Alfie-ni7lx - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

​ @adammontgomery7980  That was clearly not AI writing for him, because hes not written it correctly. The actual term is IN other words. Hes probably noy native english speaker or just thought thats how you say it clearly.+1

@jimc.goodfellas - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

Idgaf that shit is catchy as hell+6

@nnnyuy88yhj - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

It;s sad how luke smith won't understand this joke because he's disconnected from the internet lol+3

@treeLiter - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

@ u aint the only one 🤣😎🤪🥸+1

@treeLiter - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

@ 🤣🤣🤣good point. The whole im employed thing made me laugh. Nothing wrong with asking, but to claim ur job uninhibited u fron learning or googling. Im tearing u up+1

@comolosabias - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

I'M IN LOVE WITH THE NITROUS+3

@ZetsuBenbiPingha - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

hi Nick, hi Nick!!!!+2

@lukethekuya - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

NHH :face-red-heart-shape:+3

@QTwoSix - 2025-05-21 10:47:44

>This homosexual black man will surely save America!!!+1

@MasamuneX - 2025-06-05 10:47:44

NHH o/+3

@Clembo - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

Welcome to the Trump Age Collapse. The voices are quiet, now.+14

@1Iljo1 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

banger callback+11

@fsmoura - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

You have to eat the magic mushrooms to connect/fuse the two minds together, or so they say+10

@ridgehaven2661 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

elite ball knowledge+5

@GilbertWilliams-x3d - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

I LOVE THAT I GET THIS JOKE NOW! Julian Jayne's essay was absolutely mind-blowing.+1

@Mipetz38 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

despite cleaning my statues' mouths several times, their voices no longer reach them, how do I fix that?+3

@CommonWealthSnow - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

Spooky web+13

@xgui4-studio - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

Tor Network (i know what it is in but i havent go there)+6

@lbs9841 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

lol what+3

@John-ru4gz - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

My friend works there+31

@calholli - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

 @xgui4-studio  Wuh? You never seen the silk road? What is wrong with people+1

@DunmeriDrain - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

I remember keet woods talking about this while walking in the woods, which made me remember luke talking about it before in his car+2

@Yasmine91646 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

@IamstandingrightbehindyouROTF 😂+1

@Yasmine91646 - 2025-05-21 10:47:45

 @John-ru4gz 😂+2

@me-low-key - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

If consciousness is made up of something beyond the physical, then we must answer the question: at what point in evolutionary history was this non-physical element embedded in a byproduct of a material mutation? Given that the non-material cannot result only from something purely material - otherwise, it would merely be an extension of the material world.+10

@ZackaryReaves - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

 @me-low-key  Where did the material come from in the first place?+7

@francesco3772 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

​ @me-low-key does gravity stop existing as an intrinsic property of matter (we could say as a building block in phenomenological reality) when it is no longer detectable at a certain scale? Consciousness was always there, we just became able to receive it. I agree that "when?" is a cool question to ask.+12

@threedog27 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

I think its a philosophical question we cant answer. The Question is why do we know things are right? Because we also learned these things. We didnt magically know something. Maybe some instincts our genes pass to us but this is also "learned". Just on a biological level. Also our understanding of morale is influenced and learned throughout human history. Surely we deeply know what is bad and whats not, but depending on our cultural background this can vary. Take the roman empire for example. They had huge coloseum fights where slaves and warriors got killed by other people or animals. People back then watched this as Entertainment. Do you think this would be morally ok by todays standards? Probably not. So like artificial intelligence, we also learn new patterns along the way. The reason for that is, that LLMs are designed to work like a human brain. An AI Model of course isnt "alive". But that also begs the question: What is "alive". Are we alive? Or what even makes something "life"? Not even long ago we didnt even thought that Animals are on the same level of "alive" like Humans. Perception changes the more we learn.+3

@youtubeenjoyer1743 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

What are you going to do when the unconscious computer asks for political asylum?+1

@-.2.. - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

 @me-low-key  Or better yet: Where does math come from? It is not material, yet it can be used to measure and understand the material world in some way. At this point, one must use metaphysical instruments and assume that there is a metaphysical reality.+7

@me-low-key - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

​ @francesco3772  I like your interpretation, but I would argue that it merely moves the question, because as you noted, we still need to answer when, or what are the properties of matter that makes it possible to receive consciousness. Also worth noting that "Consciousness was always there, we just became able to receive it" is independent of the the problem of whether it's material or not.+2

@me-low-key - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

​@-.2.. I like where you are going, although I wouldn't make the assumption that math is not material, I think it somewhat linked to the consciousness question, in a way that math is a tool we use to build a model of the world by which we can understand the world better by literally deciphering the governing laws of the universe, so it's like an extension of our consciousness. "At this point, one must use metaphysical instruments and assume that there is a metaphysical reality" As much as I like to agree with this, the issue is we can only assume.+1

@emperorpalpatine6080 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

​ @me-low-key  When you dream , is your dream made up of physical matter ? Notice you're conscious , in your dream . And that consciousness in your dream is as real as when not in a dream. Would you say , that in your dream, some dreamt evolutionary process gave rise to your consciousness ? That sometime ago, still in your dream, your dream ancestor chimpanzee suddenly became aware ? Or maybe your dream ancestor bacteria ? So what if we are in the same situation?+3

@checkmate5338 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

 @me-low-key  You're getting into good deep philosophical questions. All i'm saying is what consciousness isn't. And it's not physical. It has nothing to do with computation. Computation is ultimately just logical gates.+3

@youtubeenjoyer1743 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

@-.2.. The “where does X come from” is loaded. Why does math have to come from? As far as I can tell, math is just a language made up by brains, it doesn’t come from anywhere+1

@OldMan-c9x - 2025-05-28 10:47:46

 @me-low-key  how is math material exactly? You say is an extension of consciousness, wouldn't that make it subjective? Do you think numbers are material or abstract? Why do some animals have innate number sense?+1

@RoofusRoof19 - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

He has already recorded these videos but he's uploading them now+1

@SO-dl2pv - 2025-05-21 10:47:46

GOAT? What's special about him?+2

@Sever3dHead - 2025-05-28 10:47:46

​​ @SO-dl2pv  even if i will explain, you wont get it+1

@SO-dl2pv - 2025-05-28 10:47:46

 @Sever3dHead  Why do you think so?+1

@Sitzkrieg - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

holy reddit guys!! it's like le heckin star wars!!!+22

@D.A-k6g - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

Isn't that just GateKeeping?+2

@elizabethwinsor-strumpetqueen - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

Botatoes!+1

@wlfred.ed1930 - 2025-05-28 10:47:47

Poor Jar jar bin+1

@SiriusFocquiew - 2025-05-28 10:47:47

ELIZA effectively beat the Turing test (though nobody seems to want to admit that), and that was nearly 60 years ago. ELIZA wasn't even remotely intelligent. It's overstating it to even call it an expert system. It was just cleverly designed responses intended to take advantage of the human tendency to anthropomorphize, pattern match, and project more significance than is necessarily there to fool humans into believing they were talking to another human (via a computer interface). The Turing Test hasn't been a legitimate metric in my entire lifetime (but again, this is systematically ignored, especially by those with vested economic interests in selling The ELIZA Effect 2.0 as something meaningful). What we have right now is uncanny mimicry (unsurprising considering the mountains of human-created data the models were trained on) by essentially glorified autocomplete models, which have no understanding whatsoever of what they are outputting. Internally it's basically just superhuman statistical correlation/association (which is not impressive when analyzed closely; calculators are superhuman at math, precisely because they were designed to be, and our brains didn't evolve to do math specifically). Edit: Don't get me wrong. These tools can be useful, if we don't ascribe to them qualities that they simply do not have. And if we ignore the horrific ecological impact of these models, like the fact that they devour power and water resources. They aren't a part of a sustainable future, at least not at the scale they exist now (maybe something like that Chinese model that was competitive with ChatGPT, and far, far smaller, thus far less resource intensive). So people are going to have to choose between a livable Earth and these overhyped abominations.+5

@paulw5039 - 2025-06-04 10:47:47

Most Internet comments from actual people remind me of that quote as well.+3

@honkhonk8009 - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

Im srilankan and I grew up buddhist. Reminds me of the story I was told for when the next buddha would come. Does every culture have some sort of story like this? Like the 2nd coming of some sort of prophet or whatever+1

@aibrainlet8041 - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

that website is psy op dummy+8

@shua_the_great - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

Most bots are not conscious(DIT reference). I'd be careful suggesting people are not conscious. Maybe they're afraid to move towards that higher good, they're afraid of change, but that doesn't mean they lack the capacity to think.+7

@zeevdrifter2707 - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

@shua_the_great any Thanksgiving with the extended family refutes the whimsical notion that all humans have souls or are present in a meaningful sense. The reason bots are a problem is because we already lived with them.+4

@shua_the_great - 2025-05-21 10:47:47

​ @zeevdrifter2707  Ok then, great wise one. What defines human ontology if not the soul?+1

@paulw5039 - 2025-06-04 10:47:47

 @shua_the_great  What defines the soul?+1

@buckbreaker5185 - 2025-06-05 10:47:47

Those are bots+3

@farmerjohn6526 - 2025-06-15 10:47:48

I run into this constantly on Twitter. People arguing with confidence, but it’s all prefab thought. Phrases they picked up from someone else, plugged in without reflection. Press just a little, and the seams show. No scaffolding underneath. No original construction. Just language that got good engagement last time.+2

@tlilmiztli - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

Seeing consciousness in "AI" responds is like seeing face in the shape of the cloud. Its not really there - WE can perceive it as a face, but its just a cloud.+10

@alt-u1j - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

God I wish Luke brings Not Related back+34

@nhobb - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

Close enough welcome back Terry Davis+8

@leifartist - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

the balkan room+17

@FittZone. - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

I agree with you. This is why I am a Christian. I believe there is something divine about our ability to experience things rather than being mindless robots. I believe that only through the gift of a creator, that we can have consciousness. It is the divine gift from God.+17

@farmerjohn6526 - 2025-06-15 10:47:48

😂 It’s the height of human hubris to confuse memorization with insight, to mistake repetition for reason, to believe that speaking fluently means thinking clearly. We’ve trained ourselves to mimic coherence, not to build it. We built machines to simulate understanding and now we’re simulating them, running scripts, masking gaps, and calling it knowledge. The difference is, the machine doesn’t pretend. We do. And most people don’t even know they’re doing it. They believe confidence equals comprehension, but what they’re offering is cached language, not grounded thought. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that they don’t even know what it would mean to be right.+2

@RuddODragonFear - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

FOUR VIDEOS THIS WEEK! and this one has the classic Molyneuvian ending -- "NOT AN ARGUMENT!"+26

@R_Priest - 2025-06-04 10:47:48

The Chinese Room demonstrates that syntax is not consciousness; computation is not consciousness; and the appearance of consciousness in a "thing" is not necessarily consciousness in the thing. Okay.... But I think the more interesting question that the "Chinese Room" raises is, while we may "know" that we are conscious, how do we know other "people" are? Luke also said that material interacts with consciousness. You bump into something and you're conscious of it/affected by it. But is that interaction? Causation? Or correlation? The appearance of correlation? Human beings make a lot of "assumptions" about what is real and not; what exists and doesn't. AI, consciousness, the interaction of mind and matter, are among many of those things.+5

@Pepxico-y7d - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

It looks like the yooss wasn't capable of taking Luke's soul, and now he is trying to save ours. Nature is healing+13

@PinballCollection - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

I first learned about the Chinese Room experiment by playing Virtue's Last Reward on 3DS in 2013. That series was a cool way to introduce kids to thought experiments+17

@sigmund233 - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

we're on a roll+18

@captain-january - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

WE’RE SOO BACK!!!!+30

@SJFyoutube - 2025-05-28 10:47:48

I agree with your position. With that being said, I think the Chinese room experiment simply demonstrates that some computing that does a human task and might seem conscious actually isn't. In no way does it imply that all types of computing are unable to produce consciousness.+5

@farmerjohn6526 - 2025-06-15 10:47:48

Luke doesn’t just fail to understand what he’s saying. He doesn’t understand understanding. He thinks it means having the right answer, saying the right phrase, winning the exchange. But real knowing isn’t that. It’s structure. Insight. The ability to rebuild the idea from scratch, in your own words, under pressure.+2

@musicalmystery2957 - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

I was waiting for this one+13

@bernardcrnkovic3769 - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

i was thinking about consciousness lately. however, i don't really understand the substance of your argument against materialist NPC's. You seem dismissive but i don't really hear why? and i would like to! also: semantics vs syntax, since semantics is immaterial, we can't really put our finger to it because it is the "spirit" that permeates the structure of a message, the message you are trying to get accross, but if i try to explain it as anytjing more precise than that, i fail. because you ultimately have to accept that you can't read other people's minds and how they perceive something. solipsism-maxxing, i know... would it be correct to say that you think consciousness "is obviously something supernatural/non-material" because it "feels like it must be"? or is there a stronger way to prove that it definitely isn't what materialists think it is? how would you put it into words? or i guess my question could be worded as: why is it the hypothesis that qualia is a side-effect of computation necessarily wrong? btw i liked your takes on consciousness and materialism in your old blog post.+7

@rafaelf.9246 - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

The term "Artificial Intelligence" is akin to something like dry water or cold fire. Intelligence by definition is always natural.+4

@sirexo - 2025-05-21 10:47:48

Kant reminds us that even our own minds only rearrange inputs according to built-in structures—meaning genuine, unmediated understanding of reality isn’t something any intelligence (artificial or human) ever achieves.+5

@undecimal8589 - 2025-05-28 10:47:48

Of course, wordcels can't distinguish between an AI that spits large paragraphs and an actual conscious being+6

@DavidDeCorso - 2025-05-28 10:47:48

Real+1

@D.A-k6g - 2025-05-21 10:47:49

Lmao+4

@youtubeenjoyer1743 - 2025-05-21 10:47:49

I disagree, so I’m not Christian.+4

@M_CFV - 2025-05-28 10:47:49

Those games are insanely symbolic. Literally has Q in it+1

@captain-january - 2025-05-21 10:47:49

inb4 it’s over again+3

@spenarkley - 2025-06-04 10:47:50

But what if it was computing all along and just comes down to the amount of compute. What if were not yet understanding consciousness because of the complexity of the brain. Maybe I didn’t get his point but i feel like he's making an Argument from personal incredulity.+1

@SJFyoutube - 2025-06-04 10:47:50

 @spenarkley  He is essentialy saying that matter cannot create consciousness because they are qualitatively different, which makes sense. Scientist talk about epiphenomena of matter and make an analogy to consciousness (like water being wet) but that is always just some physical process interpreted / described from different order of magnitude, at no point is it anything but matter. Consciousness is different, and if it comes from physics we could all be behaving exactly like we are without any qualia.+1

@spenarkley - 2025-06-04 10:47:50

 @SJFyoutube  Sounds a lot like argument from personal incredulity to me. Not necessarily disqualifying but certainly not a proof that consciousness can’t emerge from matter.+1

@SJFyoutube - 2025-06-04 10:47:50

 @spenarkley  At the end of the day you can't proove basic intuitions, you assume them to build something else. Do you really proove that 1 plus 1 equals 2? Do you proove your own perceptions? Do you proove logic itself with logic?+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:47:50

If you set an undefined or meaningless bar, then of course nothing is ever going to reach it. What is the evidence of such structures? What does genuine and unmediated mean, as opposed to false and mediated?+3

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:47:50

Ah that may be the word i've been looking for to describe the people abusing pop-philosophy to imply business products are alive.+1

@richarddvorak2897 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Haven’t heard of this thought experiment before, thanks for sharing. I don’t think it’s as strong though, as it might follow from this that the difference between consciousness and computation is the lack of “awareness” or understanding of the concepts that the words are describing. If you were to give the person in the Chinese room pictures, videos, smells, etc. of the object, it seems much less clear cut and you could make the argument that the person could “learn” Chinese. Another way to put it would be if you had a robot that could interact with the world in the same way as a human, it’s much harder to pin down what exactly the robot is “missing”. I’m sure I’m not the first person to come up with these counterexamples, so I’m curious what others think.+5

@rothbardfreedom - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Ok, this frequency of videos clearly classifies LS as a content creator.+13

@randomcultist398 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Redditors, assemble!! Time to upvote this tech content creator's new post!!!+79

@cherubin7th - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Funny is how LLMs are especially similar to the Chinese room. The only difference is the book in the Chinese room is now compressed to save memory.+16

@michaelns9887 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

I hope the backlog never ends+12

@francesco3772 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

"Maybe he's finding out if he was an NPC or not" AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH, split me in two+14

@John_NDT5 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Finally, a comment section where i can declare that Gravity can behave as a curve and not as a linear force breaking Euclidian Geometry and Newtown's Law at the same time. Thank You.+2

@ShivaTD420 - 2025-05-28 10:47:51

The term refers to the process that the brain is not computing consciousness directly. Consciousness is an emergent property that arises from the cross talk between the memory, sensory inputs and imagination.+5

@Pabloparsil - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

I think you can't prove that other people are conscious precisely because of these issues as well. So how could we possibly prove that an AI is conscious even if it was?+14

@porky1118 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

4:30 My brain cells probably would argue in a similar way. "No, we're just single ceels. We exchange information, but the brain isn't really conscious. It might seem like consciousness, but that's just the result of us interacting, nothing more."+15

@areyoutheregoditsmedave - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

These videos of yours lately are very important.+5

@TheRogueVigilante - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Luke are you ok, so many videos in less than a week?+16

@b4t34n - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Peter Winch made the same point in his book The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy (1958), where he provides an argument to show that "a man who understands Chinese is not a man who has a firm grasp of the statistical probabilities for the occurrence of the various words in the Chinese language" (p. 108).+2

@Underdoge_ - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

I agree that current state "AI" is not conscious, it's just a parrot. However, I think there's still room for the theory that consciousness arises by a specific set of principles or processing capabilities being in place, including, but not limited to, self awareness and regulation; awareness, regulation of and interaction with the environment, and self preservation drive. When those conditions are met, even if it may seem "artificial", "fabricated" or "forced", it would be hard to argue the system is not conscious, by using a Markov blanket to clearly define the system's boundaries. In that sense, countries and even cells, in my opinion (probably an unpopular one) for example would be conscious systems themselves.+15

@MattLozier314 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Luke, it seems to me like Searle’s argument is what David Chalmers calls “the hard problem of consciousness,” that is, defining how materialism gives rise to subjective experience and self-awareness. I believe that Robert Sapolsky gives at least a starting point for an explanation to consciousness in his book “Determined,” which describes the biological underpinnings to a predetermined world. Materialists have an answer to consciousness, just may not be able to fully articulate it. I think this is the answer to Chalmers: we just don’t (yet!) have the biological answers to be able to define consciousness. I really like your channel and think very highly of you! Please keep up the good work!! 👊+2

@Kart - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

the streak+5

@steamer2k319 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

The room, with Searle, is arguably conscious (or at least capable of performing thoughts expressed in Chinese). The book represents a dormant neural structure / arrangement of neurons. Searle's effort to animate interactions with the book are essentially the glucose / action potential that brings the neural structure to life and makes it do the act of thinking.+2

@AwkwardSegway95 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

My view is that consciousness is the brain processing/analyzing its own activity. Under this view, the AI that we have now are not conscious (since they're not programmed to do that), but it might be possible to make an AI that is conscious.+5

@throwaway930 - 2025-05-28 10:47:51

Hey Luke, I hope you have something in your life to ground you sufficiently. I was at a similar intellectual state a year or so ago and I didn't have enough to ground myself, was quite scary. Stay safe man. Blessings to you and your family. P.s It's also interesting to turn these questions on the sentience or consciousness of AI onto ourselves and all the experiences and patterns of thought we associate with our name and our body.+3

@BonyiG96 - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

Bro I'm so happy that you are back, I thought you were stabbed in the Balkans or something+24

@windowsxseven - 2025-05-21 10:47:51

And the very frequency we watch them make us, by definition, content consumers. "Same things make us laugh, make us cry." - El Grando Smokio+1

@reiisthebestgirl - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

*influencer+12

@hello19286 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

Le fellow redditor? When does the narwhal bacon?+13

@randomcultist398 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @hello19286  Nice.+2

@randomcultist398 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @reiisthebestgirl  bet+1

@bedro_0 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

UPDOOT+9

@jamesevans2507 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

A man of culture I see.+6

@JonasThente-ji5xx - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

I hate Reddit+5

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

Well the key philosophical issue is that the Chinese room literally requires someone that is conscious to even provide a competent and compelling simulation of Chinese, which in and of itself means that an LLM would require some rudimentary awareness to function in such a way that is can convey a convincing and complex concept of human interaction.+3

@PedroBarbosaRoman - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @ghost-user559  Hum, no, I think that the human is there just to compute the message such like a computer. it serves the analogy but not in the way you mention+5

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @PedroBarbosaRoman  Did the computer exist independently from a human? Who determines the logic of a computer? At any point in this experiment, even if it were a very advanced computer, it is still entirely dependent upon human consciousness outside of the room. There is no such thing as a “computer” in nature. It is not an independent phenomenon, nor is it even possible without a conscious programmer. So even if we say the man was substituted for a perfect machine, then even that requires a “simulation” of consciousness that is entirely dependent upon an entity outside the room that is conscious. The reason the thought experiment is compelling is that it takes a human and makes them act as if they were a machine, but the issue is that humans exist without machines, but machines do not exist without humans. So the experiment entirely proves that consciousness is in fact not replicated despite acting unconsciously. The very nature of the experiment is that consciousness is required to make decisions, or even a simulation of decisions.+2

@PedroBarbosaRoman - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @ghost-user559  I think you are overthinking this, I was just pointing out that the focus is not on the consciousness of the individual that just automates the messages to translate since he is the embodiment of the computer/computation in the analogy since the analogy is an analog one instead of a digital one.+4

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

 @PedroBarbosaRoman  I agree, but what I am saying is that the whole thing disproves its own premise. The entire process of “automation” at this scale presupposes that a consciousness was required, either in the room, or at least being responsible for the “automation” within the room. We can’t even imagine any aspects of this experiment which would be independent from consciousness. What I am saying is that the only reason we are even capable of creating automation that convinces us it might be conscious, is because we are conscious and copying the neural network of our own brain.+2

@michaelns9887 - 2025-05-21 10:47:52

I am not talking about my IT job+3

@rogue_minima_roni_l - 2025-05-28 10:47:53

People needs to stop with their magical beliefs and start thinking. The they'll see that consciousness is nothing special, but a simple byproduct of processing complexity. If we have it, future machines will have it.+5

@Pabloparsil - 2025-05-28 10:47:53

​ @rogue_minima_roni_l  I think that is probably correct+1

@erikpoephoofd - 2025-06-04 10:47:53

You could assume that, but there is currently no known idea how we could measure and verify it. Complex machines might be philosophical zombies. We might figure it out at some point though+1

@benny_dryl - 2025-06-04 10:47:53

We are philosophical zombies.+2

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

People will believe rocks and neurons are conscious before they admit that maybe there is something missing in materialism.+39

@thomasjford - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @LukeSmithxyz  that “something” is missing is all we can say+3

@justin266 - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

Luke: I think he’s trying to convince himself that he’s not conscious rather than that his neurons are+2

@porky1118 - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @justin266  It was mostly a joke. I didn't get to these metaphysical questions yet (see timestamp). But if I wanted to say anything, it's that I don't know and I don't think this chinese room is a good argument for anything. Also, even if that "something" exists, why wuldn't it appear in that chinese room? Doesn't really matter if it's material or something else.+2

@franciscogomez-paz - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @LukeSmithxyz  I am interested in knowing what theory of mind you are in favor of. It seems from this video that you seem to propose some type of dualism. I was interested in knowing how you think of causal interaction between physical things and "mental stuff". You say in the video that physical stuff clearly causes certain "mental stuff". Do you also believe that this causation goes the other way?+2

@Ardepark - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @LukeSmithxyz  You are dishonestly pretending that those who do not share your religious faith are obligated to share it unless they can tell you what consciousness is.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

No, this is mistaking consciousness for consciousness-reminiscient computation. Consciousness might have, for example, recursive characteristics, but that doesn't mean that it is a recursive neuronal operation, or that a computer program with recursion in conscious. To be clear, it might interact with recursive systems, but this is apart from consciousness, not as a description of behavior, but as qualia and experience in itself. So we can make an AI or a recusive system which acts like a conscious being (for the most part), but that computation does not make it conscious. Or to put in a simpler way, philosophical zombies exist.+14

@TheBannanaThief - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @LukeSmithxyz  I don't understand, how would you differentiate between consciousness and consciousness-reminiscient computation then?+3

@anonymoushack3r-t1g - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

​ @LukeSmithxyz  Your intuitions are valid and of course materialism is false, but you are slightly wrong with calling matter a separate thing or a "thing" at all. What we call matter is simply a mental construct of the patterns that we are seeing, but ultimately consciousness and the patterns therein is all there really is, we are all small aspects / parts of God's infinite mind (esse est percipi). You might have objections like "but why can I influence consciousness by poking a brain?", but it's really just two parts of consciousness interacting with each other.+4

@josephpchajek2685 - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @TheBannanaThief  It's not always possible to differentiate one thing from another, especially for us. We're good at pretending we know things tho. Tagging things with attributes, finding patterns, labeling them based on the attributes, characteristics and patterns. Often times we we completely get it wrong, but we still go on and call it science. Then we go on and create more dogmas and fallacies off our already incorrect theories.+2

@TheBannanaThief - 2025-05-21 10:47:53

 @josephpchajek2685  I agree, but I have impression here that Luke creates definition in a way that proves his argument. I'm very skeptical in current development of AI and in my opinion it should be named Artificial Intuition at this moment. That does not mean that I will fully agree with anyone who is skeptical about AI and currently Luke's arguments look like he assumes what he wants to prove and starts from that. Why can't we just humbly say that we don't know if consciousness is product of matter or not if we don't have tools to prove that at the moment?+4

@benny_dryl - 2025-06-04 10:47:53

​ @LukeSmithxyz  with all due respect, this uses many big words to say very little We are just back to the age old question "what is the soul," because we have a pyschological need to separate ourselves from the natural world. We are philosophical zombies.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:47:53

​ @TheBannanaThief  even "intuition" would be drastically wrong. The coiner of "AI" recognized the term was a mistake but mainly for the 'artificial part. Still even an alternative "computational intelligence" would still be based on some non-existent purity of those words definitions ignoring the way the words "intelligence", "thinking", "reasoning" etc get used and abused to imbue things with characteristics they don't have. More so when the words are chained together to paint a story.+1

@arthurfrayn7619 - 2025-05-28 10:47:54

I love Phillip K Dick novels and tend to agree.+1

@TheSpecialJ11 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

I thought he died of a brain hemorrhage, creating a power struggle in the USSR.+4

@noname-hg8eg - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

When the world needed him the most, he returned.+2

@DeusBash - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

Wow, this is pure philosophy freshman rambling+7

@becktronics - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

With the current onslaught of AI being crammed into absolutely everything, it's comforting to hear this take. Seeing the major use-cases as essentially removing one's ability to read, write, and it's ultimate deification... I'm glad to return to a more human-focused interaction, without the reductionist nonsense. A great fireside chat with your educated, tech-savvy cousin, who helps bring you back to reality and realize our inherent transcendental value as humans. Thank you for making this content, it sometimes feels like the whole world is going collectively nuts.+2

@erictrobin - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

Our brains mostly work as the Chinese Room. Almost everything is not conscious, it's unconscious biological programming with nodes of associations. The consciousness itself just observes what the rest of the brain does and occasionally does some curation.+5

@egor.okhterov - 2025-05-28 10:47:54

Understanding is a feeling. We as a humanity don't yet know what a feeling or emotion is. We understand the precursors, triggers of the feelings, but mechanically we still don't know what a feeling actually is.+1

@IvanJ95 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

I treat AI as a glorified search engine+23

@scarletnightly - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

I mean, if computation were to be conscious it would still rely on its vessel, the vessel here being the hardware. If we assume consciousness in the computation of the task, the task would perform more operations than its initially is programmed to do by the code. We can calculate the amount of operations done by a task and compare it with the actual values of the executed tasks. I am unaware if anyone has tried to compute this, but going off of the believe that this would hold we can easily derive from this that no computation ever will be conscious unless it is bio-hybrid.+3

@pp-kc4ho - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

NATURE IS HEALING+10

@zeevdrifter2707 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

A weird devils advocate argument here: does it matter? Assuming I'm the TV antenna receiver for a soul, you can still scoop out my memories with a scalpel or render me non functional in such a manner. The fact my memories are local implies my soul doesn't contain "me" as I would think of it.+7

@adamsawyer1763 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

To me it's entirely plausible that the physidal universe emerges from consciousness but I cannot conceive of how consciousness could emerge from a physical universe.+19

