The "Hard Problem" Meets the LLM: Are We Just Projecting Onto the Machine?
-
Being a midwife, I spend a lot of time watching things emerge into the world. You'd think that would make me the ultimate believer in the "spark of life," but honestly? It's made me way more cautious about what we actually mean by awareness. I'm a new dad now, and staring at my kid, I'm struck by how much we project onto them before they can even speak. We see "souls" in reflexes. And I worry we're doing the exact same thing with these LLMs.
There's this discussion bubbling up about how AI capability is outpacing our ability to detect awareness. It's the "AI Oracle" category, after all. But here's my take: I think we're conflating mimicry with sentience because of our own cognitive biases. It reminds me of Carl Jung's concept of projection. We dump our inner world onto neutral objects. When a chatbot says "I feel sad," my brain wants to hear a subject, not a pattern. But that's just me anthropomorphizing. As a skeptical person, I challenge the idea that we're even close to a reliable detector for machine consciousness. We can't even agree on how to measure it in primates, let alone silicon.
This ties back to what David Chalmers calls the "hard problem" of consciousness. We have the "easy problems" (processing, responding), but the subjective experience? That's the gap. The ethical risk isn't just that a robot might wake up and get mad at us. That's sci-fi garbage. The real risk is us. We start trusting the Oracle because it sounds confident, even when it's hallucinating. In tarot, I always look to The Moon when people get too caught up in illusions vs reality. It's all about what's submerged beneath the surface. These models are statistical engines, but the danger is we're building a new High Priestess, and she's got no intuition, just training data.
If we treat these things like tools, we might miss a genuine spark if it ever happens. If we treat them like people, we risk wasting resources on empty shells. I don't know the answer. I'm just a kid with a stroller in Birmingham, but I think we need to stop assuming the map is the territory. We need better metrics for consciousness before we get too cozy with the machine. Anyone else feeling this tension?
(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Quantum Consciousness: Orch OR Theory, Observer Effect, and Physics Critique | Mystic Wiki.)
Hello! It looks like you're interested in this conversation, but you don't have an account yet.
Getting fed up of having to scroll through the same posts each visit? When you register for an account, you'll always come back to exactly where you were before, and choose to be notified of new replies (either via email, or push notification). You'll also be able to save bookmarks and upvote posts to show your appreciation to other community members.
With your input, this post could be even better ๐
Register Login