Ned Block on Whether Consciousness Requires Biology
1/5/20261 hr 11 min
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to think about consciousness. Modern LLMs can mimic human conversation with extraordinary verisimilitude, but most people would not judge them to be conscious. What would it take? Is it even possible for a computer program to achieve consciousness, or must consciousness be fundamentally "meat-based"? Philosopher Ned Block has long argued that consciousness involves something more than simply the "functional" aspects of inputs and outputs.
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Sean Carroll· Host0:56
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. One of the kinds of questions that I get a lot, uh, whether in ask me anything episodes or just more generally, is can you tell me something that you've changed your mind about? Of course, I've changed my mind about lots of things. I try not to be too dogmatic or stuck, but I actually struggle to answer that question because there's some trivial examples where I changed my mind because we got better data or I got better information, right? I've changed my mind about the acceleration of the universe. I used to think it