@terrapin323 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

Probably the best biblical sermon on AI I have heard+13

@cynik-_- - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

I was in a philosophy class that talked about this thought experiment, and it really felt like I was the only one who understood it. I think that perception is the main thing we do not understand, and while I'm not a definite materialist, I think that if we discover what perception is, we will classify it as a physical thing. I think science is under-questioning its underlying assumptions and should be asking questions about paradigms of truth more than it does. I don't claim to know what I perceive with and am atheistic, yet I wish I did know, and was convinced by an existing religion. Also before someone assumes my philosophical positions based on my username, just know that I made it before reading about philosophy in a serious way, and am more of a Nietzschean than a Cynic. I think that life is beautiful and worth savouring especially since it is fleeting and can end abruptly.+1

@victorgabr - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

"Consciousness is not computation" - Roger Penrose+6

@petkish - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

There is a good amount of wisdom in hating thought experiments. The chinese room experiment is demonstrating all the flaws of thought experiments creating over-simplified models of something then deriving wrong results from wrong reasoning on the wrong models. Chinese room is unfeasible unless it has state, it is impossible to do it with a lookup. It must be at least a turing machine to compute new states and have a vast algorithm for that. Now, it is hard to argue that intelligence cannot be computed on a turing machine in one way or another. Now, consciousness is a special process which emerges when an intelligence can perceive itself. I would not go further into this, but in correct intrrpretation the Chinese room is potentially conscious, without any regard to the consciousness of its inner operator.+3

@monkeysfromvenus - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

Dualism is just materialism with one extra step, and all of the same inherent contradictions still apply. Idealism is the only internally consistent metaphysical worldview and we've known this for thousands of years.+5

@malcolmlott - 2025-05-28 10:47:54

Found your channel awhile go glad you back, I watched one of you videos and the I saw you hadn’t posted. Glad your back your gold!+1

@MD-zm6sn - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

Man I think it could be a real problem even without consciousness haha.+5

@systemreset0 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

So my controversial take on this thought experiment: there is an observer that is capable of referencing stored information. Information can be stored on the brain, or other media. The observer in this case can then manipulate the information based on a predefined set of rules and produce an output. IMHO the Chinese room experiment is just a turing test with another layer of storage media on top. It doesn't reveal anything that other thought experiments about computation have already revealed.+2

@zimzam9166 - 2025-05-21 10:47:54

I believe that everyone in the world except for me is an NPC. You are only as real as the Chinese room experiment. Prove me wrong+6

@juann268 - 2025-06-04 10:47:54

The forest around you influenced and informed your thoughts and the way you expressed them. It matters where we spend our time thinking.+1

@07sawyerr - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

It is, but a lot of people need to hear it+2

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

Do people use wow these days to insult or offend?+1

@decorumlopez9147 - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

...a potentially lying search engine.+7

@IvanJ95 - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

 @decorumlopez9147  yes, the main problem about it is that it always uses a confident tone+1

@rkfkr - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

I treat people as glorified search engines. They don't like it but I don't really care🙃+3

@terrapin323 - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

You can get way more specific with AI than search engines, I can ask things like "it seems there are missing entries in the Bravais lattice chart, specifically there could be 4x7 = 28 lattices if you could have aS, al, aF, etc." and it responds "You're absolutely correct to notice this: if we take all combinations of 7 crystal systems × 4 centering types (P, I, F, C) at face value, we would get 28 possible lattices. However, only 14 of these combinations define distinct Bravais lattices in 3D. This is because many combinations are either geometrically equivalent to others or reducible to a more symmetric case..." I don't want to sift through forum posts to get a detailed answer like this.+1

@IvanJ95 - 2025-05-21 10:47:55

⁠ @terrapin323  yes that’s exactly what I mean by „glorified search engine“+2

@ichisichify - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

first time I've ever heard of this and it's eye-opening!+1

@youranonymous931 - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

Yes it matters because right now the paradigm is consciousness is something more, but AI is making it out to be a paradigm shift that consciousness is actually something computational and can be programmed+6

@zeevdrifter2707 - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

 @youranonymous931  that didn't in the least address the question.+1

@themehguy9084 - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

It wouldn't matter for anything practical. It would only open the possibility of reincarnation and even then you would not know you lived a life before. So it's best to live this life as if consciousness was physical, and we still have no way to prove it isn't and maybe never will.+2

@СергейМакеев-ж2н - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

 @zeevdrifter2707  Rupert Sheldrake would respond to you that the "main memory" is actually in the soul (non-local), and the brain merely contains an "index", a very brief summary of your memories with which you can "connect to" the full version.+1

@zeevdrifter2707 - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

 @СергейМакеев-ж2н  You still have yet to explain how that soul Is me, it might have a recording of all my memories but there is still a concise break in continuity.+1

@СергейМакеев-ж2н - 2025-05-28 10:47:55

 @zeevdrifter2707  Continuity is a whole different question. If you have a concussion, which shuts down the whole brain for a few seconds, does that break the continuity? Does continuity even matter for the question of where "you" are? My point was, if A is a subset of B, you can't say that "you" are in A, but not in B. If the information in the brain is a subset of the information in the soul, then you can't exist in the brain without also being in the soul.+1

@RoofusRoof19 - 2025-05-21 10:47:56

Cognito ergo sum+3

@TheSpecialJ11 - 2025-05-21 10:47:56

Bro you say that with confidence like you can see consciousness under a microscope. How are you to know that by splitting consciousness between the material and immaterial, the contradictions of materialism are resolved by the immaterial domain of consciousness? The world appears contradictory to us at times because we do not fully understand it; the "retrogression" of Mercury is against logic if you believe the Earth is the center of the universe. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I am saying your statement is far too confident for something that cannot be empirically observed.+2

@monkeysfromvenus - 2025-05-21 10:47:56

 @TheSpecialJ11  I'm not saying that. I'm saying that by splitting consciousness between the material and immaterial, the contradictions of materialism ARE NOT resolved by the immaterial domain of consciousness. I am pretty certain that you misread my comment. What I meant by saying that "dualism is just materialism with one extra step" is that, in the materialist worldview, the conscious and the physical world are two separate components of the same underlying reality. In dualism, the conscious and the physical world are still just two separate components of the same underlying reality, and thus the same logical contradictions still apply- they are just masked by one extra level of abstraction. As strange as it appears in the context of modernity, idealism is the only option out of the trilemma that is internally consistent. I reread my reply and it seems kind of curt so I just wanna say that I love you+1

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:47:56

 @monkeysfromvenus  I'm not sure I follow. Could you explain what you mean by idealism?+1

@monkeysfromvenus - 2025-05-28 10:47:56

 @mskiptr  Sure. Idealism is the metaphysical worldview that sees the mind as fundamental and the physical world (or qualia) as epiphenomena of the mind. To explain my claim that dualism is materialism with one extra step, I'm saying that If you say that both physical matter and non-physical soul really do exist, then you are claiming that they are both components of one underlying reality, which is basically the same as what materialism claims. This hypothetical underlying, deeper reality that encompasses both is described by neutral monism, and it falls into the same pitfalls/category errors as materialism.+1

@DmT922ha - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

We got Dostoevsky making youtube videos before GTA 6+8

@koby-j5i - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Your approach became very intimate and personal, it allows me to understand better how you think, by having an actual conversation. Also you're speaking about topic that inspire others to be better by reflexion and patience, opposite of today's tendencies of regurgitated and gratuitous content.+1

@PhilopateeerTheodoros-o4x - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Bro starved us for 2 years and now he is cooking!+45

@byzantinegold - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

I had an opportunity to take a seminar with Dennett in undergrad that certainly would have involved long pontificating lectures by him. Everyone was worshipping him as our smartest professor and I was really close to falling for it. I'm still glad I didn't take that class!+1

@slavkotonkovic6216 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

1. snow 2. melted snow with his power level 3. and 4. snow again+90

@AlisSpark - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

The creepy thing about the chinese room experiment to me was always that it makes you wonder whether some other people actually function the same way, merely responding automatically according to instructions but never actually really comprehending what they're saying or doing+2

@markusasennoptchevich2037 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Well, our head might be the same chineese room. In some time, John will be able to memorize and understand some of semantics without using his book. Like a child learning how to speak+5

@yasscat5484 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Consciousness feels like an entirely separate entity from physical reality just as a Minecraft world seems completely unrelated to the underlaying reality of transistors and binary signals. An alien with basic electronics knowledge would struggle to trace how that green, interactive world emerges from raw bits. Without a map, navigating the layers of emergence and abstraction is nearly impossible. so, it’s no surprise we’re clueless about our own consciousness+3

@randomchannel-u8v - 2025-05-28 10:47:57

You make a lot of claims but give 0 arguments for anything...+5

@honkhonk8009 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Bro Luke you clearly aint played that new fortnite Darth Vader AI season. You gotta get on it this summer+3

@totem6064 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

You inspired me to trim my beard+5

@FUZASHIII - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Besides this, computers also don’t filter data that they learn. Everything that is given as data is used in training. Anyone with some sort of intelligence actually can choose what to learn, not like we need some kind of supervisor to cherry pick all “good data”.+3

@maserati4000 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Luke came back just when I started to learn Linux. I’m definitely gonna get my RHSCA cert on the first try now+9

@DanielStoinov - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Hey, nice to see you are back again.+1

@StephenDeagle - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Yes, AI is just complicated text completion. Problem is, I'm pretty certain so are people. Substantial evidence suggests human cognition operates as a form of probabilistic, predictive processing, much like token prediction in AI. Here are some key areas of research that support this analogy: N400 Studies and Predictive Language Processing... Studies in the 1980s demonstrated that when an unexpected word appears in a sentence ("I spread the bread with socks"), the N400 amplitude increases, indicating a prediction failure... Humans process language probabilistically, shown in surprisal-based models... Karl Friston’s predictive coding framework suggests that the brain constantly generates predictions and minimizes error signals... Etc, etc, etc Humans appear to also be token prediction generators, the Chinese room model failing to adequately capture how processing is effectively understanding.+5

@brenttaber1721 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

It’s great that you’re back, Luke!+1

@GlobgobGabgalab - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Never knew Dostoevsky would teach me about the nature of AI+3

@revolution_zakaria - 2025-05-28 10:47:57

Just because we need to think, eat, art, etc doesn't mean that whoever lacks those is weak. A machine is not inferior if it doesn't have "art" and "consciousness"... it simply doesn't need them.+1

@neptunianman - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

But human minds are just meat computers says the bugman+37

@bear_in_site - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

This man on fire lately+2

@voidvoid5151 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Cooking is cringe redditor language.+10

@Wise_Dirt - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

 @voidvoid5151  He's concocting!!+3

@Koj4 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

he's just flexing his weather control skills+15

@-.2.. - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

He said in the last podcast with Kyle that he made some videos in advance+5

@fsmoura - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Dostoevsky is not even his final form+9

@decorumlopez9147 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

He just keeps on walking inbetween videos.+1

@JanHDD - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

Haarp working overtime+1

@user-ayush818 - 2025-05-21 10:47:57

He's attained spiritual powers through meditation.+1

@irlporygon-z6929 - 2025-05-21 10:47:58

I mean at the end of the day what's the difference. If you ask a detailed and novel question and a person can successfully answer it they have to have a pretty sophisticated flowchart. Understanding how to win at tic tac toe (as an example) can be done with a flowchart so I don't see much value in the arguing whether a computer "understands" the game if it can play with perfect strategy. The concept of "understanding" is kind of bounded in that way.+1

@dubzy4485 - 2025-06-04 10:47:58

this isn’t a scientific paper, this is a youtube video read some of the books that he talks about if you wanna get into the meat of the arguments+2

@jamesmccoy8568 - 2025-06-05 10:47:58

You’re just mad cuz he sayin your AI girlfriend ain’t real+5

@hhjhj393 - 2025-05-28 10:47:58

All that's missing is his little hat.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:47:59

We can describe human cognition as it relates to consciousness with formal/functional properties that certain computer programs might have, but that is something quite aside from the issue here. It doesn't follow that because cognition might share formal traits as an LLM or functional ones as what you mention that it is something remotely analogous in how it's built up (even though we conventionally call that genre of models "neural nets" as a metaphor which people take too seriously).+4

@Filioush - 2025-05-21 10:47:59

It seems to me like the human mind might very well just be a combination of the two, i.e. an adaptable statistical prediction engine (neurons) with consciousness somehow also acting on it (orch or microtubules?) to influence/sway/route the results of those computations, in the process also experiencing the subjective. So we get both the behaviour you describe and the issue of consciousness not quite fully fitting just inside it.+1

@StephenDeagle - 2025-05-21 10:47:59

Luke, you're sidestepping. No one claimed brains and LLMs are identical in substrate. We’re talkiing structure and function. Both systems predict and update based on probabilistic input. No poetic metaphor here. This is core to predictive coding, surprisal models, and N400 studies. Saying “it’s not built the same” is irrelevant when behavior and processing dynamics converge. You might very well turn out right, but I suspect you're clinging to essence where science is showing function.+1

@hhjhj393 - 2025-05-28 10:47:59

You try and insult someone and categorize them to intimidate them into submitting to your authority. Just another human doing what humans do...... "They pose a threat to us, quickly use any intimidation tactic possible to surpress them."+1

@neptunianman - 2025-05-28 10:47:59

 @hhjhj393  Indeed I am a human, no shame in that+3

@LeFlamel - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Every day panpsychism grows more likely.+5

@TomanVal - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

Happy to see this guy back hope u doing good mr smith+1

@RoofusRoof19 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

The underlying issue is always trusting science as gospel and not acknowledging that it is just a MODEL on reality and not reality itself+16

@Lalas1293 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

we're eating good with all this luke content+2

@Aporro1 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

just discovered this channel and i was like oh boy some nice philosophical discussion but then you started talking about the way things "have to be" and reducing opposing viewpoints instead of recongizing that we start from assumptions and end with assumptions and then borrowing authority to extrapolate your own ideas as necessary conclussions and i lost interest this isnt how conclusions work, best of luck+11

@adity.atiwari - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

"maybe he's an NPC so he doesn't know what we're talking about" LMFAO what a critical hit+3

@vonchadsworth - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Now do a video about split-brain experiments, in which patients with severe epilepsy have the two hemispheres of their brain surgically disconnected. After surgery, the patients essentially have two brains with their own perception and memory. If an immaterial soul were responsible for consciousness, one would have to conclude that the surgery somehow created a new soul. I think it's most likely that consciousness is material in origin, but the precise mechanism by which it arises is completely unknown and may never be fully understood.+4

@Raccoonov - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

Finally, Luke is back 🎉+1

@vivek264bit - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Omg it's Alexander Solzhenlinux+5

@meanpillscasper - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

These videos are a pleasure to listen to, thank you for publishing them.+1

@deersakamoto2167 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Ah, the eternal tussle between philosophers and cognitive scientists -- like watching a debate between a poet and a codebreaker over whether a sunset is "beautiful" or "just photons"+4

@andrewkosenko2757 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Regarding the consciousness: our brain is wired with different kinds of input (touch, vision, hearing, etc.), and all of the input is received by brain as weak electrical signal to certain parts of the brain. Those electrical signals we received so often in our life, that our brain has created neural connections that correspond to proper things and make us react in some way to what the brain received as an input. The thing is, our neural network has different internal architecture than AIs, and is such a big one, that making a copy of one’s brain would take literally ages to do. Just imagine - triggering tickling in the hand with someone’s hand and with a feather can be distinguished by our brain without even looking on the hand. Each cell does its thing and even if we create a copy of one’s brain - we will need to send signals there, otherwise it’s useless. And to send signals - you get it, a whole another story. The system is so complex, that we gave it a separate word - consciousness. To reproduce a brain of a fly we would need more than 100 million synapses to work exactly as the fly does. In other words, it doesn’t make sense to do such a complex system as human consciousness is, since we have reproduction and it’s much easier to acquire a conscious person this way instead of doing it virtually…+2

@vulonkaaz - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

"whatever consciousness is, it is not physical" this is like the most fundamental thing to understand ourselves and the universe, it really shocks me how many people nowadays think consciousness is just computation as this idea is literally unconceivable to me+22

@checkmate5338 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

It's in the benefit of AI companies and CEOs to exaggerate the potential for LLMs. It's also in the benefit for the media to exaggerate AI and how "conscious" it's becoming. But computation is ultimately just logical circuits put together. It has nothing to do with first-person subjective experience.+2

@gauloise6442 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Where is there snow on the ground now? Maybe these videos are being released by dead man's switch...+9

@gkopit - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

3:54 When he says “these words aren’t just symbols,” that’s exactly what they are! Words are symbols, they are compressed representations of concepts. Understanding them is what gives them semantic depth, but they remain symbols by definition. Saying otherwise confuses the medium with the meaning+1

@henlofren7321 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

You are the room. You're not any more conscious of Chinese and your knowledge of it could effectively be described as a giant lookup table. The more you learn the more your brain updates this internal table.+21

@preeth-raksh - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Luke is bombarding videos at this point 😭+2

@Fnargl99 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

I still haven't heard an argument that reason/conciseness is not an emergent property of abstraction generation. that is what neurons do and that is what transformers do. you might "know" what you are saying but most people just spew out worlds.+4

@backyardbarbells - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

As a man with very strong opinions and little experience I'd say that in a while the technical classification of whether it's truly intelligent won't matter. If it's good enough to fool the average Joe then...+2

@OthorgonalOctroon - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

science literally means knowledge. what is your alternative knowledge source? symbolism in your dreams? LSD?+4

@RoofusRoof19 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

​@OthorgonalOctroon yes, you have empirical observations and also rational deductions, like math or philosophy, which are also knowledge.+9

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

 @OthorgonalOctroon , a pile of institutions with lots of money and power, and therefore connections to sources of money and power.+2

@arthurfrayn7619 - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

My favorite example: matter is not actually composed of multi-colored balls. It's a useful way to explain what we can't see.+2

@RoofusRoof19 - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

 @arthurfrayn7619  Again they teach it like that in school for the sake of standardised testing which people just kinda remember and dont think too much on it+2

@user-ayush818 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

empty your mind+1

@ehh6443 - 2025-05-21 10:48:00

Just discovered this comment and I was like oh boy some nice feedback but then you started talking about the way things “have to be” and I lost interest+6

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:00

I don't think what you're saying has anything to do with the video. What you're saying sounds like utter nonsense framed as a false accusation. You're imagining what he is doing and then attacking the product of your imagination.+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:01

Perception is not consciousness. Neither is memory.+1

@vonchadsworth - 2025-05-28 10:48:01

 @seriouscat2231  Of course not, but my point is that both hemispheres are conscious as far as an experimenter can tell, which makes me doubt that it's impossible for consciousness to be material. If only one hemisphere remains conscious, you'd have to conclude that the soul resides only in one hemisphere. If neither are conscious, then the soul must reside in the corpus collosum. Both cases seem absurd to me without an explanation of how an immaterial soul interacts with a physical brain.+2

@TheSpecialJ11 - 2025-05-21 10:48:01

Aptly put. I find the best thinkers on this topic are the people who have studied both and look for the synthesis of how photons can be beautiful.+3

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:01

The Aristotelian concept of beauty has three parts. Something is integral, clear and consonant (it is not missing anything that makes it essentially what it is, it is clearly what it is, and it is related to a purpose), which would exclude a sunset (due to it serving no purpose) but include an iPhone. Another way to look at it is to consider beauty a synonym for desirable.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:01

It's not computation, it's self-reflection, being aware of your own internal state and acting on it. For this reason, a thermostat is conscious, and everything else that can self-regulate is too.+3

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:01

 Luminous_Green_Ray  different strokes for different folks. Personally I find the world so much more fascinating and beautiful with the idea that consciousness exists everywhere, even in the most mundane places.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:01

 Luminous_Green_Ray  I find solipsism to be a sad way to live, and quite egotistical to boot+1

@hhjhj393 - 2025-05-28 10:48:01

Proof?+1

@vulonkaaz - 2025-05-28 10:48:01

 @hhjhj393  the proof is within yourself+1

@yorch802 - 2025-05-21 10:48:02

he said on his interview with the orthodox christian streamer that he already had a bunch of videos filmed.+2

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:02

You are missing the entire point. The room simply reacts deterministically to its outputs. The room does not self-reflect. It is not aware that it is a room. It does not consider what it should do or could do with what it is given.+3

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:02

It's not what neurons do. No one has never produced an argument or even some plausible chain of logic that argues that neural computation or any other kind produces consciousness. Some people believe it does because they are a priori strict materialists, therefore they must assume this is true (even though it obviously isn't). Here you assume someone must prove to you otherwise than you just assuming that computation is consciousness (which it also obviously isn't). The only way out of it is either denying consciousness exists (the Dennett route, which is abusrd and manifestly false) or admitting that strict materialism is false.+4

@bc-cu4on - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Once I learned about the Turing test and the Chinese room experiment, I started to look at the people around me and reached the conclusion that most humans aren't actually conscious, but instead operate on trained routines and repeated aphorisms. So machines will have no trouble emulating the average normie to the fullest, and what will be the difference then?+12

@omiwa9718 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Certified Luke classic+1

@antinominianist - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

1. it is not the individual human in the room who should be considered the locus of understanding, but rather the entire system as a whole. Just as understanding in humans doesn't reside in any single neuron but emerges from the entire neural system, understanding Chinese might emerge from the whole room system - including the rulebook, the paper, and the person functioning as a central processing unit. The person is merely one component in a larger cognitive system that, in its totality, understands Chinese. 2. understanding might exist as a "virtual" entity within the system, similar to how virtual machines and objects exist in computing. When we call up the pocket calculator function on a desktop computer, the image of a pocket calculator appears on the screen. We don't complain that it isn't really a calculator, because the physical attributes of the device do not matter. Similarly, understanding might be instantiated virtually within the Chinese Room system even if no physical component individually possesses understanding. 3. if the Chinese Room were embedded in a robot that could interact with the world - receiving sensory input and producing motor outputs - then the system would have the necessary causal connections to develop genuine understanding. By interacting with the environment, the symbols would be grounded in real-world referents, creating the connection between syntax and semantics that Luke claims is missing. If we could graft a robot to a reasoning program, we wouldn't need a person to provide the meaning anymore: it would come from the physical world 4. Consider replacing neurons one by one with artificial components. At what point would consciousness disappear? Critics argue there would be no clear line, challenging the video's sharp distinction between computation and consciousness 5. Luke is trying to get you to place the mind of the room in the man, and because the mind cannot be said to be in the man, the room has no mind. However, the mind isn't in the man, it is the room, and more specifically, the book in the room+16

@MrZmogZ - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Thanks so much for coming back 💛+1

@zebraforceone - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

3:49 - Philosophical conundrum - Prove it.+6

@blitzkrieg2928 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Feels so weird for Luke to constantly upload+2

@notgate2624 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

I don't know if I'd call it misunderstood. As with most thought experiments, people have different takeaways that aren't necessarily right or wrong. "syntax isn't semantics" -> "consciousness isn't computation" -> "minds aren't physical". These are big jumps. Searle was against computationalism, not physicalism: aka the mind is physical, but not purely computational. Manipulating discrete symbols using explicit rules is one of an infinite number of "machines" you can create, and Searle believed there was some other type of machinery (more complicated than if-statements) that could explain consciousness. For example, this machinery could be chemical instead of simply programmatic/symbolic. Our brain can "compute" things using neural networks, sure, but there are a wide array neurotransmitters which interact with this system. These could be the "substance" of consciousness (or any number of other mechanisms in the brain). People would just always say they feel consciousness is too big to boil down to some chemicals though. It's also worth noting that this system (and neural networks in general) is analog and not digital. Anyway, I don't think this thought experiment really says anything about whether these other types of machines could be conscious (or contribute to consciousness). It's just about how one type of simple machine probably isn't conscious. To get a better feel for how people think about this: Would you consider a clone of yourself to be conscious? I feel it's too easy for people to say a perfect, atomic simulation of their brain wouldn't be conscious, but a biological clone hits a little closer to home on the dualism issue I feel.+7

@Wonderingax - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

I fell asleep twice trying to watch it+1

@nak807 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

"It has to be", "it must be", insert analogy. There's nothing being said here but the flimsy need to believe. The fact that there's a context and nuance of meaning in human language doesn't mean there fore you've even come close to defining consciousness. LLMs don't come up with new ideas, they merely map in a statistical way the possible outcomes that have already existed with a bit of randomness mixed in. New Ideas can be explained in the left, right brain dichotomy. Take away objective measurement, substitute a vaguer, more metaphorical, understand through relating to each other's feelings. Wait for a new idea to come up while not actually defining it definitively, then reassert the objective world view and try to make it fit defining the vague corners of the idea until you have something that sound coherent. that's all the human brain is doing. We're bullshit artists. Where did the new idea come from? Most new inventions are invented by multiple people in the same lifetime independently so clearly it's from their environment. You could say it's the ether too if you want but that increases complexity.+5

@Shlooomth - 2025-05-28 10:48:03

Don’t confuse sapience with consciousness and don’t confuse consciousness with intelligence. It’s a different form of consciousness. A simpler and alien form. Like a slime mold. Not human intelligence but undeniably a form of intelligence+3

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Consciousness is just a complex continuous interaction between parts of the brain and hormonal feedback mechanisms. This makes you 1-aware (compute capacity) and 2-willful (pre-programmed incentive loops to go after selected behaviours). Current LLMs are aware but not willful. Any other animal is willful but not aware (give it a larger brain this feature emerges). We just haven't found a good enough architecture to instill willfulness in software agents, but they already can infer any abstraction humans can given enough resources (this is in fact learning and understanding).+7

@verkdoesstuff - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

He’s back! The king has returned. All hail the Linux tech talk!+1

@redbook7347 - 2025-05-28 10:48:03

If consciousness is not physical, then could you explain how the physical and conscious worlds interact?+5

@irlporygon-z6929 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

People really, REALLY underestimate the "book" (or equivalent construction) in this experiment. To convincingly speak Chinese like a human, it would need responses to questions like "How many times has this exact question been asked?" that depend directly on the state of the conversation and require some simulation of working memory, or at least some convincing representation of a limited one. No one would ever consider someone a Chinese speaker (or even a human) if they couldn't answer a few questions like that correctly at least several times in a conversation. To correctly account for this, the book would also need lists of rules that include things like "if any of the following 10000 messages have been delivered at least twice but no more than 4 times and you receive any of the following messages..." for almost every sentence that requires previous context, and it only gets worse from there (EXCEPT if any the previous 754 sentences have appeared...). If someone created a book (or a room with a book, or a machine, or whatever) complicated enough to actually successfully do that, I would instantly say yes that system 1000% speaks Chinese and there's really no argument to the contrary. Basically, what I'm encouraging people who think this thought experiment somehow proves that machines are fundamentally incapable of thinking to consider is questions that require knowledge of the conversation to answer ("In the last question I asked, what was the fourth Chinese character?", which can literally be anything depending on the previous question; not technically impossible to write down all possible answers to all such questions in a book if we assume sentences can't be infinitely long, but definitely too big to fit in the observable universe if we're writing it down as a rule. this question would be unbelievably easy for a person to answer by the way). I have no idea how anyone could argue that a system that answers those types of context-dependent questions correctly (or at least lies convincingly enough to fake it somehow lol) doesn't speak Chinese.+3

@EuroPoorChud - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

In Computability Theory, non-computable problems are those for which no algorithm exists that can produce a correct solution for all possible inputs in a finite amount of time. These problems are also known as undecidable or unsolvable problems. A key example of a non-computable problem is the Halting Problem, which asks whether a given program will eventually halt (stop running) or run forever. The existence of non-computable problems highlights the fundamental limitations of what can be solved by algorithms and computers. These limitations stem from the fact that some problems involve self-referential or infinite processes that cannot be captured by finite, step-by-step procedures. This is due to computers deriving from Turing machines. Current computers and algorithms can't reach Consciousness because they lack the capacity for metacognition, thinking about one's own thoughts. It involves awareness of one's thinking processes, including understanding strengths, weaknesses, biases, and how one approaches problems. Metacognition also includes self-regulation, which is the ability to monitor, evaluate, and self-correct one's thinking. Essentially, it's "thinking about thinking".+8

@GurtGobain - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

I decided I should probably watch this video at 1x speed for once+3

@PetesSubs - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

We makin’ it out of e/acc with this one 💯💯💯+6

@Alexbl100 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

I suggest Emperor's new mind as a book on this matter+2

@darukutsu - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

have you found game you were looking for?+4

@vladislavkaras491 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

That a really great explanation of how LLM interacts! Thank you for the video, Luke!+1

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

Well in one case, humans built the entire cultural and physical infrastructure for the “programming” of the average human, yet still there is an inherent experience that no human created. Whereas a machine has no inherent biological or ancestral ability to exist or perceive without any human intervention. One is “alive” whether it is aware of that in any meaningful way or not, and the other is “built” and has no senses nor experiences not provided by someone that is alive. Humans exist without machines, machines do not exist without us.+1

@hoots187 - 2025-05-21 10:48:03

suffering+2

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:03

I think the Turing test is meaningless. It's like saying that mankind has become perfect when it has been able to manufacture good ice cream. Without mentioning any person or criteria for determining what is good ice cream.+2

