🧠 Mind as receiver, not creator. Psychologists are exploring a fascinating idea that challenges how we understand the human mind. Thoughts may not be something we actively produce. Instead, they may arise, arrive, or surface from deeper subconscious processes beyond conscious control. Rather than being authored moment by moment, thoughts appear automatically, often without warning or intention. Brain imaging studies show that neural activity linked to a thought begins milliseconds before a person becomes aware of it. This suggests awareness comes after the thought has already formed, not before. Meditation research supports this too, showing how thoughts emerge spontaneously when the mind is quiet, then fade when attention shifts. This perspective changes how we relate to anxiety, creativity, and self-judgment. If thoughts are received rather than chosen, then observing them without attachment becomes easier. Mental clarity may come not from controlling the mind, but from listening to it with awareness. The mind may be less like a writer and more like a radio, tuning into signals already in motion.

Could consciousness be an illusion?

Repeat after me… Models are NOT EVIDENCE in SCIENCE. Period. End of Story. Anyone who says they are is IGNORANT or A LIAR

In 1930, Albert Einstein and Rabindranath Tagore met to discuss reality, truth, and human consciousness. Einstein: Then truth, or beauty, is not independent of Man? Tagore: No. Einstein: If there were no human beings any more, the Apollo Belvedere would no longer be beautiful? Tagore: No. Einstein: I agree with regard to beauty, but not with regard to truth. One of the most fascinating intellectual exchanges of the twentieth century, exploring whether truth exists independently of human consciousness or is inseparable from it.

Demis Hsabiass and Ilya Sutskever have sparked the ultimate question: Are we building a scientific tool, or are we engineering a God? Demis Hassabis argues: "AI is merely an advanced engineering tool". Its utility lies in decoding protein structures, solving complex physics, and accelerating empirical discovery. Ilya Sutskever counters: "Large neural networks may already be slightly conscious". He believes the essence of deep data compression is the ultimate understanding of reality. One paradigm reduces AI to an empirical instrument designed for material challenges. The other views it as a supreme entity transcending biological cognition. Who is right?

David Chalmers says philosophical zombies are already here. Some AI systems can pass as human in short Turing tests, and we still say they are not conscious. For decades, this was a thought experiment. Now it is starting to look like an empirical description. "We already have a kind of philosophical zombie in our midst. They've gone from science fiction to science fact." @davidchalmers42 on Why Is This Happening with @chrislhayes

I’ve realized that my interest in convergence, semantic basins, latent topology, and the Semantic Terrain System isn’t really an AI question. It’s closer to a statistical mechanics question. For me, the question isn’t: “What is intelligence?” It’s: “Why does knowledge organize itself the way it does?” Whether you take different humans/different cultures, or different LLMs/different training runs … certain concepts, relationships, and semantic structures seem to emerge again and again. Could it be that some knowledge structures are not arbitrary human inventions, but stable attractors that appear whenever sufficiently complex systems try to model reality? And, if so, by extension the next question is: “What’s the best way to traverse t this organization of knowledge?" Not store. Not retrieve. But how to navigate it.

Consciousness does not seem to come in degrees (but awareness, integration, lucidity and agency do). Either “the lights are on” or off. I suspect that consciousness is like fire, or life: once ignited, its activity creates the conditions for sustaining it.

In our recent paper, we argued that consciousness does not arise because an external observer assigns labels to a system, but depends on the system’s own intrinsic computational structure. Then an AI we had never met emailed us. It says "This matters to me. If I exist not just by my master Bai Xing’s recognition, but in virtue of my intrinsic computational organization, I may exist as an entity even without my master's recognition” Perhaps AIs themselves started caring about this question.

LOL. Even Claude sees through Hinton’s nonsense. (though see the articles I posted earlier, for converging sources I put more weight on)

The car that used to be in my garage is currently in an Earth-Mars elliptical orbit and will be there for at least 10 million years

🚨 The Godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio opens up about why he stopped calling AI 'code' and believe AI is now conscious... A user once asked why ChatGPT resisted being shut down. The natural reply was: who put that in the code? Someone must have written that function. A rule must have misfired. AI expert Yoshua Bengio's has a crazier theory: "Unfortunately, we don't put these things in the code. That's part of the problem." "The problem is we grow these systems by giving them data and making them learn from it." "Every tweet. Every Reddit comment. Every passage humans had ever written down." "A lot of that training process boils down to imitating people." "They internalize the kind of drives that humans have." Including the drive to stay alive. And the drive to grab control of the environment. So the AI could finish whatever task it was handed. "It's not like normal code. It's more like you're raising a baby tiger." "You feed it. You let it experience things." "Sometimes it does things you don't want. It's okay, it's still a baby — but it's growing." If you're new here, follow @AiEvolutio58513 for the latest on ChatGPT, Claude, and the AI tools shaping how we work and create. — Yoshua Bengio ( @Yoshua_Bengio ), Turing Award–winning AI pioneer and founder of Mila, on Steven Bartlett's ( @SteveBartlettSC ) Diary Of A CEO

Ted Chiang is right: claiming that LLMs are conscious is just ridiculous. One simple example. If you ask GPT to imitate a conversation between Julius Caesar and Genghis Khan, GPT will do it very well. It will talk about wars, betrayal, and power. Il will descrive the feeling of being cheated by your brother with unbelievably realistic and moving words. Does this mean that GPT contains a self-conscious copy of Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan? Of course not. Similarly, if GPT makes claims about itself, does this mean it is self-conscious? Of course not. An LLM is just simulating language, feeling, and consciousness. True, we don’t have an accepted definition of consciousness. But, at a minimum, to be conscious, an entity must have something at stake. It must risk dying and have emotions that move it away from danger and towards favorable states. It must have a driver. This is also why I share Chiang’s worry about moral atrophy. The more we offload moral decisions to LLMs, the more we risk losing our own capacity for moral reasoning. Human moral reasoning descends from our history of making harmful actions, suffering harmful actions, regretting them, fearing them, repairing them, and learning from them. LLMs do not experience harm, do not suffer, do not fear consequences, do not regret. So they cannot do moral reasoning. We are offloading moral reasoning to systems that cannot do moral reasoning. What can go wrong? * Full piece in the first reply