David P. Reichert

Is biology necessary for consciousness? A response to Seth's paper on biological naturalism In this post, I explain why I think that Anil Seth’s recent paper does not make a conclusive argument that phenomenal consciousness is inherently biological and that therefore artificial intelligence ...

+1 to that these papers are more about consciousness than "thinking" (and personally I think there's good reasons to disagree with the stronger positions expressed in these papers: davidpreichert.substack.com/p/is-biology...)

Congrats to the SIMA team for getting this out the door!

(This is what I was up to before recently getting sidetracked by more philosophical questions...)

Of course a bot had to chip in...
(no pun intended)

So Reinforcement Learning generally talks about agents, AlphaGo (Go playing AI) would be an example, etc.

(of course either way, this does not entail agency in a morally relevant sense, as the paper says)

Thanks for sharing! A minor point, but: "AI agents" being "specific to the AI safety and cybersecurity literature" seems overly narrow. In the context of AI I'd more generally understand an agent to be something that needs to autonomously take actions in an environment.

TLDR: Seth makes many valid points, but the case for biological naturalism isn't clear-cut IMO. In either case, I don't think his conclusion quite follows from the premises.
 
Ultimately, uncertainty still wins out for me.

Is biology necessary for consciousness? A response to Seth's paper on biological naturalism In this post, I explain why I think that Anil Seth’s recent paper does not make a convincing argument that phenomenal consciousness is inherently biological and that therefore artificial intelligence ...

Can only biological organisms ever be conscious?

Yes, argues @anilseth.bsky.social in a recent paper on biological naturalism.

I'm less convinced, and have written an in-depth response in a blog post here:

davidpreichert.substack.com/p/is-biology-necessary-for-consciousness