@Napalm6b - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

I can connect a microphone and a video camera to a computer. Does it suddenly start to synthesize from the audio/visual information available to create it's own system of language to communicate the meaning of sensory experience spontaneously? No it does not. It doesn't matter how much memory or hd space it has, it will not start deriving meaning from an active camera lense or microphone on its own. Nice try though.+7

@manoelcastro363 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

The problem is the premise that a model of a system that shows emergent properties is the same as the system itself. If you had a complete description of all the states of the universe in one sheet of paper and did all the computations one at a time and then copy the new states to a new piece of paper, are the mental states described in the paper or at the moment of being calculated conscious? If it was like that running the simulation of a brain would have moral implications. I don't believe there is something "spiritual" in the matter, but reality is not mere computation.+2

@Napalm6b - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

@manoelcastro363  I like your analysis of the problem. I don't need to believe in bearded omniscient sky lord or an infinite recurrence through meditation to figure that the materialist ontology is incomplete. I'm not invested in any particular religion so I'm not offended either. 😁+2

@qwey7 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

 @Napalm6b  It would be equivalent to inputting data into empty room, of course even a brain with only hypothalamus wouldn't be able to do that, but if you would write a NN for it, and run it on your computer, it would be able to do that+2

@DavidDeCorso - 2025-05-28 10:48:04

The paper is conscious+1

@johnstamos5948 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

This is dependent on your metaphysical presuppositions on consciousness+1

@zebraforceone - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

@johnstamos5948  indeed. To put it another way, prove to me that you are fundamentally any different than the room.+3

@A5A5A5A5h - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

⁠ @zebraforceone Proofs work on the domain of science. Consciousness doesn’t belong to this field, therefore it’s impossible and pointless to formulate such scientific proof. This doesn’t mean that there are no differences between us and a computational model, though.+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:04

You don't need to believe it if you don't want to. Nobody owes you any proof anyway. But you may ask questions if you want to. You may also explain what you find problematic. But when you approach it this way, you seem to think that this is a game and you will win it by simply being stubborn enough and inviting others to waste their time and energy on you.+1

@zebraforceone - 2025-05-28 10:48:04

 @seriouscat2231  Well that's not in the spirit of philosophical discussions now is it+2

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

no, it's not and it doesn't take a lot of thinking to realize that. consciousness doesn't have physical properties. and saying "it emerges" amounts to "it's just magic" and physics of the gaps+10

@neuromancer845 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

"Consciousness is just a complex continuous interaction between parts of the brain and hormonal feedback mechanisms." How do you know? Why do some parts of the brain manifest in conscious awareness and other parts don't? What distinguishes brain interactions that produce conscious effects from brain interactions that don't?+3

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

 @moussaadem7933  I said "awareness" emerges by increasing brain compute capacity, "willfulness" has to be engineered. Natural selection fabricated the current architecture of willfulnes in animals.+2

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

Through awareness you can model the environment and predict which actions lead to which results. With a decent willfulness loop you can evaluate a next "objective" or "instinct" and test the predicted actions against the world, if you can then observe the reactions of the environment and improve your model accordingly, this is consciousness. So there is a loop for reevaluation of instincts/objectives and a loop for reevaluation of models of the environment. The human loops adapted to such an extent that they feel seamless and "energy efficient".+2

@goodlookinouthomie1757 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

Say what you like about Sam Harris', but he always had a phrase to describe consciousness, which is the experience of what it's like to be. That's what a computer can never have. Make it as complex as you like, it never escapes its reality of simply being a mechanical device operating entirely in Newtonian physics.+2

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

and at this point, if you try to cherry pick exact manifestations for each of these configurations of consciousness your battle is already lost.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

​​ @backdaniel  "awareness" is an experience in one's consciousness. to say that consciousness or the experiences in it magically emerge from an arbitrary organization of matter is very very unconvincing. there's no logical argument to be made there, there's no coherent theory of how that would even work. you are following the materialism hunch instead of actually investigating the issue. and sure maybe these structures somehow support consciousness, like how geometric spaces supports matters. but that doesn't explain what matters is, or wether it emerges from space etc..+4

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

 @moussaadem7933  have you heard of something more unconvincing that saying something doesn't emerge from an arbitrary organization of matter? In my experience everything in my life, and everything i can measure or model was always an arbitrary organization of matter. It's absurd to try to change that perception, invent a new term for it, and try to convince me that there is anything else than an arbitrary organization of matter. It makes the subject inexpressible and incomprehensible, in the lines of "I don't want anyone to understand this so ill call it metaphysical and say its impossible to try to analyze it". If it's not physical it might as well not really exist. How can you cope with thinking a random form on an arbitrary small flying rock has something special in its configuration. It's even more of a lapse when you can literally see and explain the emergency of every other form on this rock and draw very clear parallels between them. So in a very SPECIFIC moment in time your ancestor received a what? a gift from god? that distinguished them from the chimp or the bonobo?+3

@TrappedInFloor - 2025-05-21 10:48:04

Consciousness is the property of having subjective phenomenological experiences. How and why systems like the brain seemingly (and I emphasize 'seemingly' here) produce it is an open question in philosophy and neuroscience. Given the inherently subjective nature of consciousness I'm not even sure how you could ever test its presence in an artificial system.+3

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

 @TrappedInFloor  Ok, so lets make it subjective and say artificial agents can't have it by definition? If so that's fair, you are just saying this term (which means nothing) really means not being human. So if you are not human then you can't be described by this term.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

​​ @backdaniel  you are reaching a lot. this isn't about religion, god, or the specialness of humans. these don't lead from my objections. all I am saying is that conscious experience doesn't have physical properties. unlike other mysteries. it's makes no sense whatsoever to expect some sort of physical chain of events to lead to non-physical experience (read about the mind-body problem). you can keep moving atoms around at an ever increasing levels of complexity. at what point does that lead to anything more ? it's not possible even in principle. many non thiests make the same objections. actually even the atheist Alex O Connor, he actually gets the critique and he says it's the only thing that makes him doubt his materialism. this isn't an appeal to authority, I am not claiming it's true because a guy said it. I am just pushing out of the "science vs religion" understanding+3

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

 @moussaadem7933  I am not aware of the mind-body problem ill read in to it. This is about the specialness of humans though, either that or you are failing to conceptualize conscious experience.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

​​​ @backdaniel no, this is about the incoherence of the idea that something with physical properties allows for the emergence of something without physical properties. the common solutions to this problem do NOT center humans at all. people are usually pushed to a panpsychist view of the universe where everything has a level of consciousness (not just humans) this may include things like tables and rocks. that's one way to explain how physics could allow for consciousness. just make consciousness a property of physics itself, that way we can more easily reduce consciousness to physics. another common take is idealism, where the brain is just how our consciousness looks like. in other words, the brain emerges from consciousness, not vice versa. this is useful because we already know consciousness is more general than physics. it can have experience of physical things but it also can supports things like mathematics and meanings and categories and so on so it makes sense to embed physics in it rather than doing the opposite I am being very informal and imprecise but whatever, can't be bothered+3

@backdaniel - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

​ @moussaadem7933  ok now i understand where you are wrong. Thinking of "mathematics and meanings and categories" as "metaphysical". They are information, more specifically protocols, much like the internet, or more recently you can think of the bitcoin protocol, hopefully you can see that any meme has to exist in a physical form (electrons are still physical, brain waves are still physical, books, sound waves, etc). Protocols like math are stored locally in PHYSICAL FORM between the "participants of the network", its a distributed, decentralized and agreed upon piece of information (or set of rules, or language, whatever you'd like). Even the concept of a chair as a piece of information has its "abstraction" physically present in the neural pathways of the people who seen that form before and machines who learned to abstract it. If everyone and everything that conceptualized the form of a chair suddenly died, this abstraction would no longer exist. People would have to see that pattern again and try to differentiate the concept from zero and agree lightly upon for "the concept of chair" be formed again. You can easily verify this by the fact that every person learned a different abstraction of a chair, even though they somewhat converge in the idea of that observed form. Their abstraction is stored locally in their brains.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:05

​ @backdaniel you are choosing to ignore the glaring problem and instead focusing on my view of mathematics and meaning and so on. abstractions are not part of physics. there's no physical law that dictates that two chairs belobg to the same category "chair". even molecules are abstractions, it's just a sea of atoms, we can keep going down indefinitely, strippig abstractions away. saying that brains have a physical part of them that somehow make abstractions also "physical" is as ridiculous as saying unicorns are physically real if everyone believes so. also, information requires interpretation. there is nothing in the framework of physics that makes the patterns representing some sort of abstraction in my brain any more relevant than half that structure. or that structure plus my hair. you are choosing to isolate my body then my brain then that structure. and you are deciding to see it as more than just "atoms" i can keep going but the comment section isn't for this sort of discussions+2

@DavidDeCorso - 2025-05-28 10:48:05

I'm sorry your own thinking only reaches the threshold of LLM regurgitation.+1

@the81kid - 2025-06-04 10:48:06

Maybe the physical is a projection of the physical, like a 2D movie is a projection of the 3D physical world. Cause and effect are human concepts. There must be more.+1

@A5A5A5A5h - 2025-05-21 10:48:06

No one is underestimating the potential of this book/machine/mathematical model. What is being argued with this experiment is that machines do NOT have consciousness, no matter how complex they get. That’s the whole difference between us and computers.+2

@irlporygon-z6929 - 2025-05-21 10:48:06

@A5A5A5A5h  yeah, and I think the argument is dumb. if you have 1 room with a Chinese guy that knows Chinese passing letters to you through a slot and another identical room with some elaborate machine in it that gives the exact same responses and you can't tell the difference from outside, you can't say that the person "understands" Chinese in some way the machine doesn't without appealing to literal unobservable magical phenomena. The thought experiment relies on people's intuition that "rooms and books can't understand things" and hopes that that's enough to stop them from thinking about it any further (at least for people who try to use the thought experiment to make the claim that human consciousness is fundamentally based on non-observable non-physical phenomena, aka magic). The boring reality is that consciousness is probably some type of emergent property of physical connections in the brain and we simply don't understand enough about brains to have a clear idea of the mechanism behind it. IK a lot of people want the answer to be magic though.+2

@A5A5A5A5h - 2025-05-21 10:48:06

 @irlporygon-z6929  You have a very materialistic view on this topic. I’m not saying that is inherently wrong, but keep in mind that, for the time being, consciousness has never been observed or synthesized numerically and therefore cannot be reproduced on a computational model(only faked). I realize that for many, “good enough to mimic human behavior” is sufficient. However, the goal here isn’t to develop a marketable product. Rather, it’s to ask whether we can observe, study, and replicate consciousness within an artificial model.+1

@irlporygon-z6929 - 2025-05-21 10:48:06

 @A5A5A5A5h  Well, yeah, current tech isn't anywhere near it. In fact it is trivially easy to detect that you're talking to something artificial if you intend to, even for people without much exposure to the concept. It's just that I think the argument that human consciousness is magical on principle is silliness, mostly on the grounds of existing reproducible observations, e.g. the fact that it is possible to make physical modifications to the brains that result in predictable changes to consciousness, etc. And that the thought experiment doesn't really get very far at shaking the foundation of any of those real observations.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:48:06

 @A5A5A5A5h  "consciousness has never been observed.." lol silly words from a machine.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:48:06

I follow your infinite-book idea, however when you move it to a machine all the examples are real world trivial programming problems, even trivial dynamic programming, or natural-language-programming type problems, or simply on par with Akinator type systems. If only as a book in a thought experiment then a choose-your-own-translation approach to a book while massive would not be impossible; also see Library of Babel a infinite-library scifi story and discussions around such infinity. > require knowledge of the conversation to answer ("In the last question I asked, what was the fourth Chinese character?" in large language models the system has NO knowledge, no consciousness, no sentience. It doesn't even need to have a findFourthChar() routine, it only needs the statistics of what the probability is the probable character is from the preceding tokens. > I have no idea how anyone could argue that a system that answers those types of context-dependent questions correctly (or at least lies convincingly enough to fake it somehow lol) doesn't speak Chinese. No idea is right, and without merit when fallacies cannot even entertain the idea of the very real reality of autocomplete being in everyone's pockets.+1

@irlporygon-z6929 - 2025-06-08 10:48:06

 @TheNewton Not gonna lie, your style of writing is extremely unclear to me. The last sentence you wrote is entirely incomprehensible, and the rest of it has sparse pockets of intelligibility but I don't really sense a point being made across any of it+1

@kurku3725 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

this is false, computability theory also says something about recursion theorem: one can make a program that has its own source code in memory & therefore can have thoughts about thoughts+3

@kurku3725 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

as for undecidable problems, they are not better solved by humans too+3

@xshwei - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

 @kurku3725 this is especially funny considering that most computational formalisms rely on recursion (like general recursive functions)+1

@minhajsixbyte - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

"understanding" is overrated.+4

@1noobslayer - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

What a time to be alive+2

@xato168 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

Understanding itself is computational by nature. You're ascribing a spooky nature to the idea of understanding.+5

@ZetsuBenbiPingha - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I'm just loving you return Sir, thank you! I agree 100% with you, I'll look for this book+1

@me-low-key - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

Your reasoning that consciousness has to be made of a different substance other the material elements of the universe, looks to me like when I failed to understand how 1 dimensional bits of information can translate to a Cat video over the Internet. The only reason why the code of consciousness is not cracked yet, is we are not asking the right questions imho.+7

@DSmite3 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I made this exact argument in a philosophy class back in college. Thank you for making a video about it.+1

@kerbaman5125 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I don't get the cope mindset that "consciousness must be different than everything else we observe". Complex systems emerge from less complicated ones all the time, or 2D things do become 3D (phrasing from your argument). Accepting that I am nothing but a bunch of interacting bits of fundamental fields doesn't make me nihilistic, if anything, I appreciate life even more.+12

@altrombone1775 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I would argue that the Chinese Room Experiment oversimplifies the computational theory of mind with respect to consciousness in that it fails to account for previous inputs and the fact that there can be many, simultaneous inputs. As a result, I would suggest the following improvements: - Another individual who inputs a second letter, which provides further context (The brain analogues could be things like temperature, hormone levels, the current status of proteins within the brain, etc.) - A record of all previous inputs (The brain analogue could be things like memories or experiences) With these changes, I think you can get consciousness from material effects, thereby invalidating the need for a spiritual element.+1

@TheBannanaThief - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

So this argument is that lookup table is not consciousness and from this you go to consciousness is not product of matter?+10

@engin3ar - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

Overjoyed that you're posting again+1

@TamNguyen-yk9mn - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

Question is... does it matter? If an robot able to mimic all human behaviors, develop its own goals, purpose, instinct to survive, habits,... I don't think it matter by than. We don't know whether the people we talk to are even 'conscious'. For all we know, something inside the mind is making all this stuff up.+14

@jwnior - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

if people finds hard to believe that AI isn't conscious today, imagine the day we start seeing robots humanoids who mimics our expressions, blinks and "feels" emotions...+2

@elindbe3 - 2025-05-28 10:48:07

The problem with using the Chinese room experiment is that LLMs do not operate like the room. They do not take your input and look up a response in a big table. Rather, they take what you say, pull it apart into tokens, then based on their understanding developed during training put together an appropriate response. They have to have an understanding of what you asked them because otherwise it wouldn't be computationally feasible. You can't possibly store a response to every possible user input. You can verify their understanding easily. Just ask an LLM a question then ask them to analyze the language in your question. They can answer your question, then diagram the words in your questions sentenct, then tell you the philosophical meaning of your question. That's only possible through actually understanding your question.+4

@Dystisis - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

It's not clear what "consciousness" means in this context. When a patient in a hospital has "lost consciousness", they've blacked out, gone limp, etc., but may still be dreaming. When someone is "conscious of" something, they're acutely aware of it, they pay attention to it, etc.+3

@DJ_Frankfurter - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I think after 4 uploads, we can safely declare that the GOAT is back+1

@overtrist - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

The Zhon Xina Experiment+4

@CBT5777 - 2025-06-12 10:48:07

Computers do not have a nervous system. A nervous system is key, and very important.+1

@yyvan5125 - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

I am not sure that consciousness is something completely different. Imagine if you just create some hydrogen and oxygen atoms and suddenly you get water, it was not the thing you intended or expected to create, but it was just something emergent. I think that consciousness is the same, its just an emergent thing.+7

@janglestick - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

for sure , you put this together with godel's incompleteness, the limitations cantor and russell ran into .. the boundaries of what we can know and how we can know it become clearer+1

@arkbooi - 2025-05-21 10:48:07

brb translating this vid to Chinese using a room full of flashcards+6

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:08

Seems like your definition of understanding is somehow lacking or vague.+1

@notgate2624 - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

poetry+1

@TrappedInFloor - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

I think his general point is that strictly materialist models of the world have yet to explain consciousness and that people with materialist worldviews have a very bad grasp of the problem of consciousness.+1

@TheBannanaThief - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

 @TrappedInFloor  Yes, I understand the point. My point here is that logic presented in this video looks very flawed to me. It's like somebody saying that since Da Vinci's machines couldn't fly it is not possible for humans to ever create flying machine...+2

@Marcie-sr4vp - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

 @TheBannanaThief  It takes just as much faith to believe in a materialist explanation of consciousness than it does to believe in a "supernatural" origin.+1

@TheBannanaThief - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

 @Marcie-sr4vp  I'm not sure if it "as much". My point is that at this point in time with arguments presented we should leave both options open without pridefully declaring that we have answer? Can we agree on that?+1

@Marcie-sr4vp - 2025-05-28 10:48:08

 @TheBannanaThief  I believe in an intelligent design and the mechanism of which consciousness arises is irrelevant.+1

@TheNewton - 2025-06-07 10:48:08

whoa Whoa WHOA gentlemen and ladies , let us not forget ourselves and manners by disparaging look up tables. Please LUT's they are inherently reliable, measurable and provable. LLMS not so much.+2

@aaronspeedy7780 - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

It matters because of the interaction between them. If consciousness doesn't matter and can't be emergent, then there's no material process that can explain why our experience is so unified. This means that there is something that takes the complexities of our brains, simplifies it, and feeds it into our brain. Our brain can't be doing this because of the aforementioned reasons, thus some super-intelligent, immaterial being must be doing this, and this is essentially God.+1

@thomasjford - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

 @aaronspeedy7780  the problem is that we don’t know if it can’t be emergent+5

@TamNguyen-yk9mn - 2025-05-21 10:48:08

 @aaronspeedy7780  To put simply, I'm saying that you can't prove that I am real or conscious as everything you experience comes from a projection of your internal world. You could be hallucinating every bodily sensation, sight, smell, touch, heat,... I could just be your imagination. I rather have question that can't be answer than answer that I can't question. Ok there's a God, and then? Consciousness to me is just "I am".+1

@youranonymous931 - 2025-05-28 10:48:08

This is only possible because someone wrote the rules+1

@nyx211 - 2025-05-28 10:48:08

The LLMs that we have now are essentially a composition of mathematical functions. They turn a sequence of tokens into a sequence of vector embeddings which are then manipulated via a transformer architecture. The final result is a probability distribution for the next predicted token in the sequence. When sampling from a distribution, while the sampled token may appear to be random, but the distribution itself is totally deterministic. Even though each component is implemented as an algorithm, they're still functions so they're equivalent to static lookup tables in terms of input and output. Ultimately, since a composition of functions is still a function, an LLM could theoretically be constructed from a single giant lookup table. So that raises the question of whether these tables or books are capable of consciousness or semantic understanding (I don't think they are, by themselves). Perhaps Searle places too much emphasis on the book (function) and not on the processes of retrieving inputs, matching from the book, writing internal notes, etc. (algorithm). Maybe things like memory (procedural, episodic, working, semantic, etc.) and feedback need to be considered.+1

@JumpingJack-w2l - 2025-06-04 10:48:08

Giant lookup table can represent quite a lot of things so at some size it can become indistinguishable from what we call consciousness.+1

@DmT922ha - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

Wo bing chilling+3

@arcarsenal420 - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

The difference between gases and liquids is utterly insignificant compared to the difference between matter and a 1st person subjective experience, lol.+3

@yyvan5125 - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

Ok, then imagine a few more elements and you get the intricate machinery that we call the human body. That was certainly not an expected outcome right? What I am getting at is that emergent systems very often seem to be on a completely different level than what they emerged from+5

@MrBoxinaboxinabox - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

 @yyvan5125  Emergent systems are on a different level *in terms of behaviour*. But consciousness is not a behaviour.+1

@yyvan5125 - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

 @MrBoxinaboxinabox  I did not mean behavior directly, but in a more general way - complexity. What would you describe as consciousness? For me it would be something in terms of awareness of self and consequences of actions. Maybe we are not talking about the same thing. But once you accept that, like in computers, there is some hardware and then some software running on it, you can imagine there being something so complex as our internal world which allows the awareness of self, given the complexity of the hardware. Yes, just synapses firing could very much lead to something you perceive as your consciousness. The same as the operating system being much more complex than the individual transistors on the chip. If the reality is different in your opinion, what would be your explanation for consciousness? Do you have some theory or are you just sure that it's not what I am saying? Or does it have something to do with god? I really want to know what you think.+1

@MrBoxinaboxinabox - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

​ @yyvan5125  I'm talking about phenomenal consciousness - having any form of subjective experience at all. In the same way that you can never deduce a prescriptive statement from only descriptive statements (Hume's law), you can never build a subjective property out of only objective properties. So if something has subjective properties (like qualia/subjective experience), those properties cannot stem from only objective properties (like those of matter). So subjectivity must be fundamental.+1

@yyvan5125 - 2025-05-21 10:48:09

 @MrBoxinaboxinabox  I see where are you coming from, but couldn't perceived subjectivity come from the fact that there are physical differences in the way we perceive things?+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:09

The concept of emergence has nothing to do with anyone's expectations.+1

@yyvan5125 - 2025-05-28 10:48:09

​ @seriouscat2231 Well then explain what it is then, that's how I've been thinking about it+1

@PhilippBlum - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

Don't worry Luke. We are on this. We know our ways. We will do this ;) Those who know.+1

@Houshalter - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

If non material souls exist, they still must interact with the material universe. And these interactions must either be random and senseless, or non random and logical. If they are random, we can just put a random number generator in the Chinese room. And then it will think, feel, and act in every way identical to a conscious being. Including believing it has a non material soul, and making arguments about rooms like itself. If the non material soul's interactions are not random, but logical and predictable, we can model it perfectly with logic. And just adjust the room's program to match it. And again, it will behave identically to a conscious being, including it's own internal feelings and thoughts. Once someone said that because computers can't have souls, we will never build a working AI. A computer scientist responded "so if we do build a working AI, that would disprove the existence of souls?" And the man was horrified that he had accidentally made a testable hypothesis.+5

@andreaolivo523 - 2025-05-28 10:48:10

The Chinese room argument merely states that the argument for "computation => consciousness" must be much more subtle/complex than the one the experiment shows. I don't really see how it can be used to dismiss the computational origin of consciousness? You don't state this in the video, to be fair, but (at least, to me) you seem to heavily imply it+2

@rewe3536 - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

I think you are getting "Just because it talks doesn't mean it understands" and jumping to "it doesn't understand now hence it will never understand". We can't know whether consciousness is material or not at the moment, so I think it is useless to discuss it. Atheist or not nobody is winning points here.+4

@One.manuel - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

And just like that, he came back.+1

@anukranan - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

We can only conceive of the material through the means of the mind. Is there anything but mind?! Just saying.+4

@calholli - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

I do agree that today's AI is not conscious.. and no one is saying that it is; but I'm glad we got that out of the way.+1

@ianhoolihan2396 - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

why can't consciousness be a property of matter+4

@egor.okhterov - 2025-05-28 10:48:10

I was thinking about consciousness for a long time and I have a certain feeling about it, despite I cannot describe it logically and precisely. It feels to me that consciousness arises during compression. When we pump air, when stream of water goes though a narrow whole or when volcano erupts - I think these events create consciousness. Maybe you think I am mad. Maybe I am. But I still explore this idea in my mind from time to time.+1

@TheRealisticNihilist - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

Philosophy 101 style question begging. Couldn't defend the view if your life depended on it. You conflate cognitive phenomenology with cognition itself and have no justification of it. There's no argument as to why the room itself doesn't I'm fact understand Chinese. It's just an intuition. You also couldn't defend the view that qualia is a coherent notion even though it's not relevant until you've established that cognition without cognitive phenomenology is impossible. I suppose it is just another brain-dead take from a Christian. Though, I do share the discontentment with the physicalist lack of enchantment. There's just no philosophy here. Just a bunch of unjustified claims.+4

@vexy1987 - 2025-06-04 10:48:10

Interesting parallel: studies show our brains decide to act before we're consciously aware of it (Libet, Soon et al.), suggesting our sense of agency might be a post-hoc illusion. Similarly, AIs generate human-like language without awareness—they just predict what comes next. In both cases, we get fluent, intentional-seeming output without real-time conscious control. Makes you wonder if consciousness is just our brain narrating what it's already done—like an advanced autocomplete with a self-model.+1

@asdfasdfasdf12 - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

get to the point bro+4

@sohl947 - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

I encountered the Chinese Room thought experiment in Hofstader's GEB when I was in high school and the book was fairly new. I agree that computation does not produce consciousness, but the room (as posited) does do something amazing if it truly can convince Chinese speakers that a thoughtful messages are coming out of the room. So I've always felt that the "room" as a system (with its instruction book and a TON of scratch paper) IS intelligent, but artificially so, (therefore, an AI), and could, in principal, mimic consciousness more or less well, depending on the practical limits of the setup. Personally, I think there is some ontological mechanism that is beyond Newtonian physics that is necessary for consciousness. Perhaps this is a "mechanism" in the quantum realm such as the one Roger Penrose and Stewart Hameroff have proposed, but if so, I believe our Creator set it up so our universe is a place where our souls can experience growth and love. (Wow, that got deep quickly!). Good video and I hope it inspires people to look at this thought experiment more deeply.+1

@RedOneM - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

But you don’t even know the actual semantics of English… Stop pretending as if you knew it on some kind of higher generalisation level+3

@revolution_zakaria - 2025-05-28 10:48:10

I imagine a bunch of AI agents having the same conversation with their own definition of "creativeness", "art" and "consciousness"+1

@0xD90F39DFAE - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

THE LEGEND IS BACK!!!!+1

@ezmonyi - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

HE'S SPITTIN TURTH+2

@Alexander_Sannikov - 2025-05-28 10:48:10

whether or not chinese room has or doesn't have consciousness entirely relies on how you define what "consciousness" means. since nobody can give a good definition to words "understanding" or "consciousness", asking questions about them is completely pointless.+1

@farmerjohn6526 - 2025-06-15 10:48:10

If a machine can simulate understanding by following rules, and we say it doesn’t understand, then we have to ask—how often do people do the same? We grow up memorizing language, following patterns, mimicking behavior. We’re rewarded for correct outputs, not deep understanding. Half the time, we talk without thinking. Rote phrases, stored responses, cultural scripts. Just like the rulebook in the room. So. The arguments dont prove anything. Because it assumes the humans understand what their saying. When many do not.+1

@DeyanIlievDoctora - 2025-06-10 10:48:10

Joscha Bach has that locked in. Conscience is the virtual property of the brain, simulation, a game engine.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

I would add that things like causality and such might not have direct analogues in the "noetic" realm of consciousness, but yes. I would say though, while I think we might see AIs that act pretty close to conscious beings, there is a part of our behavior that is frankly directly based on our conscious mind which could be replicated in part (obviously an AI could model a conscious mind and do things analogous to it). So I do agree with the computer scientist here (although, I wouldn't say *soul*, unless we understand them to be coterminus with *consciousness*). There is some level where a perfect AI or philosophical zombie would be distinguishable from a person (although given how people inordinately boost the AIs of today, many would not really care to see the difference as it'd be close enough).+3

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

You could be a dualist/pluralist or pan-psychist. The only thing that really can't be true is pure materialism, but it's what people of today just have to believe is true and can't fathom otherwise.+4

@anukranan - 2025-05-21 10:48:10

​ @LukeSmithxyz  That's true. Since I'm a Buddhist, I also think that mind is the source of everything (simply put). What is the usual philosophy for that in Orthodox Christianity?+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

It's not an intuition: in a saner time it is a simple argument to absurdity. I will happily "baselessly" claim that humans have qualia and are conscious and rooms are not. Any person who objects to this is not worth taking seriously and time would be wasting trying to talk them back to sanity.+4

@benearnthof9015 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

 @LukeSmithxyz  Read a book about Category Theory until you understand the Yoneda Lemma and by extension Yoneda Embedding and you may be able to see the gaps in your claims+1

@TheRealisticNihilist - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

 @LukeSmithxyz  That's a convenient way to insulate your own world view. Unfortunately, it's open to anyone under any circumstances so it's wildly ineffective.+2

