We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2025
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Philosophers are so desperate for humans to be special. How is outputting things based on things it has learned any different to what humans do?
We observe things, we learn things and when required we do or say things based on the things we observed and learned. That's exactly what the AI is doing.
I don't think we have achieved "AGI" but I do think this argument is stupid.
Yes, the first step to determining that AI has no capability for cognition is apparently to admit that neither you nor anyone else has any real understanding of what cognition* is or how it can possibly arise from purely mechanistic computation (either with carbon or with silicon).
Given? Given by what? Fiction in which robots can't comprehend the human concept called "love"?
*Or "sentience" or whatever other term is used to describe the same concept.
This is always my point when it comes to this discussion. Scientists tend to get to the point of discussion where consciousness is brought up then start waving their hands and acting as if magic is real.
I haven't noticed this behavior coming from scientists particularly frequently - the ones I've talked to generally accept that consciousness is somehow the product of the human brain, the human brain is performing computation and obeys physical law, and therefore every aspect of the human brain, including the currently unknown mechanism that creates consciousness, can in principle be modeled arbitrarily accurately using a computer. They see this as fairly straightforward, but they have no desire to convince the public of it.
This does lead to some counterintuitive results. If you have a digital AI, does a stored copy of it have subjective experience despite the fact that its state is not changing over time? If not, does a series of stored copies representing, losslessly, a series of consecutive states of that AI? If not, does a computer currently in one of those states and awaiting an instruction to either compute the next state or load it from the series of stored copies? If not (or if the answer depends on whether it computes the state or loads it) then is the presence or absence of subjective experience determined by factors outside the simulation, e.g. something supernatural from the perspective of the AI? I don't think such speculation is useful except as entertainment - we simply don't know enough yet to even ask the right questions, let alone answer them.
I am more talking about listening to and reading scientists in media. The definition of consciousness is vague at best
I think that then we actually agree.
So, you’re listening to journalists and fiction writers try to interpret things scientists do and taking that as hard science?
No... There are a lot of radio shows that get scientists to speak.
Which ones are you listening to?
Humans are not probabilistic, predictive chat models. If you think reasoning is taking a series of inputs, and then echoing the most common of those as output then you mustn't reason well or often.
If you were born during the first industrial revolution, then you'd think the mind was a complicated machine. People seem to always anthropomorphize inventions of the era.
This is great
Do you think most people reason well?
The answer is why AI is so convincing.
I think people are easily fooled. I mean look at the president.
No it’s really not at all the same. Humans don’t think according to the probabilities of what is the likely best next word.
No you think according to the chemical proteins floating around your head. You don't even know he decisions your making when you make them.
https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2019/03/our-brains-reveal-our-choices-before-were-even-aware-of-them--st
You're a meat based copy machine with a built in justification box.
Except of course that humans invented language in the first place. So uh, if all we can do is copy, where do you suppose language came from? Ancient aliens?
No we invented "human" language. There are dozens of other animal out there that all have their own languages, completely independant of our.
We simply refined base calls to be more and more specific. Differences evolved because people are bad at telephone and lots of people have to be special/different and use slight variations every generation.
Are you saying human languages are a derivative of bird language or something? If so, I'd like to see the proof of that.
Do you really think birds are the only animals that make calls.
What does any of this have to do with anything anyway?
Humans invented the first human language. People have ideas that aren't simple derivatives of other ideas.
How could you have a conversation about anything without the ability to predict the word most likely to be best?
Most people, evidently including you, can only ever recycle old ideas. Like modern "AI". Some of us can concieve new ideas.
What new idea exactly are you proposing?
Wdym? That depends on what I'm working on. For pressing issues like raising energy consumption, CO2 emissions and civil privacy / social engineering issues I propose heavy data center tarrifs for non-essentials (like "AI"). Humanity is going the wrong way on those issues, so we can have shitty memes and cheat at school work until earth spits us out. The cost is too damn high!
What do you mean what do I mean? You were the one that said about ideas in the first place...
If you don't think humans can conceive of new ideas wholesale, then how do you think we ever invented anything (like, for instance, the languages that chat bots write)?
Also, you're the one with the burden of proof in this exchange. It's a pretty hefty claim to say that humans are unable to conceive of new ideas and are simply chatbots with organs given that we created the freaking chat bot you are convinced we all are.
You may not have new ideas, or be creative. So maybe you're a chatbot with organs, but people who aren't do exist.
Haha coming in hot I see. Seems like I've touched a nerve. You don't know anything about me or whether I'm creative in any way.
All ideas have basis in something we have experienced or learned. There is no completely original idea. All music was influenced by something that came before it, all art by something the artist saw or experienced. This doesn't make it bad and it doesn't mean an AI could have done it
What language was the first language based upon?
What music influenced the first song performed?
What art influenced the first cave painter?
You seem to think that one day somebody invented the first language, or made the first song?
There was no "first language" and no "first song". These things would have evolved from something that was not quite a full language, or not quite a full song.
Animals influenced the first cave painters, that seems pretty obvious.
Yeah dude at one point there was no languages and no songs. You can get into "what counts as a language" but at one point there was none. Same with songs.
Language specifically was pretty unlikely to be an individual effort, but at one point people grunting at each other became something else entirely.
Your whole "there is nothing new under the sun" way of thinking is just an artifact of the era you were born in.
Haha wtf are you talking about. You have no idea what generation I am, you don't know how old I am and I never said there is nothing new under the sun.
I'm summarizing your shitty argument and viewpoint. I never said it was a direct quote.
Though, at one point even that tired ass quote and your whole way of thinking was put into words by someone for the first time.
Well you are doing a poor job of it and are bringing an unnecessary amount of heat to an otherwise civil discussion
That's right. If you cannot win the argument the next best thing is to call for civility.
And is tariffs a new idea or something you recycled from what you've heard before about tariffs?
Pointing out that humans are not the same as a computer or piece of software on a fundamental level of form and function is hardly philosophical. It’s just basic awareness of what a person is and what a computer is. We can’t say at all for sure how things work in our brains and you are evangelizing that computers are capable of the exact same thing, but better, yet you accuse others of not understanding what they’re talking about?