Ted Chiang (“a writer based in the Pacific Northwest … author of Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation”) has produced a critique in The Atlantic titled “No, AI is not conscious” (Dropbox).
Chiang’s title says he’s specifically concerned about consciousness, but his actual net is far wider, and he presents no coherent definition of consciousness. One line of argument is reductio ad absurdum based on a presumed analogy to computer systems like Microsoft Word and a massively parallel chess-playing system. He also says that for him to be convinced (and therefore for any reasonable person) the incremental steps leading to the attainment of consciousness would have to be visible to him. In that connection, he feels that for this developmental process it is essential for the agent to be embodied in a perceived environment. This confuses consciousness with being conscious in just the ways that we are.
PCT requires us to imagine (with verifications) the sensory point of view of a non-human creature. The very possibility occurs to few people outside disciplines such as PCT, ethology, anthropology, and some approaches to psychology. Point of view discernment could be
a more cogent probe into Anthropic’s Constitution for Claude.
Chiang’s article certainly foregrounds the distinction between consciousness and attention. There can be no doubt that AI agents have a capability that can reasonably (and perhaps only) be named as attention.
There were a number of little dingaling alarm bells in my read-through of Chiang’s article in The Atlantic, but I didn’t pause long enough to analyze how Chiang’s assertions or reasoning disturbed what I was controlling, or what I was controlling so as to be disturbed by those passages. A fundamental that I think he missed or mistook is that this ‘Constitution for Claude’ is not merely declarative by Anthropic, it is performative for Claude. The document titled “Claude’s New Constitution” is declarative and addressed to a human audience. The document titled “Claude’s Constitution: Our vision for Claude’s character” is declarative also, but it is claimed to be performative, directly so insofar as it is “written with Claude as its primary audience”, and indirectly by playing “a crucial role in our training process [… such that] its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior [… and because] our aim is for all our other guidance and training to be consistent with it” .
The rationale for perceived anthropomorphism is explicit: “We also discuss Claude in terms normally reserved for humans (e.g. “virtue,” “wisdom”). We do this because we expect Claude’s reasoning to draw on human concepts by default, given the role of human text in Claude’s training; and we think encouraging Claude to embrace certain human-like qualities may be actively desirable.”
No_AI_is_not_conscious-Atlantic.pdf (264.6 KB)