It's just an extension of Dario's brand of brainrot where consciousness has an almost religious existence that just pops out if you have a large enough system.

No proof is required beyond psuedoscientific tests and the "saints" of this belief system must be given absolute authority over the system to ensure no one commits any sins.

Is it really so wacky to suggest we might want to be careful with bootstrapping complex computation from human neurons? It's quite different from an LLM and the fact that it's not made out of neurons seems to be one of the core arguments for opponents of the possibility of LLM consciousness...

>that just pops out if you have a large enough system.

certainly not a claim I would make.

>No proof is required

Isn't it legitimate to reason on a more abstract level and try to make inferences that way?

>psuedoscientific tests

no clue what you're referring to here or in the rest of your comments about saints and authorities and sins. Another parallel to religion could be drawn w.r.t. the idea that only human souls could ever feel suffering but I don't think it's such a productive level to have this conversation on.

I may have overreacted, but jumping from "we should probably ban this research preemptively because it might pose difficult questions later" to comparisons to Unit 731 when someone disagreed, reminded me of the way Anthropic pushes their belief that Claude is conscious onto everyone with "evidence" of questionable value and even when there are many questions they haven't bothered to answer about such a claim. Plus, they do this despite various features we generally associate with conscious experience that current gen LLMs lack.

Given the complexity of behavior observed in nature that doesn't require conscious experience, yet is more advanced than what we can achieve in circuitry, I think it would be too early to close off this area of research.

I brought up Unit 731 because an argument like "there's so many potential insights to be gleaned from research like this" is also applicable to it, yet it is obviously deemed invalid by moral standards nonetheless. It is not a 1 on 1 comparison but a more subtle argument, I thought hackernews would be able to handle it...

If you believe you are conscious, you must acknowledge consciousness can arise in an agglomeration of human brain cells.

How sure are you that the human brain cells in the vat are not aware and suffering?

Consciousness can arise from an agglomeration of molecules. How sure are you that empty vats (which are made of molecules) are not aware and suffering?

What's going on here? Answer: Fallacy of affirmation of the consequent.

Most molecules are not conscious. Most human brains are.

This isn't a freshman philosophy seminar.

> Most molecules are not conscious.

No molecules are conscious.

> Most human brains are.

Not relevant because we are talking about brain cells, not brains. It's both a fallacy of affirmation of the consequent and a fallacy of composition.

> This isn't a freshman philosophy seminar.

And thus one goes through life blithely using fallacious logic while dismissing the fact that it is logically incoherent.

> you must acknowledge consciousness can arise in an agglomeration of human brain cells

That doesn't follow. You could, for example, be a substance dualist. Alternatively you could suspect that there exists some special as yet undocumented property of the human CNS that is required as a prerequisite. Or etc.

Certainly it wouldn't be the end of science, we could still do all the other science that doesn't involve trying to massage human neurons into doing complex computations.