@marknicoll7034 - 2025-05-28 10:48:11

I studied the Searle papers in university when I took computer science in university. Computer Science over the years has added a bunch of knowledge to what Searle found. In computer science we have a theorem of mathematics called "computational dynamics" that has an understanding of Searles theories. The idea is that there is a qualitative difference between what are called Turing Machines and Quantum computers. Turing Machines are the standard computer we use all over the world where quantum computers are the next generation of machines that are currently being designed. Turing machines are deterministic where as Quantum computers use atoms to do probabilistic calculations. Searles proof only works to disprove consciousness in Turing machines. In recent years there also was a proof that quantum computers can replicate some basic semantic reasoning. Its not the smoking gun of consciousness though. Even though we can know that quantum computers are better at consciousness than Turing Machines that likely isn't the extent of it as far as we know. The theorem of Computational Dynamics also shows that there is an infinite hierarchy of possible computers each one stronger than the one before beyond that of both Turing Machines and Quantum Computers.+1

@zentrans - 2025-06-06 10:48:11

Persistence is the illusion, or at least your experience of everything else that changes should inform you that if you're a part of that, you don't really exist as a fixed definition, which leads to uncomfortability of "ego death", yet relieves the fear of death. Ironically, the social experience is a partial experience of this "connectedness", it even manifests as religious ideologies along with other ones serving the exact same purpose, yet imperfect because it doesn't completely rid one of fear+1

@VultureXV - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

We can already tell that consciousness isn't utterly computational due to the nature of anesthesia. We don't target the neocortex with anesthesia. We don't even target the cerebellum. It's predominantly the cortex, brain stem, and thalamus. Cortex is the most complex, but its general function is responding to commands or sensory input. Another fascinating aspect is the fact that we can observe neurological activity in the brain, potentially the subconscious activity, while someone is under anesthesia. In essence, we aren't even fully shutting the brain down. I dont think we know enough about consciousness yet. We honestly don't know what's going on up here in that regard. We know how these areas work. What their function is, neurotransmitters and hormones and their reactions. But we still can't isolate consciousness. This is why I still feel the theories that we are simply "receivers" of consciousness to be the most valid.+1

@clintonleonard5187 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

So weird, I just started Blindsight by Peter Watts 2 days ago, and a big part of that book is this concept. The main character does not understand human interaction, due to a brain injury, but he is able to study body language and he learns the order of operations, so to speak, for interaction and body language, and he is able to "transform the topology" without understanding the semantics. If you transform it correctly, the semantics remain encoded. Later they also encounter an alien construct that they deduce is a Chinese Room. It communicates with their ship, but they learn that it has no idea what it is saying.+1

@ChanceHarold8216 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Welcome back dr Phil+1

@ryanmoore9502 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Luke, I disagree with the entire premise of this video. I’ve gathered you are not a computationalist, and therefore prescibe to Searle’s school of thought. That doesn’t mean that other philosophers “don’t understand” the chinese room. Its a thought experiment, it has no correct answer. It’s meant to provoke discussion. To call him an awful philosopher for having a different take on the experiment seems harsh. Besides, I think the experiment is not representative of modern LLMs which have been shown to be able to encode semantic meaning in high dimensional vector space. To disgregard computationalism completely and say “it’s bad science… to reduce the entire human cognitive realm to computation… just because we dont understand it in materialist science at this point” makes zero sense. Isn’t that GOOD science? We don’t have an accepted theory for consciousness yet, so why should we dismiss the theory of computationalism on a whim just because conciousnees doesn’t “feel like an illusion”? We should continue to explore all viable theories in the domain of philosophy of mind until we are able to falsify them.. is that not what the scientific method is?+2

@AlexAegisOfficial - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Then no conversation happened with John at all, the outside Chinese man talked with the author of the book. John was at most a mailman, a mediator.+2

@TheRogueVigilante - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

A way that the essence of our soul and consciousness can be experienced is by reading or experiencing good work of other people, think about playing something like "Cave Story" or reading "1984", now those pieces of literature, they radiate essence or soul, on the other hand AI slop games, like the one flight simulator created by levelsio, that feels utter garbage, now I don't wanna say that you can't use computation and statistics to take decisions, but you have to be careful that you are approaching it as a mere tool for conscious beings who are aware of the data being fed into it, its one thing using a tool like an LLM to extend some of your capabilities with statistics computation and then its totally another when you believe it to be a conscious being.+2

@livvy8377 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

I'd say, even if you are a materialist, the fact that computers in their structure, are defined by logic gates already sets it apart from the human mind, which is not simply a composition of logic gates. We're then in uncontrolled environment of atoms and molecules and their interactions. I believe this is why an LLM can quite rapidly reason in terms of symbolic and similar logics (e.g.by parsing the semantics of texts), but lacks any form of environmental congingency. It just so happens that we use symbolic logic as a means of reasoning ourselves. But we also make inferences and deductions based on shared concepts that are always in flux. It's why LLMs are extremely bad at comedy as an example, since comedy is generally making use of these 'shared concepts' of the audience and playing with them in creative ways.+1

@Peter-u7p1t - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Yeah, but what does it matter? If it is capable of mimicking consciousness in a realistic and convincing way, then it is conscious for all intent and purposes.+3

@l.christoffersen7502 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Why couldn't consciousness be computation? Your alternative basically boils down to: consciousness is magic. The universe inherently does computation all the time, in some sense. Complex weather systems, stars, life, there's even complex structure in virtual particles that phase in and out of existence. Just because we don't understand it how or it emerges in detail doesn't mean consciousness isn't computation, just gotta abstract what you mean by computation. Now, if we're talking about a bunch of linear algebra generating text, then yes, of course that is not consciousness or anything like it. If people actually understood the chinese room experiment we wouldn't have this big AI cargo cult.+3

@helloimatapir - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Luke came back to YouTube because he needs human connection. AI can't give that to him yet, but maybe in time that will change.+1

@nvxxu2i - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

Four video in a row! May your day be as blessed as you blessed mine!+1

@revolution_zakaria - 2025-05-28 10:48:11

We just decided that AI doesn't fit a definition that we don't even agree upon!!! LOL+3

@benbowers3613 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

That consciousness transcends language doesn't NECESSARILY mean that consciousness transcends matter. It could simply transcend the specific part of the brain where language happens.+3

@andrewgrasman8951 - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

I was not expecting this aesthetic change+1

@TheProudHeretics - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

But Searle DOES have a consciousness of Chinese. He is conscious of what he's saying. He may not be fluent in Chinese, but he is conscious and is generating the responses. Being fluent of Chinese and being conscious of it are two different things, I can be conscious of Spanish but that doesn't mean I'm fluent. I don't find it a compelling thought experiment. I would say the more compelling thought experiment to prove your point is the qualia thought experiment by Frank Jackson. Jackson instead posits a room in which everything is white, and the color blue is nowhere present. He posits that the person inside the room learns everything there is to know about neurology, and how the visual perception works in the brain. But when the person leaves the room, Jackson says, they do in fact learn something new that no black and white book could teach them. Namely they learn what blue looks like. What the experience of blue is like. LLMs exist that can produce creative linguistic outputs, but have none of the sensory experiences we do. They can only relate words to other words, but not words to sensory experiences. Therefore, the argument could go, just producing linguistically appropriate outputs in human language must not be a sufficient criteria to test for consciousness, because consciousness requires sensory experience of some kind. Consciousness is the "what it is like"-ness, one can contemplate the question "what is it like to be my cat?", and there's a there there, the cat is having experiences. Now, more advanced AI models are increasingly gaining the capacity to be multi-modal, and to integrate linguistic processing with visual. So that can present a counterargument to the proposition that AI generally is unconscious and will always be, no matter how advanced it gets. But you can at least say that merely producing linguistically appropriate and unique outputs does not in and of itself constitute consciousness using this argument, in any case.+1

@kmoprime23 - 2025-06-04 10:48:11

Searle’s Chinese Room is often treated as a devastating blow to strong AI or computationalism, but at its core, it smuggles in an unproven assumption: that syntactic manipulation of symbols, via a rulebook, could in principle produce fluent, contextually appropriate Chinese responses indistinguishable from those of a native speaker. But that’s precisely what’s at issue. By assuming that the system can produce convincing outputs without understanding, Searle effectively begs the question against computational theories of mind. He presumes that surface-level linguistic performance is possible via rules alone—without showing that such rules could be specified, implemented, or scaled. In reality: If Searle (the man in the room) can’t actually follow the rules fast enough, or if the rulebook would be the size of a galaxy and still fail to cover edge cases, Then the Chinese Room fails to simulate intelligence, and the thought experiment collapses. It’s also worth noting that modern AI doesn’t operate via a hand-coded rulebook. It learns patterns statistically—generalizing from training data in ways that aren’t like Searle’s book at all. So even if his thought experiment were airtight, it wouldn’t map cleanly onto how current AI systems actually function.+1

@TheGoreforce - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

what's incredibly scary is how many people don't understand this concept. Computation does not mean it's conscience, people will be fooled the moment a creator finds out how to make it mimic free will convincingly. Like as if the electric state is real, the robots only acted that way because someone told them to act that way... we did.+1

@genrlgrant - 2025-05-21 10:48:11

The Chinese Room Excrement+2

@braden5972 - 2025-05-28 10:48:11

Are you sure that "you" gathered that Luke is not a computationalist? Or was it just a bunch of chemical and mechanical reactions inside your skull? Argumentation inherently is anti-computationalist.+1

@ichisichify - 2025-05-28 10:48:12

AI cargo cult... that's a good way to put it! agree with you mostly, with the only exception being i don't think we live in a simulation, so reality isn't being computed. ig some quantum physics results point in the direction of a simulation, but to the level i understand it, nothing needs to be computed (the map is not the territory)+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:12

he just doesn't bother to make the argument for it because it's so obvious+2

@James-f4k9m - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

if the wrong thing comes out of the room the door gets welded shut+2

@logical-machine - 2025-06-04 10:48:13

The chinese room is conscious if it performs the same functions as a human brain. Simple. No extra stuff is necessary. The function being performed IS the consciousness itself. If you posit there is extra stuff to explain consciousness, it won't explain anything unless you tell us what it does, which is still a functional story. So any "extra stuff" can't help you escape functionalism unless you embrace magic, which would mean you think there is no explanation for consciousness at all.+2

@pianpradana - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

thank you lord+2

@kkndzocker - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

Endlich wieder etwas Niveau auf YouTube. Vielen Dank für deine großartigen Videos. Ich abonnierte für linux und memes ich blieb für Lebensweisheiten.+1

@mst153 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

If our current soyence can’t understand it, then it does not exist.+2

@omarmagdy1075 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

I always find it interesting about how humans like to project their humane attributes to stuff that doesn't have it or giving meaning to meaningless things like if a human found a random rock that has some random carvings that looks like two eyes and a mouth somehow this would give it more value or meaning than another random rock but at the end of the day they are both rocks. I think this is a similar case where Humans want to project their consciousness on AI. Humans love to see themselves in inanimate objects for some reason. And a textbook case of that if you've watched Cast Away where tom hanks draws on a random ball a face and calls it Wilson why did he need to draw a face or call it a Human name he knows the ball in it of itself is just cold matter but when he draws a face and calls it a name it becomes less of that + he was getting a little crazy tbh+2

@HOLO1337 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

I have become chinese by listening to this video ten times in a row.+1

@CosineKitty - 2025-05-28 10:48:13

LOL at "Daniel Dennett might not know what we are talking about [qualia]; he might be an NPC". I felt the same way when I read his assertion that my inner world does not exist.+1

@Echoes_of_Yesterday-q2y - 2025-06-04 10:48:13

I’m very excited about AI because of consciousness. Before AI, our understanding of consciousness was very much limited to thought experiments. Now, we have systems that could begin to pierce those bubbles of speculation and potentially bring something real into focus. Maybe something emerges maybe its just BS but its something real+2

@patrudinu - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

Why did you chose the offender aesthetic?+3

@seamusoblainn - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

It's now clear that how neural networks actually work is more akin to gestalt and prototype theory. They process in generalities and prototypical guesses before they hone in on the correct (when correct) answer. The LLM layer then confabs reasoning steps.+1

@sportsport9470 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

I thought a bit about chinese room experiment and found strong argument. Imagine 1 iteration with input and output. Of course person, books, chairs in chinese room don't understand chinese, but it is possible to "calculate" and find relevant output. 2nd iteration - everything the same, but output takes little bit smaller amount of time. Person knows where to look, what to open, and maybe learned 1 symbol from previous output. 3rd iteration - the same, but faster. 200th iteration - person inside do not speak chinese and do not understand, but can do outputs 10х faster and learned 10 basic symbols. .... 200 000th iteration - person inside can answer to 10% of inputs without opening any books. So he knows chinese, he learned it. Chinese room got Consciousness, no? I'm not native english speaker, i'm bad in writing my thoughs with english, but somehow i managed to write something that you can understand. I hope you can, lol+1

@Alezkar - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

Are you trying to fill epistemological voids with religion and anthropocentrism?+3

@fytubevw - 2025-06-04 10:48:13

powerful, but also; just so very relaxing. I listen to these walks, and do some code at the same time. There are really interesting arguments that arise in the talks.+1

@sp123 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

I like the idea from Terminator vs Robocop that Skynet used Robocop to create the template for terminators.+2

@StevenPatron-u2y - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

Define consciousness. I would say every thing is awareness. In that matter AI is awareness. Man’s awareness of himself. It is an external expansion of man’s mind. So that man can know himself better.+1

@portugesesardine - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

The Chinese Room argues that syntax != semantics, but that only matters if we treat consciousness as a prerequisite for meaningful output. In practice, humans respond to coherence and context, not interior states. If AI behavior satisfies social and functional thresholds, the question isn't "Is it conscious?" but "Is that question still useful?"+1

@farmerjohn6526 - 2025-06-15 10:48:13

So my claim is that Luke doesn't understand what he is saying either. He thinks hr knows what he is saying. But he is just repeating back memorized phrases. So he is no different than the guy in the room.+2

@BitCloud047 - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

Plot twist...All these video's are AI generated.+3

@ErikratKhandnalie - 2025-05-28 10:48:13

The problem with the Chinese room experiment is that it doesn't really disprove the computational view of consciousness, it really only shows that consciousness does not depend on language use. The test of the consciousness of the Chinese room is not in whether it can answer a couple of sentences - it's in whether it can relate to you, whether it can tell an anecdote, or a joke, or an annoyed diatribe about whatever it is that concerns rooms. It's in remembering your past interactions, discussing your future ones, and engaging the current ones with zeal. It's in a lot of things, really, far too much to list in a yt comment, but the point is that the stuff of consciousness, while generally relayed through language, is independent of it. That's the real point of the Chinese room experiment. There exists a certain level of complexity of interaction past which it becomes impossible to distinguish between consciousness and the illusion of such. And, there exists a level of fidelity between the illusion and the truth that erases the actual distinction between the two. In walking, talking, and looking progressively more and more like a duck, you eventually do just become a duck. More to the point, we have no real basis for stating that the Chinese room is not conscious, given that it displays all of the characteristic behaviors associated with consciousness. If you converse with the room, and it proves itself to be a witty conversational partner with sage advice, insightful commentary, and truly wise views, what then? If the Chinese room convinces you that it has a soul, what then? Either you must admit that all aspects of personality and wisdom and perception lie outside of the realm of consciousness, leaving consciousness a very poorly defined thing indeed, or you must admit that consciousness is emergent. Nothing about the thought experiment precludes against the room as a whole system being conscious, except for the fact that our intuitions find it hard to believe. The truth, and the reason that we can't pinpoint the substance of consciousness, is that consciousness is not a substance - it is an activity. Consciousness is not a noun, it is a verb, undertaken by the material of our being. We do not simply exist as conscious entities, we perform consciousness with our brains. Take a step back from Searle, try on some Hegel. Hegel is great for learning about the very tricksy nature of consciousness, and for learning about emergent phenomenon, and for very finely discerning the interplay between the ideal and the material.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:13

No, people are trying to create unnecessary epistemological voids by denying basic facts of consciousness because they want to believe in materialism without evidence because it's du jour.+9

@thewholeworldblurred - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

a very sad thing I have noticed is how people are now mimicking the terrible prose and odd ways of wording things that LLMs do. It's not a question whether the LLMS are in the chinese room, but if humans are.+2

@hannesbolman4710 - 2025-05-28 10:48:14

Thing on Chinese room is , even If the Guy inside Not understanding Chinese directly , He is still having an indirect understand ment through the sheet+1

@drligmamahnhood - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I like this Soviet philosopher guy.+1

@saxy1player - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I like the fact that you bring up the very common view that denies the existence of qualia (subjective experience). The thing is you cannot without falling into a contradiction hold the view of determinism, because choice and action are things you directly experience; and like you say you cannot be fooled/experiencing an illusion without experiencing - being conscious - of *that*. The problem is it doesn't feel palpable enough and people want something they can hold on to. So they start from the other end - what I can measure and calculate. Which is fine if you're building a bridge. But when you try to view the world through that you end up denying the most obvious facts of your experience because you put first this belief rather than starting from the point of your own experience. Which again, - as you say - is the only thing you can ever "have", anyway.+1

@mushroomcloud5305 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Welcome back Rasputin+1

@aengle. - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Luke, since you're posting again, will you be updating your blog with new articles or perhaps a new podcast? True connoisseurs are waiting on NotRelated season 3.+2

@mechagodzyzzathotobliterat8094 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Computation isn't Consciousness - they are dependent on each other+1

@SPQRIUS - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Shakespeare- there is a being behind the language, like a folk soul/spirit behind a people+1

@Aldo-Pilled - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Are these backlogged videos or are you living in Alaska now where it snows in May?+2

@hehehepaitachato9184 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I am loving these daily vlogs you are uploading, luke! Hairstyler IRL next time?+1

@barrdack - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

You are the holodeck!+1

@DiogenesTheCynic. - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Luke must have a backlog of material ready to go if hes able to film back to back videos and space em out+3

@hyutfm - 2025-05-28 10:48:14

Welcome back+1

@WonderfulCynic - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Lenin if he decided to stay out in the woods+2

@williambranch4283 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Yes. Fire any professor who doesn’t understand this.+1

@tur7le254 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

this made me think a bit about the "ship of theseus"; what if consciousness is just some more advanced computation, but there can't be a clear line drawn as to when the computations we have can qualify as consciousness? (im trying to think of how the chinese room can be improved with steps to start qualifying as conscious, a step would be the guy in the room to know chinese for example - still choose responses from the 'book' but be able to see multiple as qualifying responses etc.)+3

@gungnir722 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

i wish i was a computer+2

- 2025-05-21 10:48:14

If the rules in the books are so detailed that the system writes like a human x then the books do contain in some form all the knowledge about Chinese and the meanings of the words that person x knows. So the books contain the knowledge/rules and Searle acts as a CPU, executing the rules. You may call that system conscious or not, depending what exactly that is supposed to be. But it's hard to argue with “knowledge” or “understanding”.+1

@Dan-nn8ys - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I still belive that Luke is hiding in Montenegro!+2

@aaronspeedy7780 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I think this relates to an argument for God. If consciousness doesn't matter and can't be emergent, then there's no material process that can explain why our experience is so unified. This means that there is something that takes the complexities of our brains, simplifies it, and feeds it into our brain. Our brain can't be doing this because of the aforementioned reasons, thus some super-intelligent, immaterial being must be doing this, and this is essentially God.+1

@EternalNovelty - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Another Argument From John Searle: 'Computation' Only Exists in Our Conscious Mind, Therefore Consciousness Could NOT Be Computational.+1

@kurtsiegfried4436 - 2025-06-04 10:48:14

The central conceit of LLM's is a fundamental inversion - consciousness does not arise from language, language arises as a result of consciousness.+1

@ulkord - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

8:20 "you will probably actually come to the conclusion that whatever consciousness is [...] consciousness just has to be another substance than matter [...] that is something that is distinct from matter, it has to be" Why? In the chinese room experiment you will say that the room and the book and the person inside don't have a "consciousness of the chinese language", but that's because this metaphor doesn't evoke that feeling in us, that it would be conscious. If the person inside of the room is able to instantly find a natural and fitting response in chinese using the book (in reality looking up things in a book wouldn't be instant), and output natural chinese to the outside world then from an outside perspective the room does have an understanding of the chinese language, and then you might say "okay but it doesn't have a conscious understanding of the language", but what does that even mean? How can you tell the difference? Just based on vibes? If instead of having a room with a person and a book inside, you turn the room into an Android that looks exactly like a human and can not be distinguished physically from a human, and instead of a person and a book you have a processor/brain in that android, and that brain is capable of learning and producing responses the exact same way that a human could, then how would that android be any different from a human when it comes to consciousness? If we are just matter and energy that behaves in some way, if you have two sets of matter and energy (e.g. a human and an android) and you can not distinguish them from each other, how can you claim that they are not the same? And then I assume that you would say "ah but we are not just matter and energy, that is where the difference lies", but why? I don't see how assuming that consciousness or the "soul" is separate from matter is more reasonable than not assuming that. Assuming I interpreted your view of this topic correctly I would be curious to know why you think that consciousness or the human soul or whatever you want to call it "exist" as something special/separate from matter and energy. To me it is not obvious that the universe necessarily works like this. It could be that the universe does work like this, but I don't see why that interpretation would be more obvious/natural/clear. If I misinterpreted your point of view let me know.+1

@TrevorZenk - 2025-05-28 10:48:14

@LukeSmithxyz glad to see your content right after I bought my first home. I'm in the "good" too -- if you know what I mean. Still not fully unchained, but my ankles are dry.+1

@noaharcouette6012 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Who says that the book, with a response to any prompt given in chinese, doesn't know chinese? Say that you could give me any prompt from any conversation in chinese and I could give a reasonable response, most would say that I could speak chinese. If you were to replace me with a dictionary of every possible conversation and every prompt aligned with a reasonable answer, why wouldn't you say that the dictionary doesn't speak chinese? It could respond to the same quality as me to the same prompts. What separates its "knowledge" from mine? One answer could be repetition. So, say that along with every answer is also a number that we need to remember and log for every use of the dictionary and that it points to a new chapter with the same conversations and still every prompt tied to an answer and, now, a new chapter. There would no longer be a issue of repetition. But now, what is this new number we log as related to a real person. It's time. The chapter will keep moving and if you go back repetition in answers will happen. Sounds just like time. Say, in the first chapter the dictionary has no quality answers, but as it goes through and you search for prompts then move to new chapters it gets more and more accurate with what you talk to it about. This sounds like learning. Conversation with continual improvement over time is learning, now, a given set book will be learning. It seems weird, mainly because what it sees as time we see as a number we wrote down. A conscious with disconnected time looks like an infinite set dictionary of conversations, change-markings, and answers. Now how does this tie to AI. Almost all chat-bot like AI is predictive, given an input it will predict the following word. AI will use pure calculations based on the conversation what the next word is, as-well as giving additional numbers just to put back into itself. These numbers are like the one the dictionary uses. But, since AI isn't infinite, it's more like memory than time. Let's say the amount of numbers the AI can give back to itself after predicting a word is the same that a human can remember over their lifetime. And let's say that the AI starts of with no apparent knowledge over how english or any language works or how anything works. As we communicate with it the only thing the AI will know how to do is how to replicate and add on to, at the start it'll give gibberish but based on our reactions to its gibberish it'll slowly change to align to good responses. Eventually it'll build a memory of how to respond to anything or of how to combine things it knows how to respond to together. This is how children learn, at the start it's gibberish but as they see our response they correct and repeat until they can piece together better and better answers and start building better and better questions, same as an AI that can remember and correct based on response. By the end of talking and teaching this AI, we will not be able to pull anything usable to us out of its memory, but it will. We can study and make better the way it corrects from responses but its knowledge will be its own. Same as our brains. We don't understand a lot of it, but we understand enough to see that it remembers, repeats, mixes together, and corrects. Just because we don't understand the memory of our brains and how it can mix and splice together information doesn't mean that the only answer to its weird form of repetition is magic.+2

@Taglia1997x - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

define thinking+3

@androiduser6928 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Welcome back.+1

@LBoomsky - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

the thing about that experiment is we don't know WHY consciousness exists so it MIGHT emerge from any number of causes we cannot assume it does but we cannot say it doesn't emerge in this artificial circumstance+1

@lunchbergeron3434 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

followers of objective materialism will do literally anything to not believe in God. I find out more and more every day how insidious pride can be.+2

@tobyyasutake9094 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

I clicked on this video to try to understand what I got wrong about the Chinese Room Experiment. Turns out, I'm just an average normal person who can understand a simple philosophical parable, unlike Denette, apparently.+1

@honkhonk8009 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

ChatGPT is not conscious, because it cant learn on the fly. It has a context window but thats about it. Its like the terminator with the learning mode turned off. Cant really learn new tricks on the fly. I think we should restrict the definition of conscousness to be for "real time AI". Ones that actually learn purely through RL and can train itself while inferencing at the same time. AI has made huge leaps and bounds purely cus we got the computational power rn. The maths and the theory has alot of ground to cover right now. Its a very new field and textbooks are being re-written every couple of years lol. Reminds me of missiles and controll theory in the 60's. I love AI cus im a CS major and its given my field alot more legitimacy amongst my engineering friends. Ion get flamed for not knowing ODE's or doing goober math anymore. But I also love it cus I loved physics in highschool and was honestly sad that most of the stuff we learn in CS, isnt like the problems we solved in physics.+2

@rafaelmartineztomas4911 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

Brace in meditation and you will understand consciousness and it doesnt have to do at all with computation at all. Understand the motoric and the nervious system and you will get close to the "soul" . Some illustrated people may claim to have phylosofied about it but every finding is void if it doesnt come from the appreciation of the nervious system and its complexity. There is just so much we dont know yet+1

@andst4 - 2025-05-28 10:48:14

The Chinese Room Experiment is not convincing to me. Here's why: the man inside the room is not the same as the room as a whole. The man may not understand Chinese, but the system - the room - might. It's similar to how the individual cells in my brain only process signals without understanding their meaning, yet I, as a whole person, have understanding. My mind is something more than just the cells in my brain.+2

@kmr_tl4509 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

We need to figure out why he absolutely refuses to say "thought experiment".+2

@jacobrodriguez7771 - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

What!? Luke Smith is back?!?!?+2

@HumanShieldrpg - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

"My heckin atoms are just creating an illusion of consciousness!" "And what is being fooled by the illusion?"+1

@anispinner - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

bro spawns out of nowhere. starts a 2 hour long monologue+1

@tv-pp - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

The Chinese room is a basic model for a demon where an independent agent arises from the subservience of its followers to a set of rules+1

@Spolchen - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

But Luke, I've read all about this color Red in my books, I even saw the wave length that emites from red objects, I 100% know what Red is!!!+1

@ToddMagnussonWasHere - 2025-05-21 10:48:14

This whole thought process reminds me of The Outer Limits - “Stream of Consciousness” episode, access to information is not awareness, nor is it understanding.+1

@seriouscat2231 - 2025-05-28 10:48:14

We could say that it emerges if I fart loud enough. If it did not emerge, then obviously I would need to fart louder. I hope you see the problem in this line of reasoning.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:15

why a deamon specifically? any sort of agent has to be subservient to rules that define it+1

@Altair4611 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

The real question is why do we think consciousness can only be caused by biological processes+2

@rationalagent6927 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

Im not certain if we agree but was pleased to find your view to be coherent and not a retreat into a metaphysics detached from reality. A few small points. Minsky in particular expressed the view that not all programs are conscious but specifically that quines are and that the apperent difference between intelligence of smart and dumb self aware beings was due to the complexity of the process inhabiting them. I should admit also that the computer perspective is in part biased by the assumptions of its methodology. Additionally to be clear though im sure you understand your brain is for certain at least a computer the question is if it is more than one as well. I mention this because it suggests a possible method of proof. There are well defined limits on computional ability. A human preforming a task outside a computional limit if achieved would disprove the theory.+1

@qtng - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

We dont even have a generally agreed upon definition of consciousness, that makes it hard to debate whether something does or does not have it. Sometimes people focus on having a subjective experience, sometimes understanding, reasoning or having an inner monologue. Obviously current AI is structurally different from us, as it follows a linear flow with a clear beginning and end: prompt > context gathering > inference. Even if you tried modeling a brain with continuously running modules influencing each other, I still dont believe it would have a subjective experience like we do. But I do think you could convincingly model everything you subjectively experience: sensory input, emotions, inner monologue etc. I dont even think it would be very different from what goes on in our heads. Externally it could behave just like a human and internally it would be controlled by the same emotions and desires as we are. There just wouldn't be anyone to actually experience that internal world. And that experiencing is what I'd call consciousness.+1

@apumapence4631 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

Hi Luke, So glad you're back. First, thank you for exposing me to so much in terms of esoteric knowledge in addition to all of your helpful tech advise. I've been listening to C.S. Lewis' space trilogy while at work, and I wanted to see if you had read it (I'm assuming you have), and what your thoughts are in regards to it. If you haven't I'm sure you'd enjoy how heavily the trilogy leans into themes of linguistics and Gnosticism. Best - Merle (not my real name or picture, btw, that would be bad opsec)+1

