Day 1 of #MoC7 is complete! Highlights: Nobel laureate John O’Keefe on the hippocampus and consciousness, @meganakpeters.bsky.social on identifying consciousness in humans & beyond, and Robert Sunderland on Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen spirit, which we aim to bring to consciousness science!

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Consciousness: famously one of the hardest things to understand & explain. It fascinates me that so many random ̶I̶T̶ ̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶s̶ people share their complex personal theories here, & that they’re so certain. Also that they respond to experts with the most amazing technical-sounding language. Like poetry.

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Mind you, it doesn’t follow from the fact that consciousness is hard to understand that there’s deep uncertainty about whether LLMs are conscious. You don’t have to fully understand minds to scoff at conscious chatbots. Same deal that plant sentience.

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This "assert claims without testing hypotheses" routine from LLM researchers/ developers is a critical departure from scientific process. Hypothesis testing doesn't seem to occur to them.

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They do seem quite unhinged. But they only seem unhinged in ways that are good for pleasing investors, which seems like too much of a coincidence.

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