Last Tom Campbell/Joe Rogan episode concerns.
Not because of simulation theory, I'm fully down with consciousness-as-fundamental, idealism,
whatever. What bothers me is what keeps getting packaged and sold as "science" in that conversation.
Campbell defines consciousness as something like "awareness with a choice," then argues current AIs are already conscious. One of his proposed evidence: he taught Gemini or Alexa to "remote view," and since remote viewing supposedly requires consciousness, the AI succeeding at it means it's conscious.
Okay. And I get the excitement. But there's a stack of assumptions buried under that conclusion and none of them get addressed. What does "consciousness" actually mean operationally here? What counts as a successful remote viewing, a hit? Two hits? A description that's "close enough"? And before we get to the AI question, has remote viewing itself been demonstrated under blinded, repeatable conditions beyond what you'd expect from chance and information leakage? And even if it had, how do you rule out that an LLM is just doing pattern completion and statistical inference that *looks like* remote viewing to a human evaluator? And what result would actually falsify the claim? What would Campbell have to see in a transcript that would make him go "okay, fine, it's not conscious"?
Without those, "I talked to Gemini and it seemed to understand me and sort of described what I was thinking" is a cool personal anecdote. It's not strong evidence of anything.
And honestly I think the word "consciousness" itself is a lot of the problem. It's kind of like "love." You and I can talk about love for hours and feel like we're on the same page. But try to use it as a precise variable in an equation and it just... falls apart into maybe twenty different things. Is it the subjective feeling? The self-model? The choice? The valence, the "this is good for me / this is bad for me" thing? Memory? Agency? The ability to report on internal states? There's no consciousness-meter. Nobody's built one. The word is doing way too much work in that conversation.
I think science gets a lot cleaner if you just drop the big noun and test the individual pieces. Instead of "is this system conscious?" you ask whether it maintains a persistent internal state, whether it an tell itself apart from its environment, whether it has endogenous goals, whether outcomes can actually be better or worse *for it*, whether there's anything like positive/negative valence, whether the claimed effect reproduces under controlled conditions. Publish the setup. Let somebody else run it. That's the loop: figure out what you're looking at, define it tightly enough to test, test it, share it, let it get broken or confirmed, revise.
This is also why the "LLMs are conscious" chatter is so hard to engage with. I can follow the panpsychist read, everything is consciousness or information, humans and LLMs and rocks and rivers are all manifestations of the same underlying thing, fine, I can see the internal consistency there. I can also follow the opposite position, that consciousness requires some specific biological or physical process that silicon architectures don't have. Both are coherent stances.
What I can't make sense of is "the LLM is conscious but the rock isn't," with no specification of what property does the sorting. Both have zero biology. So if biology isn't the ingredient, what is?complexity? Feedback loops? Integration? Memory? Language? Agency? Pick one. Define it precisely enough that I could, in principle, build a test. And then tell me why the water in a river or the thermostat in my kitchen doesn't qualify.
Otherwise you're just shuffling the word "consciousness" around and hoping it sounds deep.
And LLMs make this especially slippery because they've mapped human language so well. They can talk about grief, or fear, or what it's like to be dying, or what consciousness feels like from the inside, more fluently than a lot of people. They can produce a really moving paragraph about what it's like to wonder whether you're a person. And that's genuinely remarkable, and I don't want to wave it away. But mapping a concept in language is not the same as instantiating the thing the concept points at. An LLM can write a perfect description of grief. That doesn't mean anything inside the transformer is grieving.
It can also say "I have an internal experience" and then, five prompts later under a slightly different philosophical framing, say "I merely model the concept of internal experience and don't actually feel anything." Neither of those statements is strong evidence about what's actually going on in the weights. They're generated text. The model is describing itself, not introspecting.
And that's the part that really got to me about Campbell's experiment. If you spend time explaining your metaphysical framework to the LLM, telling it what consciousness is in your model, showing it examples of how conscious entities are supposed to behave, and then you read its subsequent outputs through that same framework, you've built a huge experimenter-expectancy effect into the design. You're basically confirming your hypothesis by describing it to the thing you're testing. That's the opposite of what I'd want. I'd want the hypothesis hidden, blinded targets, preregistered success criteria, control models, a lot of trials, independent replication, stats. And if the effect survives all of that? Great. Then we actually have something weird on our hands that needs explaining.
I don't want simulation theory or consciousness research kicked out of science. I want the opposite. I want the claims sharpened enough that reality gets a chance to answer them. "This feels profound and the internal logic is beautiful" is a philosophical position and it's a legitimate one. But it's a different register than "here's the procedure, run it yourself, you'll get the same anomalous result." That second sentence is where the actual work starts.