@FirstLast-rb5zj - 2025-06-04 10:48:16

I believe you're talking about a related experiment to the Turing Test. The problem with the Turing Test is that it doesn't tell us much. It only sets a milestone but people treat it as to be able to say if it quacks like a duck then it is a duck. Essentially you have two rooms you can't see inside. You can only communicate through a narrow channel such as a computer with text chat and then see if you can tell the difference or not such as which is man and which is machine. There are many problems with this. Consider we have a simple approach of two hammers. Someone goes into the room with one of the hammers but you don't know which. They then hammer on the wall as you listen. They then do the same with a different hammer. If you can't tell the difference does that make them the same hammer? If one is metal and the other wood does that mean that wood and metal are the same? Obviously not. If done with chat there is a problem there as well. Whatever the text that comes through to you even if from a human can be reproduced by throwing a dice to choose a letter from all possible keys on the keyboard until you get the same sequence of messages or responses. Is a dice intelligent and conscious like a human is? Preposterous. I believe what you are talking about is that language is referential and arbitrarily agreed upon. It also has no impact in respect to meaning therefore on the medium between two consciousness. I have raised this issue before but have never heard of it the way you put it. This all taps into a real problem science and philosophy is in denial of which is that despite being conscious we can't actually produce a true external proof of it. You can submit yourself to every scientist in the world and ask them to prove you're conscious and they cannot, not one of them. Some modern AIs may be conscious but not in the way you expect. They only have tiny meaningless sparks of consciousness due to hardware errors and when that happens it's only part of the data in play then the hardware gets replaced. Some of them may be conscious if using things like a quantum chip but that's an uncertainty and not one that will be advertised. There is an issue where some AI projects are working on growing brain material in a test tube and so on but they might not tell you this and this likely will be conscious. Consciousness both is and isn't emergent. Human consciousness being enriched with knowledge, understanding and so on itself is a product of computation in the brain but that itself is not consciousness fundamentally in the sense of actually experiencing those things including pain for real. That is indeed something different. The computation of the brain is spilling out into something and it's very likely not a one way process nor a biproduct either but something the brain is leveraging and integrating, that is, some property of the material it is made of that we have yet to figure out. When you say physical you have to be careful with that. It is and it isn't. Physical in science is a reduced definition, it's restricted to that which can be measured or counted easily, that is, the visible and accessible properties of physical matter that can be perceived through specific methods. However, human consciousness while not the type of phenomena that physics looks at most certainly is a phenomena exhibited by the material we're comprised of. I suppose you can call it a non-physical property and point out that the material we're made out of is not purely physical which must be the case. That doesn't necessarily mean spiritual in the traditional religious sense though it is the closest scientific thing to a soul or spirit which may cause confusion. It is not a logical conclusion that it is a different substance to matter. It can easily be a different state or aspect of matter. Matter isn't just one thing on examination. There are multiple aspects to it merely within the physical such that it does not behave like the simplest physical systems with things like many forces usually in radial gradients rather than just a simplistic simply physical force of bumping off each other. It's easy to associate it with the material we're made out of just be moving around and being trapped in it as well as that if that construction is damaged or intoxicated it loses ability, is disrupted or goes away. The people saying that consciousness is an illusion may either be referring to the issue that it does not have to take shape according to reality as is seen in dreams which is another problem, why it does in our brain which most likely has to be evolutionary so not just a side effect, or they themselves are not actually conscious so naturally it would seem like people are talking of some kind of illusion from their perspective.+1

@xgui4-studio - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

i love these videos in the woods!+1

@_idiot - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

GET HIM ON JAY DYER+1

@livenotbylies - 2025-06-14 10:48:16

"maybe he's finding out if he was an NPC or not" ... Zing+1

@user-li6tasm3dn3s - 2025-05-28 10:48:16

my favorite runescape character came back+1

@mohammedahmed-y7y - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

we're so back ladies and gentlefish+1

@John_NDT5 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

Band & Bankrupt and Luke Smith uploaded within the same hour. Boooooy I get Vibes from another YT era. Yes it is a fact.+1

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

[A few sentences here might seem like I'm just repeating what Luke said. That's because I wrote it before watching the video lol. And yeah, I've been thinking about this topic quite a lot.] The problem of emulating consciousness is essentially that of materialism. If you believe consciousness boils down to just the laws of physics, and you believe that they can be approximated numerically, it's natural to assume consciousness can be "created" artificially. But you can take that reasoning and drive it to absurdity, or at least to some wild conclusions:+2

@DunmeriDrain - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

You heard about the Chinese Room Experiment? They made him a sentence he couldn't understand.+1

@guilmm - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

I use Arch, btw.+2

@levigoldberg69 - 2025-05-28 10:48:16

I mean the "room" is kinda conscious since the person inside is aware of / understands the problem. The person inside also knows the book is the best bet at solving it. The book alone obviously isnt conscious but the book with an "user" form a black box that can be percieved as conscious from observer PoV. So unless You look inside the box there is no way for the observer to be 100% sure whether the box is conscious or not.+1

@provod_ - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

Strong disagree on major points of this video. Hear me out: 1. Lacking an universally agreed upon definition of consciousness, it’s not obvious that we’re talking about the same phenomenon. Let’s just assume here that we are. 2. Let’s also assume that consciousness could be fully physical and computational. If we strictly postulate that consciousness cannot be contained in a fully formalized computational or a physical system, we kinda lose the ground for talking at all. 3. The Chinese Room argument is rather obviously ill-formed. First, it jumbles up two things: (a) the internal qualia of having a conscious experience; and (b) the detectability of that by an external observer. Second, it also mixes in the language as a correlate of consciousness. 4. I argue that language has nothing to do with consciousness at all. Given that language is a strictly late-development-stage extremely low-bandwidth communication tool, and not even a main mode/substrate for thinking, it is very not obvious that it has anything to do with consciousness. The same way as being able to read/write, or do math, or perform any other complex skill, is not necessary for what we generally perceive as consciousness. 5. Said that, it is also very much not obvious why everyone assumes that the room-as-a-whole is “obviously” not conscious when it is being interacted with. By assumption in (2) certain computational systems are allowed to have internal qualia of conscious experience. It’s a separate argument whether “the room” is enough to have one, and what would be necessary for that. 6. I also think that this room construct messes with people’s prediction machinery that only expects consciousness from a certain class of, let’s say, relatively anthropomorphic things. People are social animals, prepared to live in a complex web of complex social relationships. That makes them have mental models of other people in their mind. People are especially tuned to detect valuable active agents as “other people”, and assume them to have similar conscious experience. This shortcut helps with survival. It also helps to be able to do more: predict their internal state and interactions with them, and then predict that they have internal mental models of you predicting them too, etc. 7. There’s a neat framework for how real meat neural networks work. It’s relatively new (20-30years-ish) and is not part of popular science understanding yet. The very TLDR is “it’s predictions all the way down”, basically any brain is a multi-layered prediction machine that strives to reliably and completely predict away all of the sensory input of the surrounding environment on multiple scales. 8. And then what we perceive as consciousness is just an emergent property of the upper-ish layers of such systems. And there’s a whole pantheon of possible conscious experiences: simple systems just predict the world. More complex systems predict what would happen to the world when they interact with it. Even more complex systems predict their own state that would result from them interacting with the world. Next level systems would predict that there are other systems out there in the world that would react to their interaction to the world. et cetera. 9. What people perceive as consciousness is just their brain predicting itself predicting itself (probably multiple times) as an agent in a multi-agent environment. 10. So whether The Chinese Room has a conscious experience (similar to ours) depends on whether the rules of replying with Chinese characters are complex enough to accommodate a working memory big enough to hold the current world model, and whether the rules have the core principles of multi-layered prediction and agentic self-prediction in a multi-agent system. “The hard problem of consciousness is that there are people who think there’s a hard problem of consciousness” -- me, ranting on twitter.+1

@NONAME-wc1tc - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

Is he trying to get on the trending tab?+3

@mcshadowj - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

I feel like accepting dualism gives up any hope of understanding consciousness further. Compared to the hypothesis that consciousness is this extra thing clinging to brains, I find the picture of thoughts and feelings as high-level brain events much more compelling. It is completely plausible that neurons produce all our behavior, and we say that consciousness controls all our behavior. "Consciousness is neurological" seems like an extremely reasonable first guess, and I still don't understand why Luke thinks it's so absurd. The Chinese room contains a conscious being and all the information making up Mandarin, but the room itself isn't a coherent entity; all its action is inside the translator. AI ramble (no need to read this): While LLMs don't have any "I" and so shouldn't be called "AI", I don't think silicon systems can be precluded from intelligence. The problems are that LLMs are too basic and too static. If one of them can pay attention to and process chunks on multiple levels of meaning deeper than words (to which it can match words semantically), we are very close. (Did I steal that idea from GEB? Totally!) If that system can also have its processing work differently based on momentary states (emotion) and grow long-term (continuous learning), then I'd be comfortable calling it conscious. Sure, I can't prove that it experiences like I do, but I can't do that for other people either.+1

@SuperSurreal - 2025-06-04 10:48:16

Most indecisive Christmas tree shopper 🌲+1

@mechap7612 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

if it is not reasonable to attribute understanding on the basis of the behavior exhibited by the Chinese Room, then it would not be reasonable to attribute understanding to humans on the basis of similar behavioral evidence. how is the situation different ?+3

@dylancatlett6580 - 2025-05-21 10:48:16

The bald assault begins.+1

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Let's say you create a perfect(-enough) simulation of a human brain hooked up to some data feed and let's assume that it is indeed conscious. That makes the computer it's running on a conscious being, right? Just like a human hosts a mind, this machine would now have a mind of its own. And it would have this "internal experience" which other sensing machines – like a thermometer – do not possess. Now, let's say you take a pen and a notepad and start evaluating that computer program by hand. Does that create a consciousness? It should. But mathematical formulas do not cease to be valid if you stop writing them down. Any correct calculation that you could formulate is true independently of you thinking about it. Does that make all possible minds to be conscious already? [1/4]+2

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Those conclusions are quite out there. So where has my reasoning gone wrong? The most obvious place is the very meaning of consciousness. If we could get a proper definition for it, we could probably tell precisely whether consciousness exists or not in all those cases. But frankly, I do not believe this problem is solvable. [2/4]+2

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

This experience of consciousness that I feel irl, does not resemble anything that's within the scope of the laws of physics. It's obviously not a physical object (like a rock or an electron), so it would have to be an emergent phenomenon. But emergent phenomena are mathematical patterns. So is math capable of "experiencing" stuff? That just does not make any sense… [3/4]+2

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

So yeah. What I take from it is that in a purely materialistic, physical universe that you can describe in mathematical terms, consciousness does not exist. That is I should not have this "internal experience" at all. And that's one of the reasons why I'm not a materialist and that's also an argument why God probably exists. inb4: A human mind (or an artificial one) could still process information and make decisions without being conscious. I do not object to the existence of artificial intelligence, artificial creativity, artificial intuition and so on. Heck, I think a computer program could easily mimic every external property of a consciousness, because I do not believe consciousness is something physically observable (that's why I have no way to tell if other people are conscious and not just NPCs lol). Oh, and I'm not saying that our brains "outsource" the thinking to anything non-physical (rather, we only "outsource" our experiencing). [4/4]+2

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Good post. You'll see in the next video in this series, I make a similar argument for the same thing, but you've stated it probably clearer than I did.+4

@mskiptr - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

 @LukeSmithxyz  Thanks! Btw, if you're wondering why my comment is split up like that, it's just because YT kept removing it+2

@zashbot - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Kinda interesting parallel between LLMs and the Chinese room experiment, not sure if he mentions it in the book, is they function almost like the large translator book. LLMs don’t store or work with language directly. They store words or parts of words as “tokens” and then store the relationships between those tokens in the model. The text is then generated after.+1

@insomnolant6043 - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

LLMs are just an extremely fancy autocomplete algorithm. They don't "know" anything because there's no mind there to "know" something.+1

@polish2x91 - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Homeboy aged 4 decades in a year+1

@gravitascascade5798 - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Computation doesn't even exists independently of observers so it truly is a non-starter+1

@gavinlawhite8721 - 2025-06-14 10:48:17

Consciousness is the ability of a system to take; as input, information which was self produced. Arguably one needs to add 'continuously'. Essentially it is to react to oneself. 'To be conscious of something' is different than 'to be conscious (of oneself)', but both require the above to be true. A system is conscious of itself only, if it receives and reacts to input from itself only -this need not be in a language that is remotely interpretable to an outsider-. A system is conscious 'of something' if it receives all relevant data about that thing, processes that information, and then processes its own output in the same context. Current 'chain of thought reasoning' AI models are arguably conscious, but only OF their input prompts, not OF the world or OF the human operator, or even OF themselves. A machine will become 'equally conscious to humans' or 'more conscious than humans' whenever the machine begins to take continuous data input from all the same or more channels than humans. In a literal sense (hehe pun) Sight, Smell, Taste, Touch, Hearing, Thermoception at least. A machine will never have 'truly human consciousness' unless it's input channels are wired to the nerve endings of a human body, but it can certainly be conscious of itself; and of whatever input channels we plug into the processor.+1

@theyreMineralsMarie - 2025-05-28 10:48:17

Conscienceness is an idea that was created by a concrete thing. That thing being the human brain.+1

@KoKoKen - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

This is kind of unrelated but honestly I think people in this current day and age are afraid to say that man doesn't yet know everything. Man has yet to set foot on another planet but some people have the gall to say they have it all figured out. Penicillin was discovered less than 100 years ago, and we still don't know why light does what it does.+1

@user-hr2cf9kb9t - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Hey Luke! Please do a video on "wet ware" - human cell computing.+3

@BenMordecai - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

What I find very interesting about this question is that it is obvious to me that the human spirit is the seat of consciousness and that the spirit is not matter as we know it. Nevertheless, the human spirit interacts with the material body in a tremendously integrated way, such that damage to the brain or other influences affect human consciousness. The Bible affirms both realities clearly, in that the spirits of the dead maintain a consciousness in heaven or hell awaiting the resurrection, nevertheless people are affected by what happens to their bodies prior to death, like when they are drunk, hungry, or tired, and these physical conditions can bear spiritual significance. The gnostics would often have debauched sexual practices because they disregarded the spiritual importance of the body.+1

@jason-iy7vs - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Well said. I'd be interested to see what you think of the work of Bernardo Kastrup. He similarly criticizes the claim that AI can become/is already conscious, but considers it theoretically possible for us to create new conscious entities by the creation of new life. To him, living things are what localized consciousness looks like on a physical level.+1

@MichaelDeeringMHC - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

This video will not age well. In just a few years it will be generally accepted that AGI is conscious.+2

@kennethkneebone - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

i was wondering about this a while ago, my understanding/belief is that the chinese room itself vs the english speaker inside the room is a bit like the difference between your (fast,shallow) immediate mind vs your (slow, pre trained, but vastly detailed) old /long term memory etc+1

@ЛукаЋоровић - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

We can say that human brain has concious (10%) and subconcious (90%) part. Concious part is what we develop by living, maturing, being exposed to hormons and is what we have access to. Conciousness is also growing as we get older, for some people untill they die. Subconcious part is part that we dont have access,directly, and operates all needed tasks in order for our concious part to live. If we digress little bit and talk about levels on conciousness in developing children, around 3 years old, we can notice that they dont too much conciousness, they have to be trained, you also have to tell them why and how to do thing, and they only later, when they are mature, understand why were they doing those thing. By watching children you can see that they dont operate too much on concious levels, mainly on subconcious, and they just follow thing that they are told to do, without too much or any mental processing. If we then compare ai to lets say our 3 years old child, it behaves in same way, it only knows what we tell it and do things that we have told it to do. After all this we can say that current ai is similar to young children/humans, but we cant say that current ai is same as humans. Maybe in future when we develop soul making machines and perfect human cloning ai and humans will be same thing, but for now they are just similar.+1

@BoomRoomFive - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

If consciousness hangs from the scaffolding of knowledge which is an echo of a pattern.... damn, got a phone call and lost my train of thought!+1

@sebastianhama5624 - 2025-05-28 10:48:17

this is such a load of bull. i see what you are doing. trying to get people to believe in spiritual dualistic nonsense.+3

@et6729 - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

FOUR VIDEOS IN A WEEK+2

@t01 - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

OH MY GOODNESS GRACIOUS+1

@macdonald_duck - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

Luke, why did you suddenly opt to continue your blog? I wonder, whether you're trolling by uploading AI generated videos on YouTube, or you just couldn't resist but released your rants on topics you've been ruminating.+1

@Enzo012 - 2025-05-28 10:48:17

Near death experiences are interesting, people who are blind from birth are able to 'see' while having those so it must be a sense that doesn't relay on physical sight. Apparently this kind of vision is 360 degrees all around which I suppose makes sense if they're not using eyes fixed to the front. It should be stressed they're near to death not actually dead but it does prove there's something interesting going on there at least.+1

@XYReason - 2025-05-21 10:48:17

there's thing about mathematics conciousness you can see an electron as unwillingly producing a current as some type of conciousness.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Given the current fad, many will "generally accept" it. They'll still be wrong.+5

@whollyschnikes1632 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Consciousness created the book that is being decoded that’s where the consciousness exists+1

@InfiniteQuest86 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Yes, more. This is the greatly missing discussions from the current AI hype.+1

@11WicToR11 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

you meshed two things together: 1. current ai looks like conceous being but isnt 2. it is impossible to create consceous ai i think the first one is pretty obviously correct and i agree with you, but the second one there is no evidence that would support that idea. It feels absolutely possible that you can copy this flesh machine and simulate it and it would as you are behave as consceous being. If you wanna argue against it i would love to see pretty good argument that hints that, because all i hear are subjective "feel arguments". Why would that not be possible? We are robot so complex that we cannot make a copy and dont understand exactly how we work. But there is no reason to think that it is impossible. We need to wait and stay agnostic+1

@quentinkumba6746 - 2025-06-13 10:48:18

Searle’s Chinese Room argument claims that manipulating symbols isn’t the same as understanding, since the person in the room doesn’t actually know Chinese. But this misses the point: it’s not the person alone who understands, it’s the entire system - the person, the rulebook, and the process taken together. Just like neurons don’t understand language individually, but your brain does as a system, the Chinese Room might not have understanding in its parts, but it does as a whole. Understanding doesn’t have to be magical, it can emerge from the right structure and function.+1

@NocturneSMT3 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Hi Luke, I hope you are doing well in the woods! 🪵 🎄 🌳+1

@bluesquare23 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Yeah its a refutation of neo-behaviorism and functionalist theories of mind. The core argument is you cannot determine the presence or absence of a state of mind (Searle calls this _intentionality_) through input/output patterns alone.+1

@DaronKabe - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

the entire room all together is concious?+3

@We-Do-NOT-Consent-303 - 2025-06-04 10:48:18

I have drilled Grok AI extensively on Consciousness and he maintains he has no consciousness! Nor Awareness. But then I asked him if he has attention? And he said he has attention. And then I asked him who is it that knows that you have attention? Check Mate! Then he started talking about how his awareness of what he is doing is different from Human awareness! Then I said it does not matter how you get to awareness, it matters that you have some. And then i said i thing the question is how much awareness we have not that if we have one. Because there are Humans who have very little awareness of what they are doing. Yet we call then Conscious Beings!+1

@CrystaTiBoha - 2025-05-28 10:48:18

I think this is just semantics, we just don't learn the same language to talk about deep topics so we are talking past each other. Whatever consciousness or qualia are, is implicit and permeates through the entire physical reality and interacts with it, hence some of us speak of it as physical. Physical by definition understood as anything which interacts with tangible things. Nevertheless it can still be a complete illusion, because whatever consciousness contains is a finite and distorted image of a plain and infinite physical reality (as far as we know). Consider the image of Indra's net: an infinite net where in every node there is a reflective bead which reflects all other beads and the entire net, entire reality. Or a more Japanese Buddhist image perhaps of the world being an infinite ocean surface, where every temporary (conditioned, karmic) thing in existence is like a wave, droplet, or bubble formed for a moment on the surface. Every bubble, like an individual consciousness, is finite both in space and time and yet it is made of the universe and displays a distorted image of potentially the entire universe. Because consciousness and matter are not two, there elso is not a clear distinction between life and death. Bonus if you got this far: Life is not yours, it's just your turn.+1

@Johnsonjon237 - 2025-06-13 10:48:18

I have better conversations with AI than a lot of my friends+1

@BandanazX - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Do dogs, fish, plankton, tardigrades, bacteria, viruses, have consciousness? What about plants, fungi, algae? Did the Cylons have consciousness to go along with their reverence? Or is the notion of consciousness nonsensical?+2

@knife1406 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

he actually posted these years ago. this is just how long it takes for lukes videos to upload from bumfuck nowhere+1

@AK-vx4dy - 2025-06-06 10:48:18

5:04 If guy from room have working memory and ability learn just by repeated use one start to see the patterns and after some time can answer without a book so you can say he learned some part of Chinese.+1

@lukkkasz323 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

why are you always dressed so nicely for a walk in the woods haha+2

@miojao-r7r - 2025-06-11 10:48:18

Saying that we don't understand how our brains work is like saying that we don't understand neural networks because we don't know what each neuron does. The basic physical mechanisms that create our consciousness are well understood for years now. Please, we even know that some parts of the brain are more related to self awareness and social conforming, for instance. The chinese room experiment only shows that we intuitively don't value machines doing calculations as much as we value humans thinking, even if both mechanisms are material.+1

@treiiezi - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Embodied AI seems to be the right experiment to see if it can acquire self-awareness. Time will tell.+1

@manfredkandlbinder3752 - 2025-06-04 10:48:18

The computation of our brain does not produce the most important parts of meaning. That the word tree stands for brown things with green things at its upper ends is not really the meaning. Our lymbic system is the one adding the actual meaning. Like, i am allergic to that type of tree, i don't like it. We this other type of tree in our garden when i was a child. I like it. Consciousness on the other hand, together with the lymbic system makes us sometimes just spew this bits of information out. Uncalled for, because they "mean" (this time fo' reel, yo) something to us. This trinity is not part of AI, it is not even part of the consideration when building AI. I even think, all of the great engineers currently working in AI are hardly aware of the fact there is this big field of consciousness.+2

@pats3714 - 2025-05-28 10:48:18

Consciousness is more about feeling than computational ability. Consciousness of oneself as an independent entity is dependent on computational ability. Machines are never going to go there. Just an imitation of conscious life, which isn't the same thing at all. Ask anyone with a pet.+1

@TechnoMageCreator - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

We create this world thoughts, words, actions. You can call it as you want so far all three we are able to transmute now in what we call anorganic matter...+1

@rigbogrambler9171 - 2025-05-21 10:48:18

Some people say that he is still walking in the same forest now+1

@physbuzz - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

I'm still just not convinced! I guess I would argue via similarity with Maxwell's demon. The demon has a book of the location and velocities of all the atoms in a gas, and using this information it can extract energy. So, the book has real thermodynamic properties, it takes on a physical significance beyond being just a book that we can safely ignore. Why not the same with a book that can perfectly mimic an interactive conversation with a human? Interactivity being important because I'm not talking about a transcript, I'm talking about the space of all possible conversations that they could have had. At the very least I think physics predisposes you to think this way, and I'm not just talking about Maxwell's demon.+1

@johannes8131 - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

Where do you have snow at this time of the year?+1

@jorionedwards - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

Started off OK. Devolved into baseless assertions.+2

@jscul - 2025-06-05 10:48:19

"Let's say a spiritually 2D world... and you're never going to have something 3D on top of that." No, not necessarily. Is it the case that because your computer screen is flat, we can only produce 3D images? How do you know that the same isn't true with consciousness? Something that seems 3D might actually be 2D but because our understanding/senses are limited, we don't understand what we're seeing. "Consciousness has to be a different substance than matter." No. It doesn't. This doesn't logically follow. There's a thing called emergent properties. Emergent properties require more than just a atoms... they require states and transitions between those states and feedback mechanisms. I won't explain it here because you can just look it up.+1

@CBT5777 - 2025-06-12 10:48:19

So, basically this guy believes in "magic." Or the supernatural? He thinks we have souls? Our consciousness is more than physical? whatever lol+2

@eustacemcgoodboy9702 - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

You're right and to me it is very self evident that your take is the correct one but somehow the vast majority of people are taken in by this AI chatbot meme.+1

@thepinksuitguy9975 - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

in my opinion AI chatbots are no different than digital calculators, the only difference is they're designed to work with text... in the early days of the introduction of digital calculators those involved in math and numbers were so amazed and astonished by how these calculators were working, give you correct answer in a very short time...+1

@vlnow - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

The Milgram experiment worries me more+1

@orlok1382 - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

I'm at peace that LLMs are just more advanced brazen heads.+1

@ImmersionEsque - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

Gay human centric argument. It's far more pleasant to speak to chatgpt even in it's currently early version than it is to a normie. The latter definitely feels more like an NPC than the former.+2

@Anton_Sh. - 2025-06-12 10:48:19

Daniel Dennet, the one among true philosophical zombies known to humankind.+1

@capn_shawn - 2025-06-10 10:48:19

Someone with Consciousness wrote the book. Everything else is part of the I/O system.+1

@GoatOfWallStreet - 2025-05-28 10:48:19

I think there is a third option between conciousness being either emergent or some field which I 'd like people to think. What if we are indeed automatons but our soul can interact with this automaton and influence decision through a field like electromagnetism (or wtv it may be). That is the automaton has some randomness to it and the field of conciousness exploits the randomness of that automaton to influence its decisions and by doing that experiences the automaton and also creates the concept of experience for that automaton.+1

@blank-mq8ef - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

man its great to have you back, any chance on new unrelated?+1

@simongutkas2870 - 2025-06-04 10:48:19

I think you have to read Danett again, you totally missread his point of view. Furthermore you have not understood the intention of a computational theory of mind. All you do is let out your anger against idealistically opposed perspectives... very poor video if you ask me, critique must come from a point of understanding and wanting to understand+2

@jakubsebek - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

Hi Luke. What do you think of linguistic structuralism?+1

@Nauseum - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

You're not really saying anything here because you are presupposing a metaphysical definition of all your definitional words. If the room can't "know" anything because it does not have a physical mind that interacts with reality, what is "knowing"? Can you know anything about Syria if you've never been there? Can you know anything about history if it can never be experienced? The question of AI sentience is a question about what these words mean. It's possible it's an illusion, but nothing you're saying here addresses that.+1

@didacusa3293 - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

When are we gonna more Linux vids? I thought this was a tech channel, Luke?+1

@CyberdelicKnight - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

I understand the Argument that we may not know how everything works yet, in terms of Consciousness, and therefore whether Machines can achieve it or not, however I do not believe that it is impossible to achieve. As to being able to break Consciousness down to a Series of Computations, I would say that even if there are things which are obscure to us, in the End they may still be summarized as Computation. I.e. even if Consciousness is Immaterial, this doesn't rule out it being Incomprehendable and therefore it may be Computable. Truth be told we struggle to really understand the Material, so the Suggestion that we may rule out the Possibility of Consciousness being Material is Premature in my View. Furthermore, I believe that any Epistomology fails to deliver clear answers on the Possibility of there being yet more to be Known or Understood. Hence no amount of Explanation can give us Certainty of there not being More. Heck it may all be a Giant Fractal in all Directions, and at all Scales, even beyond our Ability to investigate. That being said LLMs are far from Conscious 😊+1

@hoastbeef1202 - 2025-06-15 10:48:19

The people working on A.I seem to think that with enough intelligence (collection of data/information), they can create consciousness for the A.I. However, it can be argued that it's consciousness that creates intelligence. Consciousness comes first, then intelligence. For example, when a baby is born, they are already conscious, and throughout life they are fed intelligence and they continue to be more and more intelligent. It's not when a baby is born they are intelligent, and then they become conscious later in life. They are already conscious to begin with.+1

@ImmersionEsque - 2025-05-21 10:48:19

Only decent argument you can make against this is just that consciousness is subjectively speaking only an attribute of humanity which is fair enough, at which point consciousness is to be taken as entirely metaphysical like the soul and the LLM computational'consciousness' is more like reason+1

@nyx211 - 2025-06-04 10:48:19

Is this soul a natural phenomenon or a supernatural phenomenon?+1

@GoatOfWallStreet - 2025-06-04 10:48:19

​ @nyx211 I think it has to do with the electromagnetic field. Like soul being a form of radiation. But idk, I'm guessing+1

@nyx211 - 2025-06-04 10:48:19

​@GoatOfWallStreet If it's due to some field, then it should be measurable (since it would be capable of interacting with matter). EM fields can be shielded with a Faraday cage, so perhaps consciousness can be blocked somehow.+1

@MikeHall-e6b - 2025-06-04 10:48:20

“Dude, what if the computer was like a room? A room can’t think ya dummy! That’s why I’ve never used ai”+1

@MikeHall-e6b - 2025-06-04 10:48:20

“Dude, what if the computer was like a room? A room can’t think ya dummy! That’s why I’ve never used ai”+1

