maebert

Start with a hand-wavy definition of consciousness. Move the goal post whenever your stated prerequisite of consciousness is reached and resort to unfalsifiable assertions about qualia.

And throw in some category errors while on it: when you're talking to Claude, you're not actually calling a stateless LLM directly, you're talking to an AI system (and yes, that's often just three LLMs in a trench coat). But claims about the topology and workings of a single LLM are as relevant to the question of consciousness as claiming that humans can't be conscious because the limbic system doesn't technically support it.

Basically there are neurons whose receptive field (ie the subset of the outside world that causes the neuron to fire) is "everything a monkey can reach". Flash a light in that area, that neuron fires, flash it beyond that area, neuron stays silent.

Now if you give the monkey a rake, the neuron's receptive field immediately grows to encompass the space it can now reach with the rake too: the rake becomes part of the body schema, not part of the outside world [2].

But if the rake instead is just a stick but it controls a mouse cursor on the screen, the _area of the screen_ the monkey can interact with with the cursor becomes part of the receptive field of that neuron too. That suggests that the cursor itself becomes part of the body schema.

TL;DR don't mess with people's mouse cursors, it's like cutting their limbs off.

I'm Manu, founder of Hyperspell. 14 Years ago I found my first job in tech through Who's Hiring. I take this job board seriously :)

Hyperspell is building Context & Memory for AI agents. We're at the intersection of "future of AI and agentic computing" and "this actually works". We're not just changing how our customers use AI in their products, but are constantly iterating on how we use AI to build Hyperspell, and what it means to be a software company in the decades to come.