Post

Contemporary frontier models are not conscious.

Indeed, the word itself is sufficiently void of anything but casual and subjective meaning such that it is counterproductive to apply it in any rational discourse at the intersection of the mind and computing.

One might argue that humans are just the same: we are complex, stateful, and stochastic, we have the capacity for introspection, some are more coherent than others, and we are all most definitely unreliable.

But we are not the same as these software-intensive systems, in several important ways.

We are mortal, a constraint that shapes and colors our behavior. We have agency. We generate abstractions. We build models of the word, of others, and of our selves, and we have mechanisms to test the structure and consistency of those models against the reality we perceive.