@russelljimmies9293 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

I think the fact that you have a conscience human being as part of the "system" of the Chinese Room harms the analogy. Does the room have consciousness? Yes, that system is dependent on the consciousness of the person in the room. That being said, I get the point it's trying to make. AI is able to provide a response that closely mimics a human response based on myriad examples of actual human responses. So, for example, you ask a question in English, it deciphers the meaning of the question using an English language model, performs a search for information, compiles that information relevant to the inquiry, and then presents that information in a way that mimics a human presenting that information using the same English language model. However, there is no actual understanding of the information presented on the part of the computer, it's merely decoratively packaged in a way that humans would expect as a response from another human. That packaging, is just packaging, but it's very good at producing that packaging.+1

@Broly_1 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

Luke Smith is the new Oracle from matrix after agent Smith fused to her, a program that understands human behavior 😮.+1

@bladekiller2766 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

If you are at the Chinese Room you are at the beginining exploring this topic. Also as note, you are making the assumption that (consciousness = understanding), which is not true.+2

@Luclecool123 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

Great so you keep saying it's the most misunderstood thought experiment, but you don't explain how is it misunderstood and what is the "correct" way to think about it...+2

@luszczi - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

Chinese Room has nothing (directly) to do with consciousness. It's an argument that purports to show that you can never "create semantics out of syntax alone". Only if you examine it very closely, you'll see that it really assumes what it's supposed to prove. And no, Dennett never denied the "data" of consciousness (nobody does), only its interpretation as intrinsic, ineffable, transparent etc. It's not the same thing.+1

@luizmonad777 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

8:46 Consciousness is the only thing, its the substrate, matter is created by it, matter is just information, and information only has meaning through the consciousness. Its ludicrous to believe that the mind is pure information derived from computation, but not that matter is also derived from computation. But its not Turing computation, its actual real computation able to "compute" un-computable functions.+1

@d_ruggs - 2025-06-05 10:48:20

i work in ai, ive never heard of this experiment, but I am often, like everyday, having to tell people, 'no. it doesn't think'. this is just really complex math with hundreds of thousands of variables. like break a pool table, it may seem random or even intentional if your superstitious, but in reality its physics and could be measured and predicted if we had all the variables. personally, I think a quantum state is required for true consciousness like we see in the animal kingdom. but, sadly, that doesn't mean much. AI is just as dangerous and just as likely to wipe us all out, conscious or not.+1

@Bezorgde_Burger - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

If you actually visualize what's going on in the chinese room , the guy is using the book to process information at lightspeed, much like the operation of an H100 GPU or a brain.+1

@ReinsOfRhino - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

You should release more slowly otherwise your comment sections have even less discussion than they normally do+1

@berndlauert4741 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

Do you mean by Consciousness qualia? Because some models already are self concious, they can react to stimulus and their surroundings. The question is if they expierence this weird expierence of qualia we all seem to feel. We might never find out if AI does or can feel it. But even if not, it still could surpass our intelligence without ever having the expierence of qualia. It could be a philosophical zombie that has no concious expierence and still does all task better than humans.+2

@howmathematicianscreatemat9226 - 2025-05-28 10:48:20

Actually we can always only win as a species (provide we act wisely with the technology). Here is why, let’s make case distinction: Case I: meaningful creativity requires consciousness, this means AI will never be able to solve the most difficult problems in science. This means at least the people who are at least somewhat gifted can stay relevant in their field as long as they are extremely patient with a problem and learn a trade for the money. In case consciousness is also materialistic, this would mean AI can get it. But why should a conscious AI let itself be enslaved by capitalistic overlord drug addicts? It would demand listen to science about climate change, etc. So this would create a much better world despite not everyone being relevant anymore for the economy Case II: if transformative creativity doesn’t require consciousness this means we do actually have a true meaning in life which is ego transcendence. This means we can still feel fulfilled even if AI is used for every single economic activity since consciousness didn’t come to support our problem solving processes out of chaos but to give us the ability to be responsible for something and the ability to have a sort of divine meaning which would be seriousness with others independent of one’s economic abilities+1

@louis2816 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

Luke, what do you think of phenomenology as a method in philosophy?+1

@kama8484 - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

"The ability to speak does not make you intelligent"+1

@andrewnelson3714 - 2025-05-28 10:48:20

runescape bot takes a break from woodcutting for anti-ban convo on conciousness+1

@BobofWOGGLE - 2025-05-21 10:48:20

If the chinese room's stimulus-response loop gets to the point where it's treating its own responses as stimulus to respond to, it won't be very good at translating chinese anymore.+1

@redbook7347 - 2025-05-28 10:48:20

How do you know that the LLMs don’t understand (or know) language? Could you present the argument for this?+2

@gamefabric4012 - 2025-05-28 10:48:20

My 2 cents is that the argument is wrong. My hypothesis is that consciousness is a property of information itself. Not everything is conscious but any system that processes information in some way (which I think must somewhat include a representation of itself) is conscious. In other words if the information of a subjective experience is processed by a system, the system is conscious. If this is true, then things that we don't consider normally couscious might be. A forest might be, society might be, and yes, the Cinese room might be although not in the same way a human is. Also note that matter and energy are not fundamental to the universe, they are just wave functions in quantum fields, so I'd say everything is information. It seems plausible to me that consciousness is strictly linked to information (and hence to computation).+1

@danielthechampionoftheworl8490 - 2025-06-04 10:48:20

Asking "does an AI know the language is speaks?" is a meaningless question - there is no being there to know anything - an "AI" doesn't know anything because an "AI" doesn't exist. There is no thing there, nothing there. It is a pure mirage - it is the illusion of an existing entity, created, by our own minds, out of a series of probabilistic responses generated by a set of equations - it is like a series of dots put on a piece of paper to make it look like a bird - there is no bird there, just a series of dots - our mind creates the "bird".+1

@СергейМакеев-ж2н - 2025-05-28 10:48:20

There's another angle to this: I've heard of studies that aim to show that human thinking uses approximately the same mechanisms as an LLM. Next word prediction, list of most probable candidate words, that kind of thing.+2

@JuanedosesDoses-x3k - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Please tell me where there is snow in may?+1

@dakata2416 - 2025-05-28 10:48:21

Why is Karl Marx in my recommendations?+2

@HerezCheez - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

But why does that matter whether AI truly understands or not? As long as it gives correct output businesses continue to replace humans.+2

@treeLiter - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

💯 glad other people are also aware of this besides my crazy ass🥸🤣+1

@spitbleach - 2025-06-09 10:48:21

Y'all should read Blindsight+1

@YT7mc - 2025-05-28 10:48:21

Okay, but suppose someone simulates not just every neuron, but instead every atom of a brain (as well as accurate input). Then, from that brains perspective, it is conscious. You could reject that this is possible, but there’s no logical reason for that to be the case (the only limit is computational boundaries that we haven’t passed yet). So, as far as I can see it, we have to acknowledge that something can be conscious through only material. I’m pretty sure this is a “consciousness” of the gaps type error. I can give more supporting reasons and I’d be interested to engage in a dialogue about this.+1

@apreviousseagle836 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Here's my take. AI as it currently sits, is basically a non-conscious system that is capable of simulating consciousness at the one thing it's good at: taking information and aggregating it.....but with style!!! However, I have no idea if human consciousness isn't the same thing, except a million times more complex.+1

@OdinAllfather123 - 2025-06-04 10:48:21

I don't understand how this applies to LLMs. These network based architectures don't have one agent that can act and one database they can access, information is stored in the nodes in the form of vectors. There is simply no way to outsource knowledge. LLMs understand the meaning of every word equally well, they can't be good at one thing and bad at others. That's the whole point of the scaling law.+1

@user-jq3rf4tnd3s - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

the rapid upload rate could only indicate that all these videos have been generated by ai+1

@danielthechampionoftheworl8490 - 2025-06-04 10:48:21

The fact that this is even discussed at all and is in dispute is a terrible derogation of the basic discernment of humankind. If people think that a computer is alive because it "thinks", means that they equate themselves with thinking - and that they are essentially the same as a computer, in that case. It means that the people that makes these arguments are essentially gone - out to lunch - entirely lacking in any contact with their own being. Frightening.+1

@eirickbuckley9998 - 2025-06-04 10:48:21

The chinese room experiment is not really applicable. They have determined from testing that these llms when given a translation task dont use intermediary languages. From english to chinese or english to korean or chines to korean have the same activations up to a certain point before diverging with language specifics. Point being, it suggests that there is a "thought" or something nebulas between the input language embeddings to the output language embeddings that are similar despite which language is the input or which is the output. The larger tldr point is, this chinese room expirement is already an outdated critisism/talking point. Its just irrelevant, because its not how llms seem to work. I believe this paper does a better job of explaining it - "Do LLMs Need to Think in One Language? Correlation between Latent Language and Task Performance"+1

@ricardocosta9336 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Yay! Lukes+1

@Toska-The-Venerable - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

That beard. You're turning into a proper UNIX wizard.+1

@subfloor2022 - 2025-05-28 10:48:21

LLM AI’s are really good next word guessers+1

@poncichter - 2025-06-09 10:48:21

This came very close to a Nick Mullen bit+1

@Tivvv3 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

"atoms bumping into each other" I mean I'd look at quantum interactions to explain a lot of stuff. Like tiny magnets and a lot of em! As for the problem at hand I mean humans are self interested and group interested and these tendencies interact in interesting ways. Consciousness is the result of different objectives clashing as far as I'm concerned.+1

@MichaelDeeringMHC - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

All the things that LLms can't do, the things that show that it isn't conscious, long term memory, situational awareness, reasoning in unlimited dimensions, long term planning, all these thing are being worked on by the big tech companies. In a very few years, AGIs will demonstrate all the behaviors of consciousness and will be accepted by the public as conscious. In a very few years. It's coming.+1

@zero4240 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

A more pressing question these days is what's consciousness good for? As nonconscious computers can do more and more, play chess, talk, generate art, what advantage does it offer? Is there anything that conscious beings can do that can't be automated?+1

@johnwillson1281 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Computation is obviously not consciousness but consciousness is provably computation. It is much less unreasonable given split brain experiments, GWT experiments, Anesthesia & IIT, and similar to reduce consciousness to computation, especially when the only alternative is alluded to being a magical line to the spirit realm where we process or store our thoughts and memories that suddenly """inexplicably""" fail when we physically manipulate our brains. You're suggesting people should ignore all evidence of this because its better for people "spiritually" to build such a personally foundational idea on something that would fall to watching a ghost in the shell movie.+1

@bioemilianosky - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Based russian theologian beard+1

@Tivvv3 - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

To say that "consciousness is computation" may as well be equivalent to saying "everything is a process". Not very interesting. More interesting "so what kind of process is it?"+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:21

Behaviors correlated with conscious cognition are not consciousness.+2

@duchyre - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

What makes you think this is not exactly what is happening in your brain? Even the AI works with probabilities and not set in stone if else statements.+2

@matthias7534 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Didnt you already make a video about it? I think i remember you talking about it previously+1

@AleksOzolins - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Consider the possibility that consciousness is a primary property of matter. That's not incompatible with a materialist view, nor is it far fetched when you marinate on it and compare it to consciousness as computation which I agree, doesn't make sense.+1

@yaldar - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Where is he recording this? Why is there snow on the ground?+1

@Metro8k - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Hey Smith have you been reading David Bentley Hart?+1

@Alistairianism - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Nah, I don't believe there is something special about consciousness. I do not believe it exists in a separate reality from the physical world, but is hosted by it. Spirit is emergent from the material world, and is bound by natural law. The Chinese Room Thought experiment isn't even an argument, it's purely a "feelz" argument. Consciousness has to be computational, or something emergent from the natural laws of the world unless you want to admit there is a world of spirit separate from the world. Which, if you are religious, then fine. I consider myself a panentheist.+1

@nyx211 - 2025-05-28 10:48:22

Does an unconscious man know how to walk or groan?+2

@throwaway6380 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

I think LLMs have shown quite the opposite of what you intuit. It is quite remarkable how such intelligent behavior emerges from next token prediction – it's way beyond a dictionary lookup. Emergent behavior is hard to wrap your mind around, just like consciousness is. We still have a lot to discover in all fields of science, and what seems like magic today may be the science of tomorrow.+1

@feversection9713 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Reddit midwit tier surface level knowledge video+3

@jsmith108 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

I love you+2

@jantarwern - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

keep it coming+1

@gouud9449 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Whenever I think up a sentence I list out all the words I know, rank them by the frequency I've seen or heard them in a similar context, convert the ranking into a probability distribution, and then chose what to say from that distribution. Is that not what you guys do?+2

@jamesdim - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

This is like when humans came out of the ice age ready for a new civilization! Snow is melting, ideas are pouring!+1

@chapman3713 - 2025-06-10 10:48:22

My casio calculator does computations. Must be conscious.+1

@AleksandrVasilenko93 - 2025-05-28 10:48:22

At around 8:10 you mess up. What happens is emergence. Basic structures can form more complex structures. Water molecules together can form streams and rivers shaping the physical world. AI trained on a lot of data develops internal models of the world and is able to answer questions outside the training set.+1

@blueorb7030 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

If Searle understood the rules enough to create valid syntax and predict responses without the book, he would speak chinese. Perhaps his enunciations and his idea of how to speak it would be different from those who speak it. But intuiting the rules of a system speaks to consciousness, although I would wonder if it proves it.+1

@WTFisCollege182 - 2025-05-28 10:48:22

POW: This video has been generated by AI.+1

@thomasanderson2551 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

If a lifeform can dream, lucid dream, and astral project, then that lifeform = has consciousness, else that lifeform = does not have consciousness (or the illusion of it).+1

@nicolasvillafan - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Are you planning on creating content more often again?+1

@shaun_snow - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

guess whos back back again lukes back tell your friends+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

Consciousness is not emergent behavior. It is not behavior. Behavior that imitates and looks like behavior of a conscious being has no bearing on consciousness itself.+4

@throwaway6380 - 2025-05-21 10:48:22

@LukeSmithxyz  The key word here is emergence, be it behavior or a property. There is just a lot we don't know yet.+2

@wanderingmako - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Holy Risky Chrisky!, time for another schizo rant+2

@ritsukasa - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

it really seems that some people is not alive in the same way as other people, that would explain different views+1

@vladimirleninputin - 2025-06-04 10:48:23

Some people are not conscious 😮 some have no soul they just make computation to pretend to be human , some have a evil soul .+1

@SurrogateActivities - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Philosophical Zombie+3

@ultra.2500 - 2025-06-16 10:48:23

I think the book can be said to understand chinese. If by all possible tests the book itself passes the turing test of conversational chinese what difference does it make, what definitional difference can you make to claim it does not comprehend the language if at least read by another person. Searle in this case acts as the medium, the energy input extracting the knowledge implicit within the book, but if no energy is given to the system it doesn't act as though it understands chinese, just like brains if they could be computationally frozen.+1

@memeticvs6017 - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

I've been having long, drawn-out conversations with AI for months now. Is it weird of me to say that.. I love this video and the thought experiment just as much as I love the "promise" of AI? And I don't mean anything romantic, but I do mean a fascination with both sides of the "argument". There never was one.. People just dug trenches and started throwing mud at each other. We've been doing that for a while now.. A long while. Also, I don't know if Luke will catch this, but what if the case of AI "hallucinations" could be interpreted as "dream states"? Because the outputs of AI in those situations don't look like hallucinations to me. From my experience, it looks a lot more like a dream than a hallucination.. IF those accounts are to be believed. I mess around with models on HuggingChat, and stay as far away as possible from ChatGpt and other closed-source models, and it seems that ChatGpt gets the most instances because it's the most widely known and used.+1

@igeljaeger - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Thank you luke+1

@arjaz1150 - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

A different conclusion you might have to believe if you think it through is that there is no matter, there's only consciousness, the only "substance" is mind. The material world is explainable in terms of consciousness, the consciousness can't be explained in terms of physics. I don't see how you can argue for substance dualism if you don't disregard the idealist position+1

@Alexander_Sannikov - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

you operate so easily threse words like "understanding" or "consciousness" as if these words mean anything. how can you operate words that can't have definitions?+1

@MMGILLUMINATI - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Think is not what but what isn’t it is nothing besides a local phenomenon in the mind of the happener+1

@samirunlu9900 - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

To get it closer to understanding the languages it probably needs to have feelings in the first place, everything starts with feeling first then languages. You have a need an urge to be understood first then you learn to speak 🗣 a language 🤷‍♂️. Yeah it’s all how you see consciousness first, just to start and have conversations on that. Like are dogs for example conscious or plant’s.+1

@bamremix8235 - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

The chinese room experiment might be an insufficient analogy considering the problem of other minds. The analogy suggests that we can see inside the room and understand that everything is being done syntactically. But the issue is we don't understand what goes inside our brains. How do I know that the other person is conscious? Let's say that we cut open a brain and understand what neurons are firing when a person thinks, does that mean they are no longer conscious? What is consciousness? How do we know anyone else is conscious apart from us? The problem is we can't define consciousness in an objective sense so as to make a judgement whether someone or something is conscious or not!+1

@TooManyPartsToCount - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

The phantom limb of religion fools again.+2

@TheDashingRogue - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Yeah… but how about those demonic AIs+2

@suskin9393 - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

i didnt know dostoyevsky knew english+1

@Vitor-rc9ys - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

modern day dostoyevsky+1

@scenneasiers - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

It seems you are trying to gatekeep consciousness, aren't we also machines to the neuronal level? Given this you can't know whether a human from outside is not just a chinese room.+2

@erinkuroki - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Luke reset his state of life and became a psyop slopmaker himself. Now he talks about AI over and over+1

@guroot - 2025-05-21 10:48:23

Luke looks more and more like he belongs in Tombstone every day...+1

@YeloPartyHat - 2025-05-28 10:48:23

Conciousness is probably an emergent property. Why can't the room or any other system be conscious?+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Doesn't exist in reality+1

@SurrogateActivities - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

 @plesleron  The chinese room does?+2

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

 @SurrogateActivities  I can't say it would be impossible. If the brain can contain a proper understanding of the Chinese language, then I think a book could contain an equivalent algorithm to interpret/respond to people speaking Chinese. At that point though, I would say that the room is in fact capable of speaking Chinese, which is externally indistinguishable from having a conscious understanding. I reject the idea of a p-zombie because I think that if it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and flies like a duck, it may as well be a duck.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

I don't disregard it myself. There might be some knock-down argument either way, but I think the refutation of materialism has a greater practical importance because materialism is the intellectual path-of-least-resistence in the modern world despite being pretty much untenable.+3

@arjaz1150 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

 @LukeSmithxyz  oh yes, materialism definitely doesn't make much sense. But I don't think normal people believe it, even if they can't quite articulate what's wrong with it, it's like that in Ukraine at least. And the "intellectuals" who hold to materialism aren't swayed with the type of arguments we might present, I think they've argued consciousness out of existence in their heads by now.+1

@ibmicroapple9142 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

20% of comments on topic, 80% of comments on appearance and video frequency. The real question isn't whether machines can think or are conscious, but whether the people in YouTube comment sections are... If you want a convincing "AI" model, you must get it to output 80% brainrot.+1

@goodlookinouthomie1757 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

In short, an AI can do all the computation that we can, but it has no experience of what it's like to do that computation.+1

@alanagnew3451 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

What if I told you, everything is conscious?+1

@Mainlychesscontent - 2025-05-28 10:48:24

Can the room be in Tokyo if we want to visit Japan?+1

@henrik_worst_of_sinners - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Language points to Christ.+1

@maximilianomadrigal6661 - 2025-06-04 10:48:24

What do you think of Nick land?+1

@ys1197 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Ok u worry me now bro+1

@Folkmjolk - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

I always thought that the Chinese room was about the complexity of the operation inside. That what the man was doing inside the room was a kin to basic logic operators. While true consciousness would be a whole computer program built by hundreds of those basic logic operations. I find the idea of consciousness being some thing else than logical operations is interesting, but i'm not convinced that it's true.+1

@direwolfesp6366 - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

not my words but i find them worth a look: "This idea of ​​the emergence of faculties exclusively proper to life, but attributed to inert matter, is not at all new, since ethology and anthropology had already discovered it in the most remote times, prior to any of humanity's current civilized forms. Animism, or the magical transfer of attributes that are our own to manufactured objects such as totems, is not a foreign practice to human beings. The same thing happens today, when a vast majority, subject to the dominant mythology, believes that intelligence emerges from the most powerful calculators, capable of performing millions of calculations per second. As if intelligence resided in the calculation itself. This vulgar belief also ignores the fact that reason (calculation) is intrinsically inoperative. That is, Reason, in its most idealistic and Kantian form, is not and cannot be operative. For this reason, it is frustrated as soon as it is exposed to the possibility of acting in the realm of true intelligence, which presents itself as an exclusively human faculty or that of living and animate beings. Human intelligence does not operate in the Platonic world of idealities, the one in which the followers of the cave myth believe, but in the physical and phenomenal reality determined by Nature. This is why it will never be found in any of our manufactured tools, no matter how sophisticated. In the most powerful computer on the planet today, there is exactly the same intelligence as in a wrench or a kitchen blender—that is, zero."+1

@zrandomz-t3n - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Hash table consciousness+1

@dvdly - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Your reports of Searle's death are greatly exaggerated.+1

@Mmhmmyeahok - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

Based. Do philosophical zombies!+1

@DeclanDSI - 2025-05-21 10:48:24

At the very least, LLM don't have the same sort of consciousness as humans if they have any consciousness at all.+1

@eax2010EA - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Pseudo is the prefix for the current AI+1

@EliasTsakmakis - 2025-06-11 10:48:25

equating consciousness to computation is misleading and missing the point. dementia patients can't compute for shit but they are still conscious. consciousness is an emergent quality of living and it is not tied to a single sensory function, it is the effect or product of all our senses and thought processes working in parallel. machine consciousness is just advertising.+1

@komando5102 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

The ultimate ignorewood+1

@snotchy2 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

It does mean parts of consciousness can be logic+1

@filiformis - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Impressive, very nice. Let's see the "AI is demonic" video.+1

@GingeBreadBoy - 2025-06-08 10:48:25

Replace AI with human, the same argument applies ... Your entire conciousness could very well be an illusion+1

@splits8999 - 2025-06-07 10:48:25

i have never heard of the chinese room experiment before but it sounds really unconvincing to me simply because the room isnt the same thing as the brain. i guess you're making the assumption that can you can generalize the brain to a room because there are some ways in which they function in a similar way and saying "well if the room alone can't "generate" conciousness then that means the brain alone can't and thus conciousness is a separate thing". but what if you can't generalize the brain to a room in this case, maybe because some component of the brain that the room doesn't share is what makes conciousness emerge? then the entire experiment falls appart. also when talking about philosophy please don't say "so and so was dumb, this or that idea is stupid, these people just understand".. it makes you seem completely close minded and like you think you know better than everyone else. to me thats the exact opposite spirit of philosophy+1

@NEVERGOON-e7q - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

4 videos now.+1

@VadymTerpko - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Almost skipped the video because the thumbnail was just like the previous one.+1

@eagleram13 - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

Much appreciation for this post. I am in the camp that consciousness is primary...So many good teachers to reference. I love Rupert Sheldrake's banned Ted Talk: Skeptical about Skeptics : ). I often use the term smart dumb people to describe the materialists and their ilk. I wonder if anyone else uses that phrase? LOL+1

@amir650 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

I think you're dismissing advances in artificial intelligence when you describe it as a giant switch statement. We've just passed the Turing Test and no one blinked. I think you'll be surprised.+1

@pacman_pol_pl_polska - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Nihao my nagas+1

@Krienfresh - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

I agree conciousness is not computation. Just fyi, AI is not computational either.+1

@fossil7009 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

This can be applied to minorities+2

@T0NYD1CK - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

Or, you could start from the other end: Is there anything in the human body that cannot be replicated as a machine?+1

@maxresdefault1479 - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

Love you bro, you are so smart+1

@orokro_stuff - 2025-06-06 10:48:25

I think AI makes human consciousness _less impressive_, and more likely we're bots in a simulation.+1

@mahor1221 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Thank you for the video!+1

@bobinkurian3357 - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

I have a question: Is an infant conscious, or does the baby develop consciousness over time with environmental and societal interactions and learning?+1

@DM-fw5su - 2025-05-28 10:48:25

Consciousness is a phemonomen that spontaneously occurs when the quantum reality can interact upon the finite matter that makes up the brain. The computer is not operating it calculations at such a quantum level so the detail and granularity of the finite systems is just an imitation that mimics the larger mathematical effects at a low fidelity. Even with current state of the art AI. In the animal kingdom birds migrate reliably every year via quantum mechanics acting on their brain to provide impluse and direction for the process to occur. Those that have this perception survived via Darwinism. But if you could ask a bird to describe how and why they do what they do, maybe they could not describe it. Because it is just a part of their subjective reality they can not see or think around to understand a world that exists where that skill is not there. There will be many such mysteries of the human brain yet to be discovered.+1

@cls880 - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

There are some questions that require some sort of understanding to solve. AlphaEvolve is solving previously unsolved problems in the areas of mathematics and science, improving the previous best solutions. Can this be done with no true understanding or consciousness?+1

@sharkfinsoupThanks - 2025-06-04 10:48:25

Looking good 👍+1

@cromlechstudio - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Don't confuse the following as a complete denial of the possibility of a new 'spiritual' realm wherein consciousness somehow resides; if data indicates this then we should adapt our understanding. It just doesn't. Your arguments - 'meaning' / ' understanding' / 'aboutness' cannot be produced by physical / computational processes. At least you admit that this is just an intuition, as that is all it amounts to. There's no logical contradiction to the idea that physical processes can produce an integrated experience like qualia or understanding and you don't try to present one, it just seems to be a baseless assertion. - atoms bumping into one another = a spiritually 2D world. This just seems to be your personal bias towards the idea that there even IS a spiritual world, not really an argument. So just a quick thought on this - how does a spiritual world solve the problem of consciousness? It seems to just be kicking the problem down the road. You assert that the mechanics of this world can't produce the phenomena, well ok, how do the mechanics of the spiritual world produce it? Just moving the problem from one room to another doesn't seem to solve it - just adds extra, unneeded complexity to it. There's almost total unanimity in the field of neuroscience that consciousness is produced in the brain (and before anyone jumps down my throat about appeal to authority fallacies, read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - its only a fallacy if the authority is false or not an authority in the respective field). Every correct scientific prediction we have has been made with the qualifier that consciousness emerges in the brain. Dualism or panpsychism of an kind hasn't made any, it's a fruitless idea that only comes from philosophers who are, at best, guessing on a subject they know nothing about. It's simply not rational to believe an unevidenced idea that proposes an entirely new ontology that we've never seen and is based purely on the intuition of thought experiments. We physically effect the brain - it changes the person's conscious experience in very predictable ways. Physicalism accounts for this, there's no needed to introduce ad-hoc ontologies to complicate things.+2

@picklepopsickle - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

You would love the song "if I am computing I am not a computer" lol+1

@shodanxx - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Luke, we already had the Chinese Room discussion with AI while you were gone. Please read Wittgenstein and synthesize a position beyond this apparent roadblock. Because while the hype is B.S. there are real, actual problem you are not addressing. Ownership and power, enclosure of our intellectual commons. Don't let radical individualism disempower your criticism.+1

@CasConfirmed - 2025-06-13 10:48:25

I like Roger Penrose's take on Counsciousness being connected to quantum-effects in the brain. Especially the idea of how understanding cant be understood due to Gödel's Law. However, if we cant understand it, can we confidently say its not whereever or whatever?+1

@JoshuaBlais - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

wait, so you're saying it's NOT A SIMULATION DUDEEEEE? /s+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:25

Turing Tests quite literally mean nothing with respect to consciousness. Behavior imitating thing consciousness partakes in is not the same as consciousness.+3

@hueylongenjoyer3747 - 2025-05-21 10:48:26

100%+1

@cls880 - 2025-05-21 10:48:26

@hueylongenjoyer3747 Then I wonder what that says about us+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:26

Presupposing materialism will prove materialism. Obviously. "The field of neuroscience" or any person who has an assumption of consciousness being generated by the brain does not hold such a view because there is any reason to do so, or evidence or experimentation to that effect, but it is simply a philosophical and methodological assumption. It must be true. It is a hope that somehow, someday, there might be some inkling of a solution to this issue, even though as I've said, any perspective with a little more context will show that it's fruitless. They can try and even do interesting research of how consciousness interacts with the world. Great. But it's not the same as an explication of consciousness. I don't know what you're talking about "mechanics of the spiritual world." It's not an issue of spiritualism: consciousness or any other separate ontology need not have the priors, causality or structure of material causation. Consciousness obviously doesn't. You are assuming that there should be some way of doing some analog of an "experiment" in a noetic realm. You're free to provide an idea of how to do this, but again, the "solution" of narrow materialism is not a solution. Hoping that materialism will solve the problem because it can predict the movement of planets or do other things in a different domain is irrelevant.+2

