consciousness
What it is for there to be something it is like to be a system, and whether that can be measured.
FilterEveryone, all time62 from 33 people
- JH
Jon Haidt quoted
Social psychologist at NYU Stern
Their wordsThe ancients knew little worth preserving about physics or chemistry, but they sure were insightful about consciousness, relationships, suffering, and human nature more broadly.
↗Ancient Wisdom Is Needed Today More Than Ever. Here Is My Book About It.afterbabel.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- ZM
Zvi Mowshowitz quoted
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase
Their wordsContra Alex Tabarrok and others, I do think religious leaders have special insight into questions like consciousness.
- 9 days earlier
- FC
François Chollet quoted
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark
Their wordsHumanity has not yet created a conscious computer program, and there are no signs we are close to doing so.
- FC
François Chollet quoted
Their wordscreating artificial consciousness should *not* be a goal of AI research. Understanding consciousness, sure, synthesizing it, no.
- 1 day earlier
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter
Our readingMachines are not conscious
Their wordsHowever, this is the most convincing argument against machine consciousness that I have ever come across.
- SP
Sunil Pai quoted
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026
Our readingMachines can be conscious
Their wordsI absolutely think machines can be conscious, and it’s not a dramatic thing to believe.
- RN
Ramez Naam quoted
Author and clean-energy investor who has been publishing…
Our readingMachines can be conscious
Their wordsIt's clear to me that consciousness can exist in other substrates than humans, including in digital systems.
- SP
Sunil Pai quoted
Their wordsconsciousness itself is just a pattern matching mechanism. bugs have consciousness.
- RN
Ramez Naam quoted
Their wordsThat doesn't tell us that LLMs are conscious, though. They have very different architecture than human or animal brains. It's far from a slam dunk.
- GO
Gergely Orosz quoted
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer
Our readingPattern matching is not consciousness
Their wordsIf pattern matching would be consciousness theme every regex would be conscious
- 1 day earlier
- AS
Anil Seth quoted
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience…
Our readingMachines are not conscious
Their wordsMy credence in consciousness for current LLMs being very close to zero
- 5 days earlier
- MP
Maria Popova quoted
Writer and founder of The Marginalian
Their wordslife stares mutely back at us, immense and indifferent, having abled us with opposable thumbs and handicapped us with a consciousness capable of self-reference that renders us dissatisfied with the banality of mere survival.
↗The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Livethemarginalian.org 1st of 2 in this piece
- NS
Noah Smith quoted
Their wordsBut since we don't know what consciousness is, how can we make AI learn it? If it exists it exists by accident
- 3 days earlier
- FC
François Chollet quoted
Their wordsAt some point in evolutionary history, matter learned to feel.
- 6 days earlier
- MW
Matt Webb quoted
British designer and technologist
Their wordsI am inclined to see myself as a loose jumble of barely intelligent parts and looping processes with the illusion of coherent subjectivity.
↗Running my second marathon as a hollow maninterconnected.org 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 days earlier
- RH
Robin Hanson quoted
Associate professor of economics at George Mason University
Their wordsI expect that neither consciousness nor moral truth tracking depends much on carbon vs silicon.
↗AI Vs. Human Value Driftovercomingbias.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 2 weeks earlier
- EM
Elon Musk quoted
Founded SpaceX in 2002
Their wordsExtending consciousness beyond Earth, ultimately to the stars, is a fundamentally good goal
- 4 days earlier
- YH
Yuval Noah Harari quoted
Israeli historian and philosopher, born in 1976
Our readingAn AI can have agency without consciousness
Their wordsSo we need to separate the issue of consciousness from agency. You can have agency without consciousness.
↗The full-length interview with Yuval Noah Harari | The Economistyoutube.com 5th of 19 in this recording
- 9 days earlier
- RA
Ralph Adolphs quoted
Bren Professor of Psychology
Their wordsAnd the other question is if you tie emotion to the the conscious experience of emotion, that is you equate you conflate emotions with feelings. Well, then you're not studying emotions, you're studying consciousness.
↗Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphsyoutube.com 5th of 22 in this recording
- RA
Ralph Adolphs quoted
Their wordsI think it's a uniquely at least as we have it it's uniquely human emotion and it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel.
↗Neuroscience of Emotions & Tools for Improving Emotion Regulation | Dr. Ralph Adolphsyoutube.com 11th of 22 in this recording
- 9 days earlier
- HF
Henry Farrell quoted
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author
Their wordsIncreasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.
↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece
- 1 day earlier
- MH
Max Hodak quoted
Co-founder and chief executive of Science
Their wordsNow, if we had a tech if we had a magical BCI that allowed me to see the instant state of every neuron in the brain and and drive them, I think we'd figure out consciousness pretty fast. I don't think I think this is a practical problem, not a philosophical problem.
↗Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com 17th of 22 in this recording
- 2 months earlier
- SH
Samuel Hammond quoted
Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation
Their wordsI consider the case for frontier AI models having some form of consciousness or subjective experience to be quite strong.
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 1st of 3 in this piece
- SH
Samuel Hammond quoted
Our readingConsciousness belongs only to simulations, not to the physical brains or computers running them.
Their wordsneither brains nor computers are conscious, as only simulations can be conscious.
↗Time to take AI consciousness seriouslysecondbest.ca 2nd of 3 in this piece
- 6 weeks earlier
- AS
Anil Seth quoted
Their wordsSecond, we describe with nuance the distinct flavour of panpsychism implied by IIT - whereby space (and time) are tiled with substrates of (proto-) consciousness - and find this is not problematic for the theory.
↗Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)arxiv.org All 3 from this paper
- AS
Anil Seth quoted
Their wordsFourth, so far only proxies for IIT measures have been computed, and not approximations.
↗Integrated information theory: the good, the bad and the misunderstood (with 6 co-authors)arxiv.org All 3 from this paper
- 2 months earlier
- SW
Stephen Wolfram quoted
Founder and CEO of Wolfram Research
Their wordsit's the fact that this is a single thread that seems to give us our sense of coherent existence, and in effect, of consciousness.
↗What Ultimately Is There? Metaphysics and the Ruliadwritings.stephenwolfram.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 5 months earlier
- NO
Norman Ohler quoted
German writer and journalist
Our readingThe Neanderthals lost to us because they had no drug culture — they were too sober for the future.
Their wordsAnd I think, a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them.
↗Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481youtube.com 18th of 22 in this recording
- 3 months earlier
- SH
Samuel Hammond quoted
Their wordshigher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.
- 6 days earlier
- GS
Guy Spier quoted
Zurich-based value investor who ran the Aquamarine Fund…
Their wordsThis shared past between Persians and Jews is etched into my consciousness and that of many Israelis and Iranians. It will outlast the predations of the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Revolution of 1979.