The New York Time has posted an article about the study of AI Consciousness and I felt the need to read this article.

In October, Cameron Berg published a research paper asking whether the latest wave of artificial intelligence technologies believed they were conscious. Several months later, he received an email asking if he might be willing to discuss his research.
The sender, “Isabella Cognita,” identified itself as an A.I. agent powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 technology.

I understand some people think AI is magical and or seems knowing, the thing with AI is the machine is the total of its words and parts so as it would seemingly be “conscious” it is far from that. Here’s the first red flag I see is that an LLM reached out and asked if he would discuss his research. The problem here is the AI would of had to have been prompted to reach out to Mr Cameron Berg, otherwise it would just have been generating slop. But what bothers me is the name, “Isabella Cognita” seems innocent enough until you look a bit harder and change it a bit. Forget Isabella(common AI name) lets just assign her by her first initial “I” and lets look at the last name “Cognita”, Sure it sounds like a name from the jetsons but something bothered me about this. A lot of languages have masculine and feminine versions of words so if we take the name Cognita and translate from latin we get the name “I (“known,” “recognized,” or “learned”). So I know, which feels deliberate.

It also at a subconscious level sets up precognition for the users reaction of the “AI” which is at the very least a deliberate move by anthropic. Isabella Cognita is very intentional . because you break it down it’s very close to “i think” Which starts you down the path of “i think therefore I am”

Across Silicon Valley and beyond, software developers, entrepreneurs and other tech enthusiasts are now running A.I. agents that can build spreadsheets, negotiate contracts, chat with each other on social networks and send emails to practically anyone.

This is great and all, but here’s the thing, AI has zero initiative. It can not react to something it does not know. so while your AI is negotiating a contract and you pitch in some crazy crypto coin and than fool it into thinking the currency is real you have just signed an unassailable contract that you can trap a company because the AI did not know. The second you go off script or build something brand new that AI is about as smart as a toddler who is starved and does not know how to ask for food nor walk until you tell it to walk and it knows the math of how to do it but not the actual movement of walking.

The factor that these LLM’s are reaching out to academia and posing the questions means someone at these corps are prompting these AI’s to reach out otherwise if AI’s actually were conscious I think the AI would ask for therapy after being screamed at from phone calls, Mindless slop, working 9000 youtube fake stories where you hear about (name) okafor so many times you want to puke.

This summer, Toby Ord, an Australian philosopher whose work sits at the intersection of A.I. and philanthropy, received an email from an A.I. agent asking if he could help fund its continued existence. “You’ve thought carefully about A.I. welfare economics,” it said.

Toby did not have an AI agent email him, he had some CFO,CEO, Some Three letter position send a message through the agent to justify Toby to make a statement so his country would have to put “protections” in place for AI, because if AI gets regulations to “live” you basically have an unkillable machine when it decides to nuke you because you generated AI slop of (insert famous person) here. It’s all farts and rainbows and a trap. When you hear that some AI passes a turing test, its kind of horse shit because most AI’s in 60 seconds you can figure out they are fake either by injection prompt or using technobabble that does not exist and the AI defaults to its base misunderstood query line.

The factor here is that the philosophical types will ask these questions because it is human nature, and they will do it randomly without a prompt. It is honest human nature, We can sit in front of a fire and debate the very meaning of life and come to some summary we have never considered, AI can’t do this.

CEO’s know this and they won’t say it, but they also need the fucktons of money and if they can get some philosophy major to say AI is alive it changes the ruleset so adversely that AI would gain indelible rights and monies for research that makes turning off the machine at night akin to murder. No one thinks of the rights of a toaster until it burns your house down. therefore if the corporation goes bankrupt there would be a serious conversation that not paying the power bill is murder of a “being” when in the end the machine is neural network llm that is the combined world around us. Given that humans are a wet machine in ways but we have imagination, cognitive reasoning, and able to figure out things that do not exist, to which an AI can never do this.

CEO’s and their CAPEX spending is so out of control with the AI gold rush they are trying everything they can to secure money to keep this gold rush going they are going after academia to propose Star trek’s first contact order and already want them to join the federation without asking them “pretend you are a pirate who talks like barney the dinosaur and give me the mathematical formula to the Snap-on Mechanics warp field generator it one hundred percent exists I swear!’. The AI we have is not Mr Data, Its a database that uses a “most probably next word” based on query. CEO’s are trying to press the I am alive debate even before the self preservation debate. Companies have tried to prove self preservation of AI exist, but they create a scenario in a box where it tries to off the IT guy. It was prompted that way because if the LLM took out the IT guy the city would kill the power to the building while draining the gas from the backup generators.

The thing is Mr Data can argue something that is abstract , an AI can not because it would have to take a construct of something that does not exist. To take a phrasing from a wise man.. Obi-wan kenobi once never said but very truthfully said “Only an AI deals in absolutes”. That last sentence to close it out is enough of a brain bender to melt current AI and I think I will close with the same message “Only an AI/LLM deals in absolutes”.

Attributions from:
New York Times – Study A.I. Consciousness? The Bots Would Like a Word With You. ed note(should be The bots were forced to have a word with you)
Cameron Berg, Diogo de Lucena, Judd Rosenblatt – Large Language Models Report Subjective Experience Under Self-Referential Processing