Artificial-intelligence systems such as large language models (LLMs) can exhibit behaviour that seems strikingly intelligent. This has led many people, including some experts, to wonder whether these systems could have some form of consciousness — the capacity for subjective experience. However, we think that existing AI systems are not conscious, and that, along current trajectories of development, they are not likely to become conscious. Greater clarity about whether AI could become consciousness will be crucial as society grapples with the challenges posed by this increasingly powerful technology.
The contradiction claim was wrong. You can examine literal meaning and social usage without contradicting yourself. I withdrew that objection.
Regardless
You attributed that position to me immediately after quoting my explicit statement that nothing I’d argued required consciousness to be nonphysical. Distinguishing a rock undergoing erosion from someone feeling pain does not place either event outside physics. My point was that undergoing a physical change is not, by itself, the same as feeling something. You turned that into a denial that feelings are physical, then mocked the position you’d supplied.
Your earlier “Experience is not subjective. It is contextual” doesn’t establish an incompatibility, either. I’m using “subjective” to describe experience as felt by the subject—not a supernatural property. Explaining how perception depends on someone’s body, memories and circumstances is compatible with that description. Rejecting a nonphysical explanation doesn’t rebut a position that never required one.
Your answer stipulated a person and described the harmful stimulus as pain. But building pain into the premise doesn’t establish when detecting harmful input amounts to feeling pain. The International Association for the Study of Pain explicitly states:
Nociception is the nervous system’s encoding of potentially damaging stimuli. Distinguishing that from pain doesn’t disprove a physical account of consciousness, but it shows that the distinction I raised has a concrete scientific use. Saying both are physical does not make them interchangeable; saying pain is physical does not identify which physical processes constitute it.
Then there’s your claim that I said:
That was your characterization of my question about whether a verbal-report test actually identifies experience. The passage you quoted asks whether that connection is established—not whether establishing it is impossible. Asking how to validate a proposed test is not backpedalling from a definition. Nor does saying something isn’t directly observable rule out indirect evidence. You inserted permanent impossibility into an open question, then ridiculed me for it.
Your valid criticism deserved a concession, and got one. It does not make those other attributions accurate. Calling me a “subhuman bug” isn’t what makes them wrong; the passages above are.
For all the lectures about straw men, you’ve supplied several of your own: for two, a nonphysical position I expressly rejected and an impossibility claim I never made. I’ve corrected my bad argument. Your contempt is not a substitute for correcting yours.
Shame, I don’t seem to mind.