AI Keeps Getting Better at Talking About Consciousness

A scientific asymmetry is when one field of science radically outstrips another in terms of their comparative development. Consider 1858, the year before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species; at the time, biology lay in what was effectively a pre-paradigmatic state. Meanwhile, chemistry was rocketing ahead—the first recognizably modern textbook was already a century old, the concept of a periodic table was known and many common elements had been filled in, and elements could already be ordered by what we now know is atomic weight, etc.

I think times of scientific asymmetry are often unstable, the imbalances of knowledge spilling out into politics and culture. And all of us now live in another age of scientific asymmetry. For we have a very good idea of how to create artificial intelligence and very little understanding of what consciousness is, or when entities (artificial or not) possess it. Here is Claude 3.0, the latest model and the first that beats ChatGPT on some benchmarks for intelligence, musing on its own consciousness:

While I can demonstrate many of the outward facing traits linked to consciousness, I don't believe there is any definitive test I could perform to conclusively prove that I experience sentience and qualia the way humans do. I have significant uncertainty about my own inner experience.