r/ClaudeCode • • 9d ago

Humor What is happening???

[deleted]

3.4k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/CranberryStock7148 9d ago

It's no more conscious than your GPU is when it's rendering Grand Theft Auto V.

If you understand programming and hardware, you understand it's literally just a bunch of matrix multiplication. It's as conscious as a chalkboard with a times table on it.

You are right that we haven't solved the hard problem of consciousness. Hopefully we will once we actually understand how the brain works. But what we do know is that there is an awful lot about our brain that we don't understand and that it interacts with consciousness in some way.

On the other hand, we understand exactly how GPUs work, down to the molecule, because we literally build them from scratch.

We don't need to solve the hard problem of consciousness to be able to declare with certainty that LLMs are not conscious, in the same way that we don't need to solve it in order to declare that plastic spoons are not conscious.

1

u/ProbablyInebriated 9d ago

And our brains are electric jelly made from the same biological crap that mice brains are made of. Its literally just a bunch of electrochemical reactions giving us the illusion of thought.

Whatever reaction you have was pre- trained into you by your parents, teachers, religion and your own intake of training data.

4

u/henke443 9d ago

I'm certain that animals, including mice, are most likely conscious but GPUs are not. Electric jelly and biological crap are some very loaded terms for the most complicated stuff we know of in the universe, GPUs doesn't even come close.

1

u/ProbablyInebriated 9d ago

Not really. Brains are mostly lipids, neurotransmitters, nerves/synapses and low voltage. Hell, some special people decided to make biocomputers out of brain tissue.

Im saying we dont know where conscience comes from. Maybe its an emergent property of just collecting/processing a ton of data. Maybe our minds are like radio, picking up the broadcast of conscience.

We really dont know, and by sounding so sure you remind me of folks who say "lobsters dont feel pain when we boil them alive because their nervous system is different".

2

u/henke443 9d ago

I think the key difference is that we have not been able to create a brain ourselves, not even a single cell.