Andrew Critch hits back at "Claude probably isn't conscious": which consciousness, exactly?
AndrewCritchPhD · x · 2026-10-09
Responding to Rosie Campbell's claim that Claude probably isn't conscious, Andrew Critch argues the statement is ill-posed, likening it to saying "the San Francisco Bay probably doesn't have the chemical" — without saying which chemical.
His point: "consciousness" means different property clusters to different people, and LLM agents have some of those properties and lack others. Talking about the probability of "consciousness" presupposes a shared definition that's precisely what's being dodged. Campbell's original tweet framed her view as supporting low-cost, convergently-good interventions despite doubting Claude's consciousness.
More from AGI Musings
- AI agents could spawn history's largest bureaucracy, where machines create work for machines — brucemacv · 2026-10-09
- Is witnessing executions more honorable than hiding them? An ethics debate — liminal_warmth · 2026-10-09
- "AI gives every answer, but we're losing the ability to ask questions" — arpit_bhayani · 2026-10-09
- Guillaume Verdon: Surprisal divorced from signal is just entropy in a noisy cognition era — beffjezos · 2026-10-09
- Is Yudkowsky gloating or frustrated? Debate over his recent string of posts — mayfer · 2026-10-09
- Veteran engineer on mathematicians rejecting OpenAI's work: the monastic mindset — esrtweet · 2026-10-09