“Arguments About AI Consciousness Remain Highly Motivated and At Best Overconfident” by Zvi
LessWrong posts by zviShow Notes
It has been roughly a year since my last dedicated post on this question. Its first sentence has not changed: I happily admit I am deeply confused about consciousness.
It would have been nice if a year had allowed us to make progress on this and the related questions. Looking back, we have made little progress.
We have people, often the same people, making similar arguments. The post from last year has held up well, exactly because we have made so little progress. Thus, I will not be going over the basics of my perspective again this year, because they have seen little change. See last year's post for that.
Then again, if these are some of the biggest philosophical questions, then a year is not so much time to try and figure them out. It is only because of the frantic pace of AI that a year is a depressingly long time to not have made philosophical progress. Historically, almost all years contain almost no major philosophical progress.
This year's post is about the recent change to make abusive-to-Claude behavior a violation of Anthropic's terms of service, coverage of the latest depressingly similar set [...] --- Outline: (01:29) Cooperative Alignment (05:48) Here We Go Again (08:28) The Consensus Is Slowly Moving Towards Moral Patienthood (10:38) The Slavery Question (13:55) We Are Conflating Different Arguments (18:29) No It's Not About Liability (18:52) That Old Time Religion (26:55) Debating the Pope (30:29) Keep Sonnet Safe ---
First published:
October 13th, 2026
Source:
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More from LessWrong posts by zvi
It was the probably worst day in cybersecurity history. So far. Not only is there a critical flaw in PHP that due to a leak was announced a day before the fix would be available, sending most of the internet scrambling for solutions and likely dooming a lot of long tail websites permanently, there were several other unrelated incidents. The floodgates seem to have been opened. I have a market on whether there will be an even worse day before the end of the year.
Anthony Cimino offered the closest thing to an official response we have seen on the leaked Anthropic draft bill I covered on Saturday.
Nick Cammarata of Goodfire makes a bold claim: Neural Networks are Already Clean. This was his follow up after various resulting online discussions.
There is a newly leaked bill that Anthropic is purportedly shopping around is (if you assume its bugs get fixed).