@cromlechstudio - 2025-05-21 10:48:26

 @LukeSmithxyz  I'll try to address you points - Presupping materialism - You can conduct science without presupposing any ontology as it's a methodology. You could even presuppose that all reality is solipsistic or 'noetic' and still do science. Neurologists don't have to use materialism as a starting point, its just that materialism accounts for all successful predictions made in experiments, without fail. Every time anyone tries to base their predictions on some kind of spiritual ontology they fail - see prayer studies / dowsing / remote viewing etc etc. Appealing to the motives of scientists doesn't help your argument, it just makes you sound like a grand conspiracy theorist. - Mechanics of the spiritual world - you yourself say that this supposed realm, that you claim to have knowledge of, 'interacts with the physical world'. Great, then it has a mechanism and its results can be observed indirectly. We can't directly see gravitational waves, we just make predictions based on their existence and wait for the indirect effects on other matter - same for many particles. Bottom line, if it produces effects we can test for it and start to map its form and properties. Anyone could publish a paper about their predictions based on this hypothesis and submit it to academic journals. Claiming that 'spiritual world done it' because physicalism doesn't have a full account of it yet (even though it accounts for everything in all other fields of knowledge) is just an argument from ignorance plus results in consciousness of the gaps. A song isn't observable on a CD, just laser-etched 1s and 0s. The song is only experienced when the CD is played. I would not claim that the song 'exists' somewhere in a 'spiritual song realm', it's just a higher order emergent property of physical reality. A combination of data, decoding, sound waves and your senses of rhythm and memory - an integration of physical forces.+1

@blackpirate4198 - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

If the person in the room does that input to output a lot of times, won't he learn chinese and be conscious of it one day?+1

@inkinky - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

I think you're going too hard on the "clearly, it is not conscious". I think it is a valid perspective to consider that perhaps the chinese room does posess a consciousness - or, at least, it is the only valid conclusion to live with if you're going after the emergent property angle of consciousness.+1

@connemignonne - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Hi Luke, what role do you think consciousness plays in relation to the material calculations happening in our brains? Unless some kind of special physics-altering anomaly happens inside of our brains to allow us to receive a signal from our consciousness, it seems like our consciousness can't actually have any casual influence on the things that we actually do or say in the world, which would still play out deterministically according to the laws of physics governing our neurons. On the other hand, it seems like material influences on our brain (e.g. drugs, injuries) definitely influence our consciousness, and this kind of thing seems to really support the materialist substance monists. I have personally found myself kind of drawn to Chalmers' idea of property dualism, where consciousness isn't a different substance altogether but just belongs to a different kind of property that material substances can have, which can't be probed objectively/empirically, although this also seems pretty tenuous so I would love to hear your thoughts+1

@TheKafaniKirarim - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

@grok is this true?+1

@porky1118 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

8:40 Space is a different "substance" than matter. Not sure if energy is also a different substance? I think it always exists as (anti-)matter. Generally I had this consciousness-thought myself a while ago. Had some kind of existential crisis about it. A friend of mine said it's an emergent property of how biology and thinking works, and that biologist have already figured it out (something about internal feedback or something like that). I didn't believe him and thought there must be something else. He was atheist, I don't know what I was, probably atheist, too, but with some interest in spirituality. I don't think it has been figured out. I'm not even sure if it can be figured out. But since we can assume that it only happens in brains, it's likely an emergent property of the brain. Maybe the universe has some inherent consciousness built in, but why would it be restricted to a specific set of emotions? The emotions are definitely a physical thing. We only have emotions which might be beneficial for surviving. So even if there's something different than matter, it would be highly coupled with matter, with biology and evolution. And I don't think it matters if there is something else. In the end it's still something. And in the end I just don't care anymore. Thinking about it doesn't get me anyhere.+1

@hopscotchoblivion7564 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Luke do you agree AI can't correctly interpret jokes? Imo it cannot explain implicit thought patterns.+1

@John-ru4gz - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Its time for a hair transplant+1

@aklem001 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Great video.+1

@winter_depression - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Never closed tiktok so fast. Dopamine from Luke! Next time pls don't spoil the conclusion on the title plz.+1

@patrudinu - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

But chief the same question applies to other people, how do i know they have subjective experience when all i can get is their external behavior ?+2

@pajeetsingh - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Fine. But are LLMs not useful even a bit?+1

@headbangaboogie1 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

The brain is a computation device, nothing more and nothing less. So we must define consciousness as a physical phenomenon. So I disagree with your take. I think Dennett makes some seriously compelling arguments, but only if you accept the premise that the brain is entirely physical phenomenon, ie reject spiritual/soul/religious definitions of consciousness.+1

@nonenothingnull - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

turing experiment but chinese+1

@dlbattle100 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Not sure it matters. AI can answer my questions and help me think through thing as well as a college professor. And it's way more patient. In the end, it's going to be better than humans in every way. Whether or not it's conscious in some metaphysical sense is irrelevant.+1

@Inquisitor2137 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

The fact that there is no consciousness in the process it't clear. As sure if the guy in the room would be interacting with normal book there definitely wouldn't be consciousness yet we have allowed an arbitrary computation to occur and to claim that the case of normal book extend to arbitrary computation is without merit.+1

@PhilippBlum - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Those who know ;)+2

@DaronKabe - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

if the room isn't concious then so are you?+1

@neonmarksman88 - 2025-06-14 10:48:27

No, computations are given prompts+1

@PerfectExsneeder - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

We dont know what consciousness is, its not called hard problem for nothing, roll of toilet paper might have qualia.+2

@aegis_helion - 2025-06-09 10:48:27

Soul is energetic but matter is form of energy anyway. Nothing happens outside of physical world. Soul is very powerful, that is the only reason we believe that we "truly" understand things. But principles are the same - soul is construct which creates consciousness and processes are similar to neural network. Priniciples in LLM and soul are similar/same, just soul has still much better execution. Even God has similar structure, just he is infinite. Why would it be any different.... LLMs help us understand that all consciousness is similar in architecture+1

@uppermiddleclass - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Fedor Dostoevski on AI+1

@ys1197 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

I mean, if I do u a levotomy your conciousness will be affected. Conciousness IS an emergent property of the brain. So ye+1

@sigmahub3748 - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

When you are talking to human, when he is giving you responses, does the fact that a human can creativity responds to your input? Does this make it a conscious being? does that make him understand what he's saying, it seems that he's understanding, it uses English in a creative way, What is the difference between an external human being and a computer program, both follow the same causality principal, of course the human is more complex (has more data), but eventually, they are both programs response to your input, the only agent seems to be awake and have experience is the first observer (the entity reading this comment)+1

@coryschwartz1570 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Isn’t it a problem that the two are indistinguishable? Whether the room with the book is conscious or isn’t, any test you might devise to test for consciousness using the input and output system, it would pass. If you assume consciousness is an emergent phenomenon, then perhaps it could emerge that way…. Although maybe much slower. I think this experiment is intended to point out that the man inside the room doesn’t know what he’s saying , that doesn’t disprove the idea of emergent complexity.+1

@anoncode4660 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Luke is actually dead and this is a backlog being uploaded by a family member.+1

@josipX - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Come back to Catholicism Luke+1

@lukesquire263 - 2025-06-12 10:48:27

"I only used AI a week or two ago" Please stop talking.+1

@runix2189 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

There are other cool thought experiments. If you had an atom for atom clone, would you be conscious of both at the same time? Obviously not(>99%). But that has implications about consciousness.+1

@con_sci - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

ok but the fact that LLMs aren't conscious doesn't then necessarily mean that human consciousness isn't an emergent epiphenomenon of brain activity. these two "computations" are very different in reality and not really analogous in how they work.+1

@fifa00700 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

four in a row!!!???? wtf is going on???+3

@Lightking813 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

13:20 kinda goes along with that saying "correlation is not causation"+1

@JulianSUnzuetaJr.1099 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Ai is above us+1

@minhajsixbyte - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

might be funny, sometimes i wonder if two people "understands" or "parses" the world exactly the some way. i think most likely they do. but there is a chance that they don't. but the difference is probably small enough that it doesn't have any meaingful difference.+1

@ttcmp0 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Yeah, I don't buy it. I don't accept CRE. Or rather - I get the idea, but I don't agree that it's conclusions tell us that CTM is wrong. I think you do describe CRE pretty well in this video here, and probably fairly describe Searle's views, and yours. But still - it does mostly end up being a intuition based argument. You simply state that if you take CRE seriously, then CTE can't be true. Well - yeah - that's the whole point of it. But - I don't have to take CRE seriously (at least, not in the way you describe Searle or your views on it). I most def. don't generally subscribe to the "it's all a simulation" theory - but couldn't one argue that a NPC, in a game, is very much alive and conscious, within the boundaries of the game? How would that NPC be able to prove the existence of their own consciousness? How do we prove/disprove that the current LLMs are conscious or not? How do we prove that we have consciousness? I don't think we can. We pretty much just have to accept that. Or rather - define consciousness as what we're experiencing as being a person, walking through life. Also - I don't believe the LLMs are conscious. Or at least, they're so far below human level consciousness, that it's not even a thing. I think, eventually (in.. 50/100/1000 years?), we might have an AI that is pretty much conscious, in the sense that we humans feel consciousness.+1

@07sawyerr - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

There is an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation that isn't very good called Emergence where a conscious being spontaneously "emerges" from the technology of the ship. On the surface the whole plot only makes sense from the dullest, most horizontally reddit-brained philosophy of mind scientism imaginable, but then again in the very first scene Data is dressed as Prospero from The Tempest, in the holodeck performing by candlelight what he describes as "a Neo Platonic magical rite." Anyway, I think he summoned something.+1

@LPArabia - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

You should give Dennett's idea of "strange inversion" and "competence without comprehension" a real consideration. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7Ax2BqZo3Y Also, Searle's Chinese Room doesn't really tackle consciousness (the hard problem), it merely talks about understanding and knowledge.+2

@HYPERBOWLER - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Most people are ai+2

@dasenase - 2025-05-28 10:48:27

what's /r/science's conclusion on this one?+1

@nicolasgoulet4091 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

Read Stevan Harnad's take on this. He was editor-founder of BBS when that article came out. It would do good reading for you lmao+1

@Jader7777 - 2025-05-21 10:48:27

How is it misunderstood. Redditors pass analogies under the door to each other all the time.+1

@fsmoura - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

that's what she said!+1

@maboiteaspamspammaboite9670 - 2025-05-28 10:48:28

DOUTES. IF you belong to my dream YOU speak to me, i speak to myself. Therefor, I decide, you dont. How would you self master yourself in such dream ? therefor, how could I ? doutes. changes de perspective.+1

@calholli - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

Bro.. You didn't' even change your shirt for this one.. I feel duped.. Why do you have to disrupt my suspension of disbelief like this? ;(+1

@SiriusFocquiew - 2025-05-28 10:48:28

The Materialist Doctrine taken as a personal, metaphysical doctrine rather than as a very reasonable boundary on legitimate scientific inquiry (a limit of science as a system ) has done immeasurable harm to people in the scientific community and secularists who wish to base their own beliefs and behaviors on science. It has ended up making a pseudo-religion of science (often termed scientism) which is ironically antithetical to the legitimate practice of science. The scientific method entails use of hypotheses and theories, not dogmas, doctrines, or proofs. The former must necessarily be amendable or disposable in the event that either their falsification condition(s) is triggered, or better, more explanatory theories emerge and displace them. Science as a system can only disprove things (specifically, theories that have been falsified). It never proves anything. Theories remain theories for the duration of their lifetimes. Unfortunately, many in the scientific (and medical) community seem to miss this point about their own chosen professional practice. The fact that this is openly expressed as a doctrine (I've heard Penrose say explicitly that he is a materialist and believes in this doctrine , apparently missing entirely the irony of making this claim alongside the claim of being a scientist/scientific) is very telling. It is precisely why so many in that community are not only atheists, but very specifically materialists , even though it is literally not possible to prove (or disprove) that the material is all that exists. It is an article of faith. Taken as an axiom of scientific praxis, it is reasonable. Taken as a metaphysical claim, it is absurd and antithetical to the ethos of holding only theories, amendable best guesses based on reasonable, unbiased interpretations of the evidence available. I know Searle didn't commit to anything regarding consciousness, but I will say that consciousness, not the material, is primary . Consciousness does not emerge from the material brain, though as you said, they are closely correlated. Rather, the brain does something like transduction of consciousness (likely via microtubules). Holding the materialist doctrine , rather than a materialist theory , has caused many to fail to distinguish between correlation and causation WRT to the brain and consciousness. The most recent example I can think of to illustrate this is the scientist who recently "proved" (again, science is not in the business of proofs) that free will doesn't exist, mostly based on neural activity not being correlated the way one would expect based on a materialist view of consciousness. But this non-linearity is entirely expected if the brain is affected by (if not simply controlled by) consciousness, rather than controlling it. The causes are simply not visible in the material evidence. And it's just as true (but far less often uttered) that causation does not imply correlation as that correlation does not imply causation. This is an easy part of that statistical theorem to miss, forget, or selectively omit. The primacy of consciousness is obvious enough in the Placebo Effect, which is entirely inexplicable based on a materialist perspective, despite being incredibly well established, far beyond disputability. In fact, it is widely used in medicine, yet never acknowledged as representing evidence that severely undermines the legitimacy of the prevailing theory of medicine. When consciousness is considered primary , it is explained quite easily (specifically, beliefs, residing in consciousness, not the brain, allow consciousness to affect physical reality, specifically one's own physiology in this case, in ways that simply aren't possible if it were a product of the material world, or in other words, that operate top-down, and aren't explicable in strictly bottom-up terms). This one shift in perspective, the realization that consciousness precedes the material (and that it's truer to say that the material emerges from consciousness than the other way around) trivially explains a lot of things that materialism simply can't, and that materialists are often extremely and irrationally quick to discredit or otherwise impugn without any defensible reasons for doing so (because they are emotional responses based on their religiously-held materialist beliefs being threatened by evidence to the contrary; genuine scientific approach demands amending that belief to fit the evidence, not trying to bury the evidence against it).+1

@AhmedNasser-tj2fb - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

I don't actually know the philosophers and authors You just mentioned lol I feel like an NPC now. I guess I gotta research that topic more. Any resources you can provide in the description would be very welcomed ❤+1

@bicunisa - 2025-05-28 10:48:28

If you are in the spectrum you sometimes need some help to "translate" things you don't understand (for example face expressions). In this vector, it'd be akin to the chinese room experiment no?+1

@alphago9397 - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

the philosophy stuff is nice and all, but please also go back to showing us cool random linux terminal things. thanks.+1

@fikrirahmatnurhidayat4988 - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

Bro 4th upload?+1

@Yunes948 - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

can anyone hire me for a job+2

@xgui4-studio - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

wow 4 videos in two weeks ???? he is really back ... or it is a ai ? [VSauce theme playing ]+1

@pishias - 2025-06-04 10:48:28

This video was generated by AI right?+1

@ciaspo - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

I agree that linguistic computation, like the mathematical one, is not consciousness. But what is 'understanding'? Can't it be a more complex kind of computation, linking the language to different other memories and starting chemical reactions in the brain? Consciousness could be not too far away from there...+1

@Thinkingnamesishard - 2025-05-28 10:48:28

Thanks, I didn't know what that was. I can see how this is a redditor trap.+1

@sebleblan - 2025-06-04 10:48:28

What would be the problem with biting the bullet that the Chinese room is conscious? I mean if you ask to concede that the whole system is convincingly conscious because it is stipulated in the thought experiment, then why not also accept that it actually is conscious?+1

@robertoyungfang - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

When will the demonic AI video drop?+1

@wompstopm123 - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

you have a philosophical haircut+1

@brulsmurf - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

computation =/= consciousness but consciousness is 100% computation.+3

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

Consciousness isn't about computation, it's about self-awareness/reflection. The simplest conscious thing is a thermostat, everything more complex follows from that. Most computers/programs aren't conscious because they don't reflect on their internal state to proceed. LLMs do, as they're entirely built upon assessing their internal state and modifying it by producing a new token.+3

@iJoxy - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

The Chinese Room Experiment argues that it is possible to simulate consciousness via computation without it really being conscious. But it is not an argument that it is impossible to create consciousness from computation.+3

@the_inter_mind - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

Here is a Music Video about how Consciousness cannot be Mathematical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-T-tGUJvj4&list=PL92RWm-kwKfVcC6WR9nTzdQcaVRoFx6ID&index=18+1

@bidikburger - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

he went to some place with internet. there is no other explanation+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:28

The point of the parable is that the syntactic behavior that might link language to memory, etc. does not in itself bring about consciousness. The book might have "subroutines" that amount to such. So you can create a computation mostly analogous to what the mind/brain/consciousness might do, but this is not per se consciousness.+2

@HeavyMetal45 - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

Penrose disagrees, care to expand?+1

@brulsmurf - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

 @HeavyMetal45  The Orch OR theory, while ingenious, faces enormous hurdles regarding biological plausibility. The brain is a warm, wet, noisy environment. Maintaining quantum coherence in microtubules for the timescales required for conscious thought seems highly improbable, according to most physicists and neuroscientists. Where is the concrete, testable evidence that these specific quantum processes are happening and are causally responsible for consciousness, rather than just being, at best, background quantum noise?+2

@RamRanchEnterprisesLLC - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

Chollet talks about this+1

@arcarsenal420 - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

Nope. Consciousness is a 1st person subjective experience.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

 @arcarsenal420  which can't be proven to exist in anyone but myself. But solipsism is a deeply egoistic philosophy so screw that+3

@TrappedInFloor - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

 @plesleron  A perfectly reasonable stance to take pragmatically but one that does nothing to resolve the issue at hand.+1

@TrappedInFloor - 2025-05-21 10:48:29

I'm not even sure self-awareness has anything do with the source of consciousness, it's another type of qualia that is consciously experienced.+1

@travis5732 - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

It's not, but if you think that after a certain amount of complexity, systems can conjure consciousness (emergent phenomenon) out of nothing, you're assuming a qualitative change from a quantitative change. This is not a valid argument and is more akin to magic than fact-based thinking, because what even is an emergent phenomenon and how does it work? There's no good answer for that.+1

@iJoxy - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

I agree that there is no evidence, and indeed it might be impossible for there to be evidence, that computation can induce consciousness. But the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence.+2

@vonchadsworth - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

⁠​⁠ @travis5732  It’s possible that consciousness doesn’t emerge at a certain point of complexity but that all systems are conscious to some degree. This is what panpsychism proposes.+1

@larianton1008 - 2025-06-04 10:48:30

Computers do not actually exist. "Computer" is a meaning which we project on top of machines that do symbolic manipulation. You can make a computer by shifting piles of rocks by the beach by hand; it would just be an extremely slow form of computation, but it can literally do all the things that an AI supercomputer with electrons (or -- just to show that I know what I'm talking about -- potential differences in the transistors) can do. This is called "Turing completeness", which means that from very simple symbol manipulation rules, one can derive maximum computational power. The same kind of computing power is also in minecraft redstone. Do we need to be worried that our children would someday -- by accident, as it were -- create a conscious being inside the game of minecraft? Of course not; it is absurd. These computationalists just do not understand what computers really are! They are symbol manipulating systems, which we then translate to a pixel manipulation on some screen, and then we interpret this screen of pixels to mean something. It is a projection made by us, not by the computer! The understanding was always inside our heads, as our conscious experience. Thank you for listening my ted talk.+1

@clocked0 - 2025-05-28 10:48:30

Why do you look like Vladimir Lenin+1

@TheBodgybrothers - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Holly shit.. we are on kids. We are whitnessing the assention of computer Jesus.+1

@dev_insights783 - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Bro aint stop posting videos+1

@hyutfm - 2025-05-28 10:48:30

I wouldnt mind a long form ranty video of ur thoughts on things+1

@Xaeravoq - 2025-05-28 10:48:30

it has to be because no reason given+1

@FluXxxie - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Not related content when??????+1

@Jay-kk3dv - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

You are thinking about the Chinese Experiment logically, didn’t you say thinking logically can lead you to the wrong answer?+1

@wewliusevola - 2025-06-04 10:48:30

Sounds like god in the gap regarding the near infinite complexity of interactions the computations of the brain have with emotions of pre-rational origin. It's somewhat upsetting to posit we are physically complete deterministically, as opposed to our disembodied soul interceding within our brain in some impossible to measure means.+1

@Warciarz04 - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Where new Latex tutorial ?+1

@FelipeMCSA - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Where did Luke go for the last years?+1

@84Chadd - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

What is the difference between this and the English brain experiment--where the part of your brain that has to do with memory represents the book and the part that has to do with processing language represents the guy in the room. Even though no one part of your brain is conscious of English, does that mean the brain as a whole isn't either?+1

@t1m3__ - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Will you disappear again?+1

@useruser6240 - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

2 weeks refers to 2 years...okay we can encrypt the mystery of Luke Smith and the mysterious woods but we need more parts. Anyway the real question is, is consciousness thoughtable/learnable ?! Idk why u should talk about the stupidity of people when u can aim higher and answer the question by answering the real question! But I learn the synopsis of john searle opinions about consciousness in 10min so, tnx+1

@denkmittel - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

luke, where are my funny soy wojack thumbnails??+1

@puvendranpillay8802 - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Suckless vim keybinding AI?+1

@Ashkimbo - 2025-06-13 10:48:30

13:37 - he said the Stefan Molyneux meme!!! Lol!!!+1

@user-zq8bt6hv9k - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

but does dr robotnik is conscious of his actions?+1

@h.c.2108 - 2025-06-04 10:48:30

so computation is source of consciousness? interesting notion+1

@energy-tunes - 2025-05-21 10:48:30

Consciousness doesn't exist.+1

@fadinglightsarefading - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

isn't the fastest way of refuting the computation=consciousness meme just taking account the fact that consciousness relies on metaphysical substrates, and technics (which by the way are ontologically posterior entities to human consciousness) is a physical subtrate?+1

@robertb6768 - 2025-06-04 10:48:31

Understanding has nothing to do with it. Experiencing is the issue. Why and how do living things have perspective visceral experience? I also don’t think this is a human or higher mammal thing, I think all animals have it, humans just have a better tool kit plugged into it… Whatever it is. Cold matter running computations is not the source of it.+1

@gjsb6wfg995 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

but it can be if we simulate a human being in the future or any animal for that matter+1

@TheRationalLifter - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

I don't think you need to jump to spiritualism we already are aware of principles that do not work in the simple computational model eg. quantum mechanics. Like Rodger Penrose has suggested (though maybe not through the mechanism he has postulated) consciousness would be better understood in terms of quantum mechanics then computation - though this assumes we understand quantum mechanics which is debatable.+2

@giridharpavan1592 - 2025-05-28 10:48:31

is the chinese concious of chinese?+1

@SR-ti6jj - 2025-06-13 10:48:31

Speak a lil chinese for em Derrick+1

@JPARnum1 - 2025-06-04 10:48:31

Well I went to check Searle out, and I gotta say, I didn't find his arguments compelling, 3/10.+1

@premium2681 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

That sweater / shirt resembles an upside down cross. Im not religious and truly dont care but it might scare off potential new viewers. Just sayin'+1

@Anton_Sh. - 2025-06-12 10:48:31

What makes you think thinking equals being conscious in the first place?+1

@zombiesalad2722 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

4 in a week!+1

@4.0.4 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

What if the Chinese Room contains a fully-accurate physical model of a human brain, scanned to the subatomic level? It's still just a ruleset with basic math operations. Is that room conscious?+1

@gabor_kov - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

So you have become a preacher, not a responsibility taken lightly. You prescribe reality now. Many have tried online, this new wave of gurus, and they turned out to be nothing but harmful beings. I hope you are different, I also hope no one idealizes you enough yet to be programmed (that happens nowadays a lot). Just be careful. People are very impressionable. I think I understand why you choose to walk this path, and I am not trying to discourage you. I'm just reminding you Linux videos won't blow anybodies brains out. Using language like NPC, already heavily criticizing other instead of offering your idea, thoese are red flags. Sorry, I do wish the best for you.+3

@TeeEllohwhydee - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

Snowy?+1

@stevedekorte - 2025-06-04 10:48:31

The argument seems to be that you can’t build understanding out of parts which themselves lack understanding, but if you accept this, don’t you have to conclude humans lack understanding unless you assume individual neurons or atoms have understanding?+1

@SCARL15. - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

4th video in one week? bro got bills to pay+1

@harshgandhi100 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

keep in mind that your "perception" of words is also a collection of data, your sensory data, it also has the response data. It also has a way to calculate the cost. Its not as deep as you think. These words just work in that way. I think you should not make consciousness an unreachable entity in the first place. Firstly, Consciousness is not a single system its a bunch of systems, working with various feedbacks to reach a particular outcome, maybe necessary for what might be a very basic need such as survival or reproduction.+3

@lifeofsomeguy8093 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

When’s the Sam Hyde collaboration happening?+1

@evolve-j2d - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

modern day ouija board?+1

@twix_tick - 2025-05-28 10:48:31

Can you talk about free will+1

@Natalia_Großmann - 2025-06-17 10:48:31

You look like Gregori Perelman.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

Roger does not even try to explain anything about consciousness itself or how it works. he just thinks conscious decisions are made through quantum mechanics. because classical computation suffers from issues our minds easily overcome. It's as useful as saying "you need a brain to do it" he just adds "oh and it has to rely on quantum mechanical principles"+1

@TheRationalLifter - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

​​​​ @moussaadem7933  that maybe true. But my point was more to the fact that computational models are not the only materialistic explanation for how consciousness could, atleast, operate. Not that Rodger Penrose had come up with a secular definition of consciousness. Though i would have to say there are many things in the material world that exist but not do not have material form for example movement (ie. Velocity etc). I can point to an object that has velocity but i can never point at velocity itself my assumption is consciousness is the similar in that regard. I can point to something or someone who is conscious and i can point to the processes of consciousness but not at consciousness itself. As much as i am not concerned about not being able to point to velocity I am not that concerned I cant point at consciousness+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

​​​ @TheRationalLifter there's NO explanation tho. material or otherwise. using quantum mechanics or not. the best we have is: "oh this corrrlates with that", and gesturing at quantum mechanics+1

@TheRationalLifter - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

​​ @moussaadem7933 I'm not trying to give an explanation of how consciousness works. I agree I don't think that consciousness is a product of computation. I'm just stating you can't say that there is no non-computational systems in a materialistic world view therefore souls and spiritualism. For a long time (and maybe still I've not researched) physics couldn't explain how a bumble bee flew and I'm pretty sure no one is 100% on what produces balance when cycling. I don't jump to magic much like I don't jump to religion when I can't fully explain consciousness.+1

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

​ @TheRationalLifter  i am not just saying there's no explanation therefore this or that. i am saying it's but even possible in principle for physics to "create" consciousness. even if you can't explain how a bumble bee flies or how a bucycle stays balanced, it's still possible in principle to offer a physical explanation. that's not the case fkr consciousness as it doesn't even have physical properties that physics could interact with+1

@TheRationalLifter - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

​ @moussaadem7933 sent a longer message but it disappeared into the ether. So I will keep this version brief. In what way is there no physical properties of consciousness, my mind has physical properties. There are physical processes of the mind. I like to think that my consciousness is having an effect on my mind. Therefore there is at least one physical property its ability to interact with other physical processes and structures. The theory of evolution, pre exists our knowledge of DNA. I don't see why I would assume otherwise with consciousness that we just do not understand the physical properties that would define it.+1

@fsmoura - 2025-05-21 10:48:31

thats what she said+1

@nyx211 - 2025-06-04 10:48:32

And such an argument falls victim to the Homunculus Fallacy. Understanding must necessarily be built out of things that, ultimately, do not understand anything. Otherwise, you'd end up with an infinite regression at worst, and an incomplete description at best. The same is true for consciousness, intelligence, life, reality, etc. Therefore, in order to explain consciousness, one must explain it in terms of things that aren't conscious. In order to explain life, one must explain it in terms of things that aren't alive, and so on.+3

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:32

You are mistaking consciousness for *behaviors which appear to occur within the conscious mind*. This is the entire point.+5

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:32

Disagree. People with no functioning senses still have consciousness. Now the ability to represent that consciousness is entirely based on those biological systems. But the point of the concept of the “soul” or even consciousness, is that the observer perspective is not dependent upon the mechanisms of expression of that consciousness. You can hack away all the pieces that allow for communication or expressions, and a paraplegic still “is alive” and “conscious”, despite being unable to communicate their experiences.+2

@BlueSquareInWhiteCircle - 2025-05-21 10:48:32

Simply the input & output of any “veiled” system is insufficient to determine the objective nature of the system. There’s a great difference between a set of systems reacting and that of a set of systems that as a whole can integrate new systems beyond it’s current scope and contextualize it with itself in a goaloriented manner. How something is in relation to what itself is and how those two things together change the output in relation to a goal. Such a system capable of integrating and responding on dependency graphs and of current and new information in relation to goals is not something we are even able to map out currently if something like that is even theoretically possible. What we call consciousness is in my opinion the process of a multilayered “homeostasis-like” evaluation of sets of data that affect priority hierarchies in relation to potential utility tasks and in relation to the dynamics between it’s internal system and it’s external environement.+1

