alt.hn

7/2/2026 at 2:44:36 AM

Why I Don't Believe in Machine Consciousness – Jaron Lanier

 https://www.jaronlanier.com/1000words.html

by andsoitis

7/2/2026 at 4:39:58 PM

I do not believe that the current machines are conscious, but cannot categorically deny the possibility.

The author’s take on the Turing Test is a common misconception - Turing did not propose that the machine fool a human into believing that it was human, but rather that the machine fool a man into believing that it was a woman.

The author’s reference to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Turing’s Halting Problem are also misguided: humans are in no way immune from such logical traps (“will your answer to this question be negative?“)

by stevenalowe

7/2/2026 at 6:08:30 PM

There is also a problem with making a distinction between machines or programs becoming sentient versus human-like consciousness, both of which are highly unlikely for LLMs.

Without human-like bodies, it is even more doubtful that human-like consciousness is possible. On the question of sentience, for a machine, maybe that will be possible in the future. That will more likely be because we have greater knowledge and more details about how the brain operates, leading to closer and more accurate digital copies.

by baranul

7/2/2026 at 7:42:11 PM

Yes-ish? I don’t see the distinction between consciousness and sentience

by stevenalowe

7/2/2026 at 3:35:49 AM

There are theoretical limits on one program's ability to fully analyze another that make this so. People can nonetheless recognize and use computers, so therefore people cannot be in the same ontological category as computers.

This argument seems flawed to me. Even if there are theoretical limits to how fully a computer program can analyze another, it does not immediately follow that this means a computer program is incapable of determining if another computer program is in fact a program running on a computer.

I don't need to fully understand all the ins and outs of the Linux source code to determine it's code, and that the code runs on a computer. I don't see why that would be different for a program.

Am I missing something?

by magicalhippo

7/2/2026 at 3:03:35 AM

Always a moment when you find yourself agreeing with the sentiment and outcome of a public intellectual despite reading inordinate amounts of contextual vituperation about said public intellectual from professional historians regarding his writing.

Despite wanting to say "stopped clock wrong twice a day" I think he's right to conclusions. I might differ to reasons because my principle position is the lack of induction, and therefore inductive reasoning. Self recognition wasn't high on my list of reasons but I may reconsider.

Also, like lots of autodidacts out of his field, he overrated the Turing test. It's a thought experiment, its not real. We don't lock Chinese philosophers in caves Jared.

by ggm