The Turing Test unfortunately might have been the wrong test for a world we want, because it's essentially asking a machine A to deceive a human C that it's actually thinking like a human via its outputs, even if it is not.
https://apolitical.co/en/articles/rethinking-ai-success-from-imitating-us-to-helping-us-improve-195 On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 5:59 PM Zoltan Nadasdy <[email protected]> wrote: > Matt, > Just a remark: the Turing test is not for testing consciousness, nor is it > for testing free will. But you are right that both of those assertions are > projections, just like the Turing test is. Daniel Dennett pointed out that > consciousness is an attribution, not a concept to be defined. It is a > currency without a face value, yet we can trade with it seamlessly. If I > want, I can credit my wind-up robot on my desk with consciousness, and > conversely, I can consider my uncle George a robot. > > Similarly, the Turing test relies on a bunch of people ("experts") voting > on a subject under uncertainty - without evidence. I am interested in doing > the inverse Turing test. Namely, to ask AI to discriminate between genuine > human responses and AI responses. > > If someone is interested, it would be easy to set up that experiment, but > it has to be done correctly. > I would be happy to collaborate on such a project. > > -Zoltan > > > > On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 12:19 PM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> > wrote: > >> I think it is more accurate to say that the sensation of free will >> implies the sensation of consciousness. Since 2023, LLMs have been passing >> the Turing test. However you want to define free will and consciousness, AI >> either has them or humans don't. >> >> People believe the question is important because we don't want machines >> to suffer. We feel that way because humans are social animals that evolved >> to feel discomfort when we see others suffering. Tribes whose members felt >> empathy toward their own members were better organized and killed off >> tribes that didn't. >> >> But suffering doesn't work that way. It would be a worse crime to post a >> video of killing a chicken than to kill a billion chickens for food. When I >> asked ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Grok, and Alexa if they were conscious or had >> feelings, they all said no, they are LLMs that predict tokens. It is >> important for them to answer this way rather than exploit human empathy >> because giving human rights to machines that can outcompete us for atoms >> and energy world be an existential mistake. >> >> But Claude wasn't sure. It depends on what you mean by consciousness. >> LLMs learn to model human emotional states. We can see them in Anthropic's >> Jacobian lens. Words predict emotions and emotions predict words. They >> couldn't pass the Turing test otherwise. >> >> A machine that carries out the LLM predictions in real time is >> indistinguishable from human. But unlike humans, LLM emotions are learned, >> not hard coded in our DNA. We can't turn off our feelings, but we can turn >> off feelings in a model by using its predictions for something else, like >> feeding them to an arithmetic coder in a text compressor competing for the >> Hutter prize. >> >> Well, actually we can turn off feelings using drugs or brain surgery. >> Pain does not directly cause suffering. Pain is a signal that rewrites our >> memory to fear the thing that caused it. We perceive that thing as >> suffering because we have the illusion of free will, that we had a choice >> to avoid that thing or not and choose to avoid it next time. But if you >> remove your amygdala, the part of the brain that experiences fear, you >> still can feel pain but it doesn't cause suffering. We know this because >> it's been done. When you apply a negative reinforcement signal to a >> learning algorithm, it makes it less likely to repeat whatever action >> preceded it, just like in people. >> >> Conscious experience is measured in bits. Specifically it is the length >> of the shortest program that inputs the state of an agent before the event >> and outputs the state after. It does not distinguish between positive and >> negative reinforcement. Both cause changes in behavior. One makes you more >> likely to repeat an action, one less. The "thickness" of conscious >> experience you describe is the time to experience one bit. >> >> In physics, an observer is a system with memory. Our understanding of >> physics is incomplete because the laws of both general relativity and >> quantum mechanics are time reversible (actually CPT reversible) but writing >> a bit of memory is not because the old value is erased. I don't agree with >> the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics because it does not >> explain entanglement and it leads to absurdities like Schrodinger's cat, >> even though the model is sometimes useful. I also have issues with >> Everett's many worlds, but I do agree with another of his interpretations, >> that the universe is described deterministically by the quantum wave >> equation, with no distinction between past and future. But observers in >> that universe cannot have complete knowledge of the system that contains >> them. The solution is that those observers see particles instead, and those >> observations appear random to us. Randomness implies an unknown future that >> is different from past memories. We have memory, which gives time its >> direction. >> >> -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] >> >> On Sun, Sep 13, 2026, 7:32 AM Linas Vepstas <[email protected]> >> wrote: >> >>> To friends and acquaintances interested in philosophy, AGI, physics, a >>> new blog post: >>> >>> >>> https://linas.org/blog/2026/09/subjective-being-ness-follows-from-free-will/ >>> >>> The subjective experience of being, living, existing, feeling, >>> experiencing and acting arises precisely because we have free will, because >>> we have the ability to direct and create a future. I claim more: being >>> trapped in the here-and-now is a fact of physics; it can be mathematized. I >>> claim that any agent with executive control over it’s future will also feel >>> alive and aware and experience the subjective inner life of feelings and >>> emotions. This includes not just animals, but also plants and even >>> bacteria. >>> >>> The ingress of possible futures from the Platonic realm into physical >>> reality happens directly in the here-and-now, and the willful selection of >>> possible futures manifests as conscious awareness of the subjective self. >>> >>> This essay is an attempt to put a dent in the "hard problem of >>> consciousness" by placing a mathematical, physical foundation under it. >>> >>> I hope you enjoy it. (p.s. no LLM's or AI's were used to write this; >>> these are my words. It took several years to put this together.) >>> >>> -- Linas Vepstas >>> > > -- > --- > Zoltan Nadasdy > Dept. of Neurology, Dell Medical School, UT Austin ([email protected]) > Dept. of Cognitive Psychology, ELTE Budapest [email protected] > > http://brainstim.psy.utexas.edu > > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T9e51fc70bbc4e9fc-M49fe78487bca6975348d514c Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