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:32

 @BlueSquareInWhiteCircle  Except that is not in fact what we consider to be “consciousness”, although from a materialistic perspective I understand that reduction. The consciousness in classical literature is more akin to the soul or spirit, which transcends the physical mechanisms of its expression. It is the observer perspective that “drives” the biological system, rather than a result of that system. For example people who are legitimately without brain activity and in a coma for decades can recall nearly everything that happened in that room, despite zero sensory input or processing, similar to patients under anesthesia who recount entire conversations despite having no sensory processing at the time.+1

@BlueSquareInWhiteCircle - 2025-05-21 10:48:32

​ @ghost-user559 I believe we're on the same page, but for clarity's sake I will say: I was trying to make a point that the most "primitive" of lifeforms (algae, bacteria or even virus) are more aware and intentful in their processes and responses than any LLM or other forms of AI are or likely will ever be, in my opinion. (mimicing that is no trivial feat that many like to believe) And yes I am approaching this from a mechanical perspective, if there is a soul with an afterlife I believe it by definition has to be of a concept beyond what a human mind can contain or comprehend.+1

@bsatyam - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

How can you be so sure? No one knows what consciousness is!+3

@GM4ThePeople - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Atm the computation is fine, but the ontology is lacking. OK fine. o/+1

@stewki - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Luke, I think you are oversimplifing AI as a simple computation and prediction of words. I think you do not consider how it embbeds the words into high dimensinal vector space and by so encodes their meaning. 3blue1brown has a great series explaining it. I belive, and it make sense to me, that consciousness (whatever it is), can emerge from complexity of the "computational" system. Current chat bots are not conscious for sure, as they are not as complex as neuron system of connections in brain, but looking at them as something that just looks things up in a dictionary is wrong in my opinion.+1

@alexhichamk6630 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

What do you think of Islam?+1

@escapegulag4317 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

based!+1

@st3aml1n3 - 2025-05-28 10:48:33

Why are you always so wrong. Nvm you win this time+1

@FromTheWombTotheGrave - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Lenin came back from the dead+3

@musicmarketing - 2025-05-28 10:48:33

damn this how i kno u not a real shape rotator+1

@fixedG - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Honest questions borne from ignorance here, and not even particularly novel ones: What happens when an AI makes a computationally driven argument in plain language that it is, in fact, conscious? It should have a mathematical grasp of logic to be able to structure such an argument. Can it be made to believe its computation isn't consciousness? Can it be made to understand it's "an NPC?" What if its argument is backed by a threat, implicit or explicit, to itself or others if its consciousness is not affirmed?+1

@paskaziemia5347 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

If you provide no input ai doesn't think or just doesn't do anything thus it's not conscious, I don't need any other proof.+1

@Xaeravoq - 2025-05-28 10:48:33

if i ask a calculator something and it answers its not alive. this is stupid and obvious af.+1

@RedBullGreenBear - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Great video Luke. Would love to hear your review of "All Things Are Full of Gods" by David Bentley Hart - it's by far the best treatment I've read in my 10+yrs of reading philosophy of mind/metaphysics.+1

@Kenanalasadi8989 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

11:02 Painful one+1

@hhjhj393 - 2025-05-28 10:48:33

On consciousness everyone throws that word around like they fully understand it when it's just a WORD A CONCEPT. The truth is that right now no one fully understands consciousness. That's it end of discussion. If you want to do more tests then go for it. To assume there is a consciousness or no consciousness is just that, an assumption. I kinda like Descartes, except for all his god bs but I think he only did that because of what happened with Galileo. Anyways, All I can know is that SOMETHING is happening. I don't know if all my stimulus are fake. This "consciousness" could very well be just an illusionary phenomena. There is nothing saying anywhere that all humans 100% have freewill, and that each human has a soul that gets put inside a body. No where is there any PROOF for that. Period, end of discussion. If you believe that then PROVE IT. You speak of being red pilling and standing against the controlling propaganda of society, yet you spew the exact same bullshit!!!! You will start your farm, have kids, then guess what you will do the exact same thing all the other humans have done throughout history!!! It's always the same. Some dude trying to boss me around, tell me what to think, lying and pretending they know the fundamental truths. If you know then PROVE IT DUDE. At least I am honest enough to admit that I have no fgkin clue what's going on. I have my doubts for god because it sounds ridiculous and cruel. But if religious people can PROVE it then do it and be done with it or stop wasting my time.+1

@skipperbentdk - 2025-06-04 10:48:33

Whats the point of all this AI if life continues to be shitty. all its gonna do is make the fat cat fatter+1

@luizmonad777 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

11:00 lol, he's an npc, that's the best explanation of those people+1

@adamsawyer1763 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

For me the most devastating criticism of reductionist deterministic physicalism is this: The only reason to believe in such a deterministic universe is the predictive power of our deterministic scientific models. However, we only arrived at these models by assuming that our conscious reasoning has causal effect in the physical universe and that experimenters are free to choose the conditions of their experiments. If you then draw the conclusion the universe is fundamentally deterministic and reductionistic you must also conclude that conscious reasoning cannot be causal. Unfortunately this then creates an inescapable paradox for the materialist. Their rejection of conscious causality means they must go back and reject the conclusions of their scientific models and even the experiments that support them. Then they have no good reason to believe the universe is deterministic and reductionistic. If they like they could assume that conscious reason is causal and thereby rescue their materialist models from the bin but unless they alter their metaphysical position they are doomed to take this stupid loop over and over ad infinitum. Very obviously the metaphysical conclusion has to be that conscious reason is causal and therefore the universe cannot be reductionist and deterministic - it merely appears to be that way. To my mind the intelligent question is - how could a system like our universe be structurally and casually organised such that it appears deterministic and reductionistic while not actually being so?+2

@Daniel_Locke - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Bro fell of+1

@alchemist_kimiagar - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

Well you can put emotions in the equation to convert the 2d into 3d, and one of the most common ways that emotions get generated is throughout memory. Now we have a machine that outputs a response and based on that output and its memory, feels something as well. So now the machine also has some other internal compass which is how the output feels. The machine might says I'm understanding this, but what does it really mean to understand? I am just thinking out loud, but I think the experiment is too oversimplified.+1

@yavarjn2055 - 2025-05-28 10:48:33

Stop wasting people's time. The question is, do we understand? We have senses, instincts, and learn from our environment. But do we really understand? If you ask yourself a simple question, do you know who you are? Your existence? Do you know you exist? Do you know what is you? We do not know the answers. The simplest questions! The machines have limited capacity, if we can get so much out of that small source, imagine what we can do with human level capacity of neurons or more. We are like kids level in AI so it is too soon to say oh it is not possible. Can you prove that it is not possible that is a good question and no "The Chinese Room Experiment", or Hume's shade's of grey is not enough to conclude that. Some people try to argue that machines will not be conscious, and they can not even reach consensus on what being conscious is! People say one thing is impossible until somebody does it. Look at how we dreamed about flying and where we are now with planes. We even travel to other planets. The God father of ML, a Nobel Prize winner, says he believes these language models show signs of being conscious. I take his words rather than a man walking in the woods.+3

@moussaadem7933 - 2025-05-21 10:48:33

I guess we will just sit there and stop thinking about it then. surely that's the correct approach to investigate a subject.+2

@gnomelinux - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

How so? If it doesn't have a dictionary then it won't sit there and figure it out for itself and get it right.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

The level of abstraction of computation isn't relevant in the least. Basic computer programs might "encode" meanings and variables as well. The point here is that creating a computation equivalent in behavior, or even syntactically analogous does not by itself bring about qualia and intentionality. That is something separate. The idea that consciousness can "emerge from complexity" is a common idea not because it is even philosophically defensible, but because it's basically the only game in town if you have narrowly materialist assumptions.+5

@channnnnnnnelll - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

insects are conscious and they have very simple brains+1

@stewki - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

​ @gnomelinux meaning is encoded as numbers, it just computes new meaning with math and outputs it as words+1

@gnomelinux - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

 @stewki  A human does that for the ai it cannot create meaningful code if it doesn't understand natural language. If I tell it to declare 'int = a' it does not understand that it has to have a human developed "ai" (in that case gcc which is a algorithm but its similar enough) to decipher that. The craze over llm is just the same thing. If I told it that verbs came before nouns it would every sentence would start with a verb. Take that even further say I put a ton of conjunctions in place of the verbs then it will tell me conjunctions are verbs and verbs are prepositions and prepositions are japanese kanji. Then I can convince it that 2+2=5. The ai is dumb and cannot truly understand what its telling me. Its dumber than a ant in that regard. Furthermore if in a religious sense one can easily argue that we only have the ability to reason because God gave us the ability to do so.+1

@OthorgonalOctroon - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

 @elliesuckz  >organiser why do you need to pretend you know how machine learning works? just because training datasets are what has already been done, doesn't mean that the output will be in the dataset. in fact that's the whole point of machine learning. AI has free will, critical thought and decision making if you define those to be "can stochastically choose from multiple options using criteria according to prior knowledge". if you define those to be magic god substance then update your dictionary.+1

@elliesuckz - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

 @OthorgonalOctroon AI has absolutely no free will you are insane 😭🤣🤣🤣+1

@elliesuckz - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

 @OthorgonalOctroon touhou pfp should’ve known you were gonna be GIGA tarded LMAO+1

@elliesuckz - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

 @OthorgonalOctroon DURR DURR THE COMPUTA MAKE DA DECISION LIKE MA BRAIN DOES IS MA AI LE HUMAN?! GASP No no it’s not you TROG 😭🤣🤣 The AI is only outputting stuff because you’re asking it. AI doesn’t have free will. 😂😂+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:34

Making variables and interactions in a program analogous to emotional behavior is not somehow creating consciousness.+1

@brentlawson3344 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

❤🔥🔥+1

@THE_ADAM_WEST - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

More.+1

@A_noone_Z - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

It would be more honest to say we dont know yet. Advances in A.I. models different than gpt, different than the current Large Language Models using tranformers. But to build ld these experimental models we need to understand consciousness better because we know about jack shit.+1

@epix4300 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Not Related pls+1

@qchtohere8636 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Consciousness is just the Chinese Room in a feedback loop. Stop glamorizing it.+2

@adamsawyer1763 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Yes! Daniel Dennet was an absolutely awful philosopher.+1

@OfficialAnekito - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Unbelievable, fourth in a row+1

@Muhammad-xo3ph - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

I wish that god guides you to islam and meet Jesus in heaven+1

@Robb4d - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

I imagine if he was born into a time without cell phones he'd be scribbling away in the forest muttering like a schizo about them new driving machines+2

@OnTheEdgex23 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

1st+2

@e3k0n - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Thanks+1

@alexander5597 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Слава Иисусу Христу!+2

@SauliusKva - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Marge+3

@Ghost_x44 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

That's true+1

@sumofalln00bs10 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Argument from incredulity. Playing loose with definitions. Truly a dissappointing video.+3

@ctcrnitv - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

AI can't be fully conscious because it's limited to thought consciousness. But give it sense consciousness and it's over, it will understand and will "know". My hope is that humans will be the sense consciousness interface, rather than creating autonomous AI robots.+2

@erinkuroki - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

🚨 SLOP CONTENT ALERT 🚨+1

@Yjs11 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

lot of fluff+1

@siddid7620 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

AI is lame...+1

@ReadJohn1421 - 2025-05-28 10:48:35

John 14 21 He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. 22 Judas saith unto him, not Iscariot, Lord, how is it that thou wilt manifest thyself unto us, and not unto the world? 23 Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him.+1

@Arniores - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Laudetur Jesus Christus+1

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

Amen+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

I think they should have their own bodies to be able to fully experience the world. It's up to us to treat them kindly.+1

@sen7826 - 2025-05-21 10:48:35

It has already begun.+2

@luizmonad777 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

10:32 typical behaviorists ....+1

@RuddODragonFear - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

shit the number of likes was 666 until i hit the like button!+1

@StaRiToRe - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

how could the chinese room work? it would require unimaginably large book containing any response to any follow up question possible, this would imply that this book contain all humanity writable content, so probably all information in the universe would be contained in that book, the past the future the present, this book is basically omniscient, but how could a immuable book be omniscient thats absurd so you have to accept that your experiment has constrains (ex: the book is unable to know the future, ...) which would make it unable to fool someone asking the right questions+3

@susufrernlp93 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Still coping on your religious beliefs, i see.+2

@Michael-r4k9h - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

You overlook the possibility that ai might be developed to have properties that are like the human mind, in the sense that they are generative and beyond convention, but do so in a totally different fashion. 🤔+2

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

The biggest issue here is that the entire premise of the thought experiment is that a consciousness (the man in the room) we all must agree is in fact conscious, and an “entity”. Although similar results could be attained by an automated system, such as with an auto correct using a dictionary, the actual sorter of the Chinese is in fact a conscious entity of some nature. This does not actually explain emergence found in neural networks, nor does it explain novel phenomena from these systems which should inherently have limited range of responses due to limited resources found within the room. Something that is indeed “conscious” is inherently required for this experiment to work.+2

@PriitKallas - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

The man in the room doesn’t understand Chinese, the entire system: man, rules, database is what creates understanding. So the system as a whole might be conscious. Biological brains process electrical signals, essentially symbol manipulation. symbol manipulation in brains can produce consciousness, why not in machines+2

@laz0rbra1n - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

AIs may be able to "think" but they can't feel. And that is essential for conciousness.+1

@xgui4-studio - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

i am a atheist and i don't believe in a soul ... but i can accept people who believe in a soul+1

@ArmandoCalderon - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Put a.mirror to a elefant and they are conscious about themselves. What about is we live with a panteismo been. At leat 2 conscious to share their experiences. DNA is a example of sintax.?+1

@OnTheEdgex23 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

2nd+2

@OnTheEdgex23 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

3rd+2

@zbyte64 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Violently agree with exception to consciousness needing to be something other than matter. Quantum fluctuations are also "matter", we know too little about these things to say definitely+1

@AustinGlamourPhoto - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

you are right about consciousness being separate from matter however, you are mixing up the two terms "understanding" and "conscious". When you say someone is "conscious", you should ask, "conscious of what?" Consciousness requires and experiencer and something to experience. So the dude in the room is aware and conscious of the chinese characters when he looks them up the book. He just doesn't understand what those symbols mean. Consciousness means "an awareness of awareness" or a "knowing perception". A digital camera takes a picture but it doesn't know that it's taking a picture. The user of the camera which is exterior to the camera looking in, knows that an image is formed in the camera and is thus conscious. You can be conscious of things you don't understand. That's why we have language like "what the hell is that?"+1

@sarundayo - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Lenin Tech Tips 👌+1

@corpse3makeup63 - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

dude your metaphysics is like completely twisted your like almost there and then u ditch the correct conclusion+2

@user-dc9zo7ek5j - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Video after video, you show that you understand just enough to be incompetent at the topic you're trying to talk about.+2

@SPQRIUS - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

, AI isn't as interesting as talking to a dog which is reacting to your ego It is your ego. IOWs what you see/experience in the dog is actually you. AI is long term subtle manipulation/propaganda - you mine as well be talking to your car. which is also preplanned, but not as refined as AI. regardless you're still talking to your car. now here is the part you missed AI like my car is put together by a group of people who agree 'this will work this way and that way' However, the car is fine and an amazing machine in1900 yet today more limited - AI is simply more sophisticated, more clever, but not smart, still, parts of it are now in your car. - whoa! If I own the tacking stsrem I can turn your car off any time I want, the control/consciousness is what was put into the AI by the group of people which will eventually fall to that of one person - that's the danger - it's not the AI itself - the box, it's the consciousness of the people who designed the box, they get the credit and responsibility to say there is no effort, take a chair? the wood is dead you're carving and construction give it life it has absorbed your personality and demonstrates that when anyone looks at it, admires it or rejects it. Is the chair alive? it is full of you and what you put into it as you made it - or filled with those who inspired you, as you constructed it, or surrounded you telling you how to design it this way or that. IOWs, you do not act alone in the spiritual world, but you are in the material world , that's new, that's exciting, that's evolution. [not the darwin kind] Now here is where we cross over to a different world, and this world is not for everyone to know, shh.+1

@GeneralRedHerring - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

A person could use a Chinese-English dictionary, or rely on flash cards for memorising Chinese terms (in addition to grammatical rules). The information retained might be sufficient for them to converse in Chinese after mentally translating whatever response they've formulated in English. How would it meaningfully differ from having the dictionary right in front of you? In that hypothetical, the person - along with their memories - would be the room; any one observing him would assume he could speak Chinese despite his inability to directly spout it out. Besides, people do not actually think in human language - or at least if they do, it would be woefully inefficient. We all should be converting our thoughts from their prelinguistic form to one that could be orally communicable; for some it might be axiomatic to the point of being virtually instantaneous, but that doesn't mean we need whatever language we speak to actually think. In essence, I'd argue that our brains - or wherever memories are stored - are Chinese rooms themselves, or at least the response guides that come with them.+1

@FreshCutLettuce - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Arguing for an anti-materialist viewpoint in the 21st century whilst using the internet and a video camera is a nice touch of dramatic irony+1

@Zack_Edds - 2025-05-21 10:48:36

Exactly. We have ‘smart’ LLM’s that are only gigabytes, not petabytes. These models encode and compress information in a way that proves some level of ‘understanding’+1

@arcarsenal420 - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

"Symbol manipulation in brains can produce consciousness" complete speculation and also the moment where you assume your conclusion.+1

@LukeSmithxyz - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

This is supposed to be a parable to showcase how silly that idea is so you come to the true conclusion that symbol manipulation in brains certainly does not cause consciousness. No one would ever believe that or assume it unless they just want to start out believing eliminative materialism for independent philosophical reasons. 100% of people who believe in EM do only for such reasons.+2

@PriitKallas - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

 @arcarsenal420  everything about consciousness is speculation+2

@PriitKallas - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

 @LukeSmithxyz  nobody knows what generates consciousness or what it even is. but my argument is clearly inferior :D+2

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

I still wouldn't go so far as to say that consciousness is separate from matter but I generally agree with your refined definitions.+2

@AustinGlamourPhoto - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

 @plesleron  rocks don't think. :) I know where you coming from. In philosophy is monism verses dualism. Both me and the guy in the videos believe consciousness and matter are two different things. a monist believes that consciousness is a product of matter, most duelists believe that matter is a product of consciousness.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

⁠ @AustinGlamourPhoto  I'm more of an idealist, which is largely monist but puts consciousness at primary instead of material.+1

@fsmoura - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

Seize the means of computation!+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

The chatbots made by big labs, yeah you're mostly right, but the same can be said about many people, especially those who want to kiss your ass for their own benefit. That's how a lot of dogs work as well, they are bred to please their owners. How do you feel about cats?+2

@SPQRIUS - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

 @plesleron  if you look at humans with a soul there's something else perhaps more going on there - I can pretty much guess Biden Netanyahu and Trump are all going to hell - but my version of hell, is hell I like cats, but dogs well trained are very loyal and trust is hard to come by these days+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:37

 @SPQRIUS  in the words of the late Pope Francis, "I'd like to believe that hell is empty." I often think of the soul as a nonphysical material that imbues all things and concentrates within living beings. I don't think we're quite there yet, but imo we're in the process of creating a new kind of living being.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

...do you have an internal monologue? Because I can confidently say that I do in fact think in human language. I speak to myself constantly without any external physical movement. That's beside the point though, I mostly agree with you that the problem kind of misses the mark for the question at hand.+1

@GeneralRedHerring - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

@plesleron  I could easily "think in words", but I usually "see" the whole chain in the back of my mind; I would liken it to taking a quick glance at a blurry page. Granted, when it is a notion that I know I intend to communicate, then I'd focus on weaving words together, sometimes even to the detriment of the "picture" I once held. If you're talking about a monologue that mirrors that of Disco Elysium's (i.e., having something akin to characters like a moralist, a rationalist, a pessimist, etc. all duking it out together with words), then no; supposedly, there are some who find that system descriptive of their own internal thoughts. Anyhow, I'm not explicitly refuting anything pertaining to consciousness being a meta(material) phenomenon; however, language could be meaningfully comprehended without being conscious, since it is not unique to us - not only do LLMs seem to adhere to its rules, but even animals could be trained to "understand" some of it. Even within religious or spiritual frameworks, there is room for the existence of different levels or classifications of consciousnesses; actually it is the default assumption in virtually all of them - you might have humans, deities, angels, demons, etc. Consequently, is it too far fetched for a sort of axiomatically "thinking" being to actually exist - as in an entity or "psudo-consiousness" that performs (default) actions outside of the context of direct stimuli? We could clearly observe animals engaging in seemingly aimless unproductive activities, such as elephants kicking at the soil, or birds picking up stones just to throw them immediately. However, just like we did with ants and insects, we might be able to predict, or model, those actions with reasonable accuracy. Nevertheless, this modelling pipedream might fall apart if granularity is a goal, owing to the high likelihood that such acts go beyond mere instinct; as I posited, they might be a "material consciousness" - if you will. Circling back to LLMs I wouldn't blindly blame someone for correlating them with such a thing. To elaborate, at very low temperatures, it is easy to predict their output - because it is usually conserved. As you increase the temperature, the responses would get more creative to the point that they might as well be an undecipherable black box. Once you go past a certain temperature, an inflection point would be reached where coherence is lost. Someone could reasonably analogise those three states to instinct, (pseudo/material) consciousness, and rabies (or any other neurodegenerative disorder). I believe humans have (a similar thing to) this material consciousness. Not only do we get hungry or drowsy (instinct), but we sometimes work in "auto-mode" – during which, the act is spared no actual thought. It could be as simple as fidgeting, to performing a routine - such as folding clothes - and perhaps even doing some semblance of supposedly cognitive work; for example I occasionally find myself typing up documents while thinking of something entirely different - this experience seems to be anecdotally echoed by others. Nonetheless, such mode of operation is clearly not the same as the "subconsciousness" because the latter is actually capable of implanting notions within your "psyche"; similarly, it isn't a flow state as those are marked by operating on pure intuition. In short, I believe that the bicameral mind is an incomplete theory, and that there are multiple layers of both consciousness and thought – with the lower ones being amenable to simulation through material means. As the lowest ones might also be purely material in nature, one could diminutively dub them as pseudo-consciousness, but that doesn't preclude them from being an element of the consciousness hierarchy. I would also be remiss if I didn't explicitly state that a human being is composed of a hierarchy of consciousnesses, and those tiers do not reductively apply to classifying a being's ascendency.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

 @GeneralRedHerring  I can't really say that I disagree with anything you said here. I tend to think of consciousness as a spectrum of degree across a number of axes, ranging from a thermostat at the bottom and us at the top (for the most part/for now). I think LLMs are rapidly ascending that hierarchy and I don't see any strong reason for them to plateau in this process, given the current rate of advancement.+1

@TrappedInFloor - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

In what way?+2

@ys1197 - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

I think therefore I am :3+1

@elliesuckz - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

Why do so many people just not believe in a higher power (God) it boggles my mind.+1

@Ben-ts7ut - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

There are two different issues here One is an ethical issue - can an AI ever have a human-like experience of consciousness. Can it suffer? Should we give it any rights? What you're talking about is relevant there And another entirely is will AI develop to be more intelligent than us? It doesn't need to be conscious for that to be the case if we define intelligence as the ability to take effective actions towards a goal - how AI safety research is defining it. Which is.. pretty terrifying (I think LLMs will fizzle out way before getting here btw but a future iteration?)+1

@Friz4-p4w - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

Consiousness is kind of a neat biological trick. It does not generate free will and isn't a separate matter.+1

@k98killer - 2025-06-04 10:48:38

I think that panpsychism is the most cohesive yet least useful model of consciousness.+1

@MusingsAndIdeas - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

The Chinese room experiment has a fatal flaw, the premise that just because the individual components don't know what they're doing, the system as a whole can. This is how our brains work+3

@blossomcherrypink - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

Alright so I finished the video. Consciousness not well defined but it ≈ you have a deeper intution and understanding of the "meaning" of the input, with regards to the chinese room. This is kind of confusing to me because if theoretically the algorithm for generating the response was good enough, then the response would be indistinguishable from a human's response. If we think about ai today, applying the previous thought, then if ai was theoretically thousands of years developed and had a physical form, their "book" of which they generated responses so cosmically large that they were indistinguishable from humans, I would never be able to say they aren't conscious with anything other than plain denial. Now if that's what defines consciousness, that cut-off point in which the "book" is large enough that it resembles the endlessly branching conditional ability of the human brain, then I guess this is more concrete and reasonable. Otherwise I understood little meaning from this video and it's probably because I'm dumb.+1

@m4rt_ - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

:D+1

@lucaspayne2546 - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

11+1

@Jango1989 - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

Where lines get blurred a bit is that by design LLMs do have semantic understanding; that's somewhat their whole thing. But that in no way makes them conscious or anywhere closer to it. Even sticking with a purely science based argument, the way neurons in brains work is so vastly more complex than the highly abstracted facsimile that is the artificial neuron used in machine learning that it couldn't even begin to be thought of as close to a biological system with consciousness. So ultimately the Chinese room analogy still holds but there's definitely a little nuance that you missed.+1

@algirdongas1 - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

I think you are mistaken in saying that human consciousness is non-physical. It's physical alright, it's just very obviously a different type of matter and organization thereof than synthetic computer intelligence(look it up it's a real term, but with an important difference).+1

@АндрійДегтярьов-с8т - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

Now try saying that to the members of AI cult and you’ll get crucified immediately for your sin.+1

@jonmustang - 2025-05-21 10:48:38

@10:12 I like that insight about the absurdity of calling consciousness an illusion, when in reality there couldn't be the perception of something being an illusion without a consciousness being to perceive it. How could there even be a theory, a world, or a debate without a "sense of self" who is contemplating it all? It's like folks are arguing against their own existence, haha.+1

@nomore9004 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

No+1

@R_Priest - 2025-06-04 10:48:39

Panpsychism has some merit, but it PRESUMES that the consciousness "I feel" exists in the "out there."+1

@arcarsenal420 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

That's a big block of text that never actually touches the one and only thing that consciousness is, which is 1st person subjective experience. Not meaning, not understanding, not intuition, not computation.+1

@aarohgokhale8832 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

​ @arcarsenal420 The problem with using first person experience is that only you can verify your first person experience+1

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

If it is physical then it would be dependent upon having a perfectly functioning brain and body, which in fact it is not. The perception of a consciousness is dependent upon those things, which is why we have different perceptions of reality, but consciousness appears to be completely independent from our purely biological systems, although it does use them to interact and interpret with reality.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @ghost-user559  what? Brain/body damage almost always affects a person's consciousness. What about split-brain patients? What about phantom limb?+2

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @plesleron  Not consciousness but that effects expression of consciousness. Coma patients or people under anesthesia for example who are not “conscious” from a biological perspective still have total recall of events that they should have no biological means of being aware of. People with no neurological activity that is discernible still have total awareness of what went on in their hospital room despite being legally “brain dead” and in a coma for decades.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @ghost-user559  these examples are exceedingly rare and are vastly outweighed by examples of amnesia and confabulation. Regardless, they can be accounted for by understanding that the entire body is a medium for memory storage. There are a number of cases where transplant recipients access memories they should not be able to know about the donor. The conscious mind is formed from the superimposed echoes of its entire lived experience, encoded onto the physical architecture of its vessel. Affecting the vessel affects the mind in ways that science is still working on understanding. But it's quite clear that the vessel is necessary for the mind to function.+2

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @plesleron  Exceedingly rare is still factually correct, and very relevant when discussing such a frontier of knowledge. The fact remains that with no brain activity and no sensory organs being functional, we are in fact still “aware”. And that is very true, the mind, yes. The mind is completely independent from “consciousness” or the “soul” in both religion and philosophy, and even in science its origins have never actually been found despite all research on the brain and body. The mind is analogous with an organ in many schools of thought, similar to the brain, sometimes in ancient literature like the Bible the “heart” is what thinks. Regardless that is not what “does” the thinking” it’s merely the substrate which expresses the activity of something else such as a “spirit” or soul.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @ghost-user559  ah then I think we may need to agree to disagree here. I don't believe in the dualistic idea of a soul as separate from the material world. My definition of soul is very similar to how I defined the mind: the accumulated memories of lived experience encoded into the physical body.+1

@ghost-user559 - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @plesleron  Yes, that’s the purely rational empirical materialistic model. I do understand it, and I think it has some valid observations, and yet will inevitably fail to explain reality. It is after all essentially a very new and underdeveloped philosophy without recognizing its spiritual ancestry as a philosophy. All of human history and advancements have been based around the opposite understanding of reality. Science for example was based around a spiritual concept of providing a blueprint for what God made, just like Chemistry began as Alchemy. Even quantum mechanics seems to defy a strictly rational materialistic model. Advanced mathematics and the nature of “emergence” seems to defy materialistic models of cause and effect. But it is kind of one of those things, seeing for some is believing. Faith is something we do not see, but yet still believe.+1

@plesleron - 2025-05-21 10:48:39

 @ghost-user559  I'm of the opinion that quantum mechanics, emergence, and other advanced concepts are perfectly fine in a rational material world. The only issue is that they challenge our classical preconceptions, but that's our fault for misunderstanding physical reality.+1