At <<https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-moderately-easy-problem-of-consciousness>> I tried to post this to SubStack Notes, but no dice: There appears to be a length limit! Who knew!
Noah—
You frame this nicely as “the moderately easy problem of consciousness”—not the metaphysical “why is there anything it is like to be…?” but the workaday “what sort of physical and computational structures do we h...
The core tension here is between the allure of AI as a conscious entity and the reality of its current capabilities. The author’s anecdote about ChatGPT-3.5’s failure to recognize Noah Smith as a human economist—rather than a chatbot—serves as a powerful illustration of AI’s fundamental limitations. This isn’t just about factual errors; it’s about the absence of any meaningful model of the world or the conversational context. The system’s "confidence" in its responses, whether correct or absurd,...