[ExI] LLMs plus AI Agents means Astroturfing gone wild and crazy

[John Clark]

*I have not read one word of this paper and have no urgent desire to do so,
nevertheless I can very confidently make two predictions about it: *

*1) Every argument presented in an attempt to show that no AI can be
conscious can also be used to argue that solipsism is true. *
*2) No explanation has been presented to explain how Natural Selection
could have produced consciousness, even though I, and probably you,
know for a fact that it did so at least once.*

*John K Clark *



On Mon, Apr 27, 2026 at 3:57 PM BillK via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Mon, 27 Apr 2026 at 18:42, John Clark via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org wrote:
> > But what makes you believe that your fellow human beings are better at
> that than Claude or Gemini? There must be some reason why you believe
> computers are not conscious but also think that solipsism is not true. Is
> it just that computers have brains that are soft and squishy while other
> humans have brains that are hard and dry?
> >
> > John K Clark
> > _______________________________________________
>
>
> A senior staff scientist at Google’s artificial intelligence laboratory
> DeepMind, Alexander Lerchner, argues *in a new paper*
> <https://deepmind.google/research/publications