Haha this was in an episode of Behind the Bastards recently.
[Behind the Bastards] Part One: How AI Chatbots Became Cult Leaders https://podcastaddict.com/behind-the-bastards/episode/223160669 via @PodcastAddict
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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really? i would imagine if we were to simulate a humans / some other animals brain, it could feel things like the real one can. kinda like in this fly brain digitalization experiment, but on a larger scale.
~something~ ~something~ ~amazing~ ~digital~ ~circus~ ~something~ ~something-....~ ~(u~ ~have~ ~heard~ ~nothing...)~
EDIT: here a better link for that fly project in case anyone cares.
Simulating something like a brain didn’t mean it’s alive or feels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
That's not really what the Chinese Room thought experiment is about though. That was more about output not necessarily being proof of a mind (which is an awesome argument against early LLMs) but the more you abstract and pick at it, the harder it gets to keep that argument.
No one understands what their neurons are doing and usually what we describe as the mind is the thoughts above them, or the narration, or the images, or feelings. We'd certainly consider the English-speaker conscious in the experiment even though they're just following the steps to produce the expected characters, so does that mean if a program observes itself and has new thoughts above them, that it's conscious then? Is an LLM conscious if its input is the process of another LLM?
I mean, probably not. I wouldn't say so. The question is how complex of a system does it take to be 'conscious'? At what level of introspection does a thought become real? If someone could perfectly simulate every cell, every neuron, every chemical reaction in a human body, what precisely would be stopping it from being conscious? I'm not sure that any answer other than a 'soul' makes any sense, if you believe in such a thing.
I dunno. Just kinda thinking out loud. I think consciousness is a lot lower bar than people give credit for, personally.
That's a controversial thought experiment rather than a proven fact. There's no proof yet that consciousness isn't 'just' a computation, albeit one done by brain tissue rather than a regular computer, and if that's the case, then the Church Turing Thesis applies, and the same computation can be done on a different computer without changing its nature.
yyyyes, its interesting how fast the discussion turns from "can machines feel?" to "can we feel?" to "is the mind just computation?" down to asking if everything is deterministic or not... whatever - discussions are fun
If a human can be horny or sad, so can a computer one day.