What Is It Like to Be a Thermostat? A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Limits of Subjective Experience
Grady_Booch · x · 2026-10-09
Grady Booch shares a philosophy paper arguing that our confidence in denying consciousness to a thermostat rests on intuitions about complexity and biology, not a real theory of subjective experience. Functional descriptions can't settle whether mechanisms are accompanied by a subjective point of view. The paper poses a dilemma: if consciousness depends on specific physical/functional organization, we must explain why that yields experience rather than mere behavior; if consciousness is fundamental, we must explain why attributing it to simple mechanisms is meaningful at all. The takeaway is directly relevant to debates about whether LLMs could have experiences.
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