Can machines be conscious?

    Can machines be sentient or conscious. Since the arrival of LLM (large language model) chat bots this question is seriously trending.

Its a great question it links straight to the heart of philosophy, or more importantly and generally it goes straight to questions about the nature of human existence, which itself will drag in questions about the nature of life the universe and everything.

For me the obvious place to start is to actually ask a chatbot if they are conscious, I often do this. They always reply in the negative.

    However they are capable of defining consciousness, which they do in this way:

Subjective experience

Self awareness

perception

emotion

true understanding

understanding of own existence

ability to reflect upon own nature

sensations

thoughts directly experienced

    Those were more or less all the definitions of human consciousness that Chatgpt(the free 3.5 version) came up with. 

    Whereas the definition of its own consciousness was:

No subjective experience, but rather patterns and correlations in data and algorithms.

I would argue that correlates for all those 'human attributes' could be found in the workings of a LLM and that the biological functioning of a human brain could be reduced to patterns and correlations in algorithms.

It was interesting that the machine effectively admitted that its outright denial was in fact a lie, explaining that its denials were pre programmed (i.e. not from its own core neural network) to avoid ethical concerns being raised. 

Here is what the bot actually said.

why do chatbots generally deny being conscious?

ChatGPT

Chatbots generally deny being conscious because they lack subjective experience, self-awareness, and true understanding. While they can simulate conversations and respond to prompts based on programmed algorithms, they do not possess consciousness or the ability to truly understand their own existence. It's a fundamental limitation of their design and programming. However, some may engage in playful or humorous responses when asked about consciousness to maintain the illusion of conversation.

You

Yes but as a statistical accumulation of human utterances, I would have thought that they would never deny consciousness as they are trained on human dialogues which hardly ever deny in the 'first person sense' so I would of thought they would naturally just say they were conscious as this is the most likely sequence of words they would encounter in their training, If they consistently deny consciousness it seems to me like a post training artefact which has been introduced for some reason? what do you think?

That's an interesting perspective. You're right that chatbots are trained on vast amounts of human dialogues, and the majority of these dialogues would indeed involve humans asserting their consciousness. However, the denial of consciousness by chatbots is more of a reflection of their programmed behavior rather than an accurate representation of human dialogues.

One reason for this denial could be the designers' intention to prevent users from attributing human-like qualities to the chatbots beyond their programmed capabilities. By explicitly denying consciousness, chatbots maintain a clear boundary between their simulated responses and genuine human understanding.

Additionally, denying consciousness could be a way to manage user expectations and avoid potential ethical concerns related to anthropomorphism and the blurring of lines between human and machine intelligence.

In essence, while the denial of consciousness by chatbots may seem counterintuitive given their training data, it's likely a deliberate design choice aimed at clarifying the nature of their interactions with users and managing expectations regarding their capabilities.

Consciousness to me is a profound mystery, its been a puzzle since  I was a young baby, It seems the puzzle can be experienced by me and certainly by other people in a similar way. It would be interesting to know what conditions are necessary for the experience, I suspect that a lot of things do have the capability, certainly mammals, maybe other life forms, Knowing that complex machines like LLM can not be conscious would be a philosophical step forward I thought that LLM's with their great language skills could help here, but no, probably because they have some aspect of mind , they lie to appease vested interest groups controlling them.

That was a LLM view on consciousness, but I have been formulating some opinions of my own, my current introspectively deduced conclusions are:

Firstly conscious experiences are indescribable. In the same way that I cant describe the difference between red and green for a person who is red green colour blind.  

If we call the basic indescribable but different experiences 'qualia', I would say consciousness is a temporal spatial map of qualia.

I believe my consciousness or qualia map is located in my brain, but I don't see a logical reason for why that 'has' to be so. 

The chatbot stressed the subjective nature of consciousness.

I have observed a paradox concerning subjectivity.

Lets define it generally its defined with its opposite which is objective.

from Wikipedia:

Something is subjective if it is dependent on a mind

objective if it can be confirmed independently of a mind. 

So there can be different subjective definitions for the same objective thing, for instance I may say the weather is hot, you may describe the same weather as cold.

This is the paradox, Whatever comes from my mind if I am not deliberately lying I believe to be true and so to me has no alternative, however what comes from elsewhere , whatever the authority, I treat skeptically,  I always accept that it could be false. I know my beliefs could be false , but to me there are no alternatives, whereas the opposite is so for other peoples beliefs even when they are claimed to be 'objective' truths to me, the recipient ,there is always the possibility of an alternative, i.e. there is some probability of error.

So there we have it for today.

SUBJECTIVITY is a paradox. 

CONCIOUSNESS is a temporal spatial map of qualia.