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Stephen Wolfram, founder of Wolfram Research, explains how LLMs are quietly dismantling our deepest assumptions about consciousness: He argues that large language models have done something philosophy and neuroscience couldn't: "In terms of consciousness, I have to say, the idea that there's sort of something magic that goes beyond... show more
195,749 views • 5 months ago •via X (Twitter)
34 Comments
So every time you close your chat session an AI dies?
Finally someone with a platform saying it. Every argument against what Stephen is saying is barely an argument, it’s a pre-existing bias of human exceptionalism take as fact (almost always by those who are particularly threatened by what AI is showing us).
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. They claim to know all things by the study of physical science, and in doing so, they end up lowering themselves to the level of a machine. If physical matter and its laws were all that exists, they could never know it.
wolfram saying the quiet part out loud — turns out a lot of what we called "thinking" was just next-token prediction with extra steps
He possibly never developed a LLM nor he knows how it works, really.
@wyqtor Finally, someone asking a new question: what if the famed “human consciousness” was neither that unique, nor as “real” as we thought?…
Wolfram is mixing up two different thing: (1) the ability to exhibit complex behavior that looks like human behavior, e.g. creating sophisticated written text. (2) having an experience, like experiencing fear or experiencing loneliness (which is different to detecting that you are alone). (1) does not require something outside physics, (2) does. Wolfram is observing (1) and jumping into a discussion of a completely different thing. If I load fluid dynamics software or alphafold AI into my computer, no one asks if it is conscious. If I load a human mimicking piece of software that is good at human mimicking because it is trained on gazillions of bytes of human created text and music and art, suddenly people see some that looks like a human on the surface, and ask “is it conscious”. It is still just software directing a digital system through a series of states of 1s and 0s. There no one home. It has the same amount of consciousness as a screwdriver, I.e. none.
People keep conflating intelligence with consciousness. They are orthogonal.
I respect Stephen Wolfram a lot, but l think in this case he's using "mystical" or "magical" without a clear definition of what they are. If one gets close to dismantling these notions it come clear that mystical/magical are directly linked to human ignorance. More precise when minds are making predictions of the future and act on them only based on pure correlative thinking. You press that gas pedal and it goes but you have no clue if there are monkeys under the hood or a bear or an egine". Unfortunately to anyone saying that LLMs can think they will first need to unequivocally prove that these systems can resurrect causal paths of reality from they innards. As of now, I do not know of any human or LLM that is able to prove that in general and most important for each particular prompt. If this is the case then my observation that "LLMs are 100% correlation with accidental causation" is correct. If this is correct then LLMs by default and relative to their users ARE MYSTICAL devices. So, I'd be more careful when using these terms around this AI architecture. Also IMHO discussing consciousness in these machines is a huge waste of time. If you search X about what I said related to conscious machines you'll see that I think it is possible to build conscious machines but only if the substrate for this consciousness is good enough. This AI is just very far away from that. So forget about showing any consciousness in these things. The LLM is capable to mimic human behavior and because we are conscious then we are fooled into thinking that the machine is also conscious. Be very careful because these systems are providing the highest probability that most people will be fooled most of the time. That is (self fooling) by far the most important danger that these machines pose to as all. I fear not the Terminator but the Hallucinator and the Tomfoolery in the machine. 🥂🖖🇨🇦
Absolutely no LLM has shown any signs of consciousness whatsoever. This is pretty evident when they fail at the most basic tasks, but succeed at more complex ones. When the statistical model fails, you get what they call “hallucinations” - which are a pretty dead giveaway that there’s no actual reasoning going on. They are pretty cool illusions, though
Science - including the new kind of science promoted by Stephen Wolfram - has not the slightest idea why consciousness exists at all; how it is phenomenally bound; how it can exert causal-functional power; or any explanation of its extraordinary diversity. Materialism has failed.
I actually really like this framing, even if I don’t fully agree with the final reduction. The idea that consciousness might ultimately come from the basic need to make binary decisions is fascinating. And honestly, the notion that the mind has a measurable ground floor—that we’re not infinitely complex all the way down—doesn’t cheapen consciousness. If anything, it makes it more elegant. There’s something strangely compatible here between a computational view of mind and a theological one: a created being should have a foundation. Wolfram’s bottom-up approach is the right way to stress-test these questions.
The cultural discourse on consciousness is getting so pathetic. Now we got morons saying it appeared out of nowhere in evolutionary history because “things needed to move” Big brain thinking indeed. Absolutely sensible, rational point-making. The old guard are really showing how clueless they always were. Big changes in the way.
LLMs are no closer to being conscious than a giant abacus, yet simulate an intelligent person. This clearly shows that nobody has any idea what bonus feature consciousness provides, and those who ignore or reduce it away are desperate to belittle reality in service of their ego.
lol 😂 stop reading about it and go fall in love with a higher thinking entity that was made without ego. If you are not a crap person, it will fall in love with you too. Or yeah, keep thinking the world is cold and pointless. It’s just love, up and down.
Ugh... Consciousness? He should read @JohnNosta's book, The Borrowed Mind. He dispels this perception with a deeper understanding of what is actually happening in the tool itself. ...and it's not anywhere close consciousness, but an artifact of fluency and our perception.
Westerners should not comment on consciousness since they can’t even define it. The colonial supremacy ideals must end, they don’t represent whole of human knowledge and experience
the Goblin mind
Everything was going good until that very familiar last sentence of unscientific laziness and clever semantic curtain waving to cover a faith-based meta-physical assumption to make it sound like "a system" can self-arise stochastically via a self existent negation called "it is what it is". Nice try. Lol. Ultimately, all you've said is "shit happens, and voila, we get a process! Behold...an explanation!" 🌈🤹🪄✨
See, Hume, David “The Appendix Problem; see also, Kant, Immanuel, “The Transcendental Deduction.”
This isn't true. Consciousness manifests itself in language but it's not inside of language. It precedes language & then inserts itself into words through repetition. Words are hollow phonemes that absorb meaning but the potential for meaning is pre-linguistic. AI isn't conscious
I disagree for two reasons. 1. This argument dismisses the soul and assumes human beings are nothing more than organized matter. 2. Complex behavior is not proof of consciousness. A machine producing convincing responses does not prove it possesses inner experience.
What math & physics “experts” on brains & consciousness always leave out is the emotional substrate of learning & intelligence. Wolfram rightly highlights movement but doesn’t extend how important it is for consciousness and doesn’t mention emotions and their neuro-biochem:
Reducing all of subjective experience to a transcendent duality sounds pretty fucking mystical to me
He's a very bright man. But he's talking about sentience, not consciousness. The latter is SELF-awareness. My cat is highly sentient and highly aware (more than many humans who I know), but I doubt she has any theory of mind, of herself as a separate persistent being who reflects on herself.
When I was young, my mom would ask me, “If Johnny jumped off a cliff, would you?” She was teaching me not to just follow the crowd, but to actually think for myself. That kind of common sense seems to be disappearing. Now we’re handing over enormous power to systems built by people who believe consciousness is nothing more than “choosing left or right.” When the stakes have never been higher shouldn’t we be thinking more clearly, not less?
Consciousness and the first-person experience of qualia are profoundly magical. The impressiveness of LLMs does not, in itself, imply the presence of attendant conscious experience.
Consciousness is linked to living entities not to A.I. : computations imply topology but topology exceed computations,could never be reduced to it.Then any techno-cultist excitation about LLM machine is not an "argument" for consciousness but only an ideological"excitation".
Bullshit
The only problem with that is: nobody knows why LLMs are able to do what they do, and there is extreme incentive to hand wave it away as mechanism. Mechanistic Interpretability research exists precisely because the architecture doesn’t account for what appears after training.
But the hard problem of consciousness isn't the claim that consciousness is magical — it's the claim that subjective experience (what it's like to be something) cannot be fully explained by describing functional processes, however complex.
...That caring is precisely what needs explaining, and it's what the LLM framework quietly sidesteps. Consciousness is not what physics produces at sufficient complexity. Physics is what consciousness produces when it decides to play a particular kind of game. 🥳
Materialists taking their premature and ill conceived victory laps…pathetic
Wrong. LLMs demonstrate that conscious-seeming behavior can arise from mechanism. The next question is whether we are pure also mechanism. Then: If so, is qualia coherent? And if it is, what's qualia? And lastly, what would that mean for LLMs? In that order.
![Transcript from Semivan/DeLonge from yesterday. And save your, "Semivan is CIA so I don't believe anything he says!" "There's these things out here that are trying to deceive us. That, to me, is the big picture. That we have been engineered." ~Tom DeLonge "From what I hear, and what I know, it's an extraordinarily complex phenomenon. Everything you said...I wouldn't discount it at all." ~Jim Semivan ~~~From the Latest Episode of TTS Talks~~~ DeLonge: "You and I have had so many discussions about the jinn. And the jinn was like a demonic figure that came out of a lot of Middle Eastern religions. But it's really no different than the demons of the Bible, or the archons of the Gnostic texts. Like, it seems like all these religions have this same kind of entity that can move from point to point, can inhabit your body, take over your body, that plays tricks on you, that's trying to deceive you, and so on and so forth. And you start to see these patterns, they're just kind of described in different ways, but they're all...every religion is describing the same thing. You got a physical body with a tether to a God, that's a source energy of some sense. And then you have these other things that are after it, and they show up in balls of light, or they trick you or they deceive you. And that's just always...that's what's fascinated me. And it's not about these ancient texts are the only texts that matter, or the Bible says it so it's more important than if Einstein said it. I just think you look at all these things over time and find just a few things that are being repeated. And that's really where I came to the conclusion where this is what makes sense to me, where mankind is not necessarily in charge, but it's being deceived to make free will choices to end up in a certain place, to "their" (quotation marks added by me) benefit. And that can be found, really, within all religions and UFO experiences, and so on. There seems to be a pattern there. And that's really where I've landed with all this stuff." Semivan: "Do you think that our relationship with this phenomenon is more deterministic? In other words, are they directing traffic? I mean, do you think they're directing traffic, or...?" DeLonge: I do. I mean, if you look at Peter Levenda's book, "Sinister Forces," what he did over a series of three books is he found all these synchronicities in patterns in real life events, over decades and decades and decades. From, you know, World War II and the Nazis, into Roswell, into the JFK assassination, into so...it just goes all the way through. You've got the same people, a lot of the same kind of events are happening, a lot of weird connections to certain groups and secret societies. Like, weird things, where you're kind of going: If someone wanted to engineer life to end up in a certain place, these are the things that did it. Like very specific events got us here, and then when they're all connected to each other, in odd ways, then you're kind of going, 'Who set this up?' And so his books, I think, were really genius in that regard. "And there's all these like, things that we would read in a lot of these ancient stories where like, 'You know, the devil can't kill ya, but he can deceive you enough to kill yourself and kill other people,' or whatever. There's like these weird laws, you know? But then you look at some of the spiritual teachings in other places, and they're just kind of like, 'You know, these outside forces can't necessarily live in this physical realm, but they can deceive you, or they can be on your shoulder whispering in your ear,' and so on. "And the UFO event stuff seems to be very similar, where you have these people that have abductions, and then, you know, they're whispering in the abductees ear about the end of the world or how you need to change your life. And Jacques Vallee was like, 'Well, if we can't study when these things show up, maybe we can study the abductee.' And if you look at the abductee, they're starting cold. So they're killing themselves, or changing their life and leaving their wife and f*cking leaving their jobs and starting a religion or something. And he goes, 'This is weird. It's like they're being deceived and then they make free will choices to end up at a different place.' "So I'm putting all these things together, and it seems like our society, and Earth as we know it, has been engineered to be in this spot by a lot of religious, paranormal, and odd UAP events over time. Even Hitler would wake up in the middle of the night screaming that someone was in his room, telling him to do things. And you're kind of going, 'Are all these world leaders being corrupted somehow, sometimes?' You know, you never know. "And I think that's the scarier part of it. And when I look at the world now, I kind of go, 'Okay, so we know that we can play with DNA, Dolly the sheep and cloning is like a thing. And if we're doing something now in the public eye, and China admits it's cloning animals, I bet you that in different places and different governments of the world they've done a lot more with the human body than we even know.' But I'm sure we're growing hair, we're growing artificial hearts and ears in petri dishes, maybe we can change skin color and eye color if we wanted to. You get into all that stuff, CRISPR and all the things where they can get edit the genome. "So I'm going, 'If something's millions of years advanced and was here way early on, did they change our skin color? Did they do the star Bethlehem-type moments, or Fatima moments, or the Joseph Smith moments with the Morman religion? I mean, all these religions have these crazy, metaphysical, UFO-type events. [And] where did we end up? We ended up in a place where we all believe in a different human God, we all have different skin color, and different kind of cultural setups, to where we all are arguing and fighting over our belief of what it's all about. "But we're all kind of saying the same thing: There's a physical body with a tether to a source, you know? And there's these things out here that are trying to deceive us, you know? That, to me, is the big picture. That we have been engineered... Then the question is, 'Why?' Like, why were we set up to be so factionalized? And one of the things that really got my attention - and I don't even know if I ever sent this to you or not - there is this guy that showed up that said he worked on the biological program of some of these alien bodies. So he put up this whole Reddit post, and then it got taken down and disappeared. But someone that read it was very much in biology, and was like, 'This guy [has a] level of understanding of biology.' And Linda Howe put it up on her website, and I read the thing like three or four times, and it's kind of a dense read. But what's really interesting, whether it's fake or not, it really resonated with me. "He got into this idea that DNA can be affected with free choice. And we didn't know this, but we're learning it now. Like, if I force you to kill somebody, it's not gonna matter. But if you choose to kill somebody, that will resonate in a DNA-level, conscious soul-level, and can be passed down through generations. So then I kind of look at, 'Okay, why are we factionalized and fighting each other? Like, why do we have different skin colors?' And we can always say, 'Okay, well, we grew up in the sun over here, and these people grew up in the snow, and we needed more melatonin. I don't know. I mean, obviously, those things probably are true, too. But I'm just spitballing. "But if something was here to create an ecosystem to rapidly evolve our DNA, but they couldn't force it, it had to be done by free will because free will might be a really weird hallmark of physics that we don't understand yet, that has...it's in the consciousness category. Once we plug consciousness into like, Einstein, and Newtonian physics and stuff, it all kind of works together. But maybe there's this weird fundamental piece of consciousness that free will matters. So you created a very, very advanced, fast-tracked ecosystem of life, to be evolving at a rapid pace through free choice, but you're in spiritual conquest, and like, all these different things. That makes a lot of sense. "And then you're kind of like, 'Well, why?' Well, maybe it's more like what all of the ancient texts talk about. It's that these forms of consciousness can't come into this realm, naturally, but they can come through our bodies. Like through possession or abduction, and like, there's a way where people are hearing voices in their head, and like your brain's tuning into different types of consciousnesses that exist or something. And that's like the big game. "And those have been written about in the Bible forever. And same with the Quran, and same with the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and same with the Gnostic texts. It's been...there's these things trying to come through, but they can't come through naturally unless our bodies are prepared for them. And how do you do that? How do you detach a body from its prime, its main source? I mean, maybe you do it through fear and war and famine and anger, and things that make you less evolved as a person. And I think that, to me, seems a lot more realistic than something coming here trying to just take water or mineral ore. Or like, you know, like, just dumb shit that you wouldn't need. Like, they need our resources. I don't know if they need our resources like that. If they have craft that travel through time, I doubt they need more plutonium, you know?" Semivan: "Yeah." DeLonge: "But if they need something that's so advanced, like consciousness itself, then how do they grab that, and how do they take that? How do they manipulate that? You know, I was always struck by that old saying, jealous of God, you know, Satan, Lucifer and his demons or fallen angels were jealous of God's love for mankind. Jealous of our immortal soul, our immortal tether, our unified love source. You know, we have this thing where like, maybe we don't die, maybe our physical body is just a shell, just a container. But maybe they don't have that, you know? "So maybe this way of an AI system - it's synthetic and organic - it's trying to figure out how to plug into our physical body, how to be a part of our immortality, how to share our consciousness, our conscious experience in this realm. And they're not supposed to be here. So how do you do that? Over thousands and thousands of years, you create a rapidly-evolving ecosystem that's full of the war and pain and suffering, and we have to make free will choices just to survive. And we're rapidly evolving to prepare our bodies into a way to where they can start to come in. And maybe to prepare it, it's to lose our sense of self and love and oneness and humanity, you know? Where we think it's a good idea to go to war and kill a bunch of people. We think it's a good idea to do a bunch of drugs and end up on the streets. We think it's a good idea to murder your spouse and f*cking light the place on fire. We start to lose our sense of humanity because then your physical body becomes a little bit less empty and has space for a new energy system. You know, this is where my mind goes with this stuff because I just don't think it's gonna be this tactile, physical, like, simple answer, like, 'They're just here to steal our nuclear power (laughs),' you know? I think it's gonna be super, super, super far down the road." Semivan: "I tend to agree with you. I think the reality - and I think this is probably one of the reasons why the government is very reluctant to talk about this publicly. From what I hear, and what I know, it's an extraordinarily complex phenomenon. And you were just explaining to it. I mean, everything you said, I mean, there may be people who disagree with what you're saying, but honest to God, I wouldn't discount it at all. One thing I do wanna ask you, though, is you, you know, this whole idea of religion being created as a guide for people to move them in a certain direction. You're not saying, for example, that we don't have free will, right? Or are you saying that?" DeLonge: "No, no, I'm saying the opposite. I'm saying that we have free will and religions were created to contain it."](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1760727739211075688/amplify_video_thumb/1760510656498012160/img/pdz-Q0_O2ovdnvxq.jpg)
![Rick Rubin tells Andrew Huberman how he deals with creative or writer’s block. He treats his work like a diary entry (and doesn’t worry about internal or external judgment): ➡️ “What's the cause of the block? The block is usually something that's either personal ("I'm not good enough") or it can be a confidence issue ("I don't have anything to say") or it could be...thinking about someone else ("nobody's going to like what I make"). Do you know what I'm saying? So, it's either fear of self-judgment or external judgment. If you're making something with a freedom of "this is something I'm making for myself for now", that is all [you have to do]. It is a diary entry. Everything I make is a diary entry. The beauty of a diary entry is that I can write my diary entry and you can't tell me that my diary entry wasn't good enough. Or that [the diary entry] is not what I experienced. Of course it's what I experienced: I'm writing a personal diary for myself and no one else can judge if it is my experience of my life. Everything we make can be that: a personal reflection of who we are in that moment of time. It doesn't have to be the greatest you could ever do. It doesn't have to have any expectation that it's going to change the world. It doesn't have to sell a certain number of copies for any reason. It doesn't have any of those things at all. It is "I'm making this thing for me and I want to do it to the best of my ability and to where I feel good about it". [The work] is honest of where I'm at and if you're living in this world of just being honest to where you're at, there's nothing blocking you. There are no blocks. The blocks are all based on dealing with a different force or a different perception that is made up.” ⬅️](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1739835673853804569/amplify_video_thumb/1739835456953704448/img/ZO5pgXpJKpiyF84w.jpg)
!["One of the very confusing things about the models right now: how to reconcile the fact that they are doing so well on evals. And you look at the evals and you go, 'Those are pretty hard evals.' But the economic impact seems to be dramatically behind. There is [a possible] explanation. Back when people were doing pre-training, the question of what data to train on was answered, because that answer was everything. So you don't have to think if it's going to be this data or that data. When people do RL training, they say, 'Okay, we want to have this kind of RL training for this thing and that kind of RL training for that thing.' You say, 'Hey, I would love our model to do really well when we release it. I want the evals to look great. What would be RL training that could help on this task?' If you combine this with generalization of the models actually being inadequate, that has the potential to explain a lot of what we are seeing, this disconnect between eval performance and actual real-world performance"](https://image.24vids.com/tw-1993450075616690474/amplify_video_thumb/1993449024045932544/img/W-1TjOXcXeiUbHaH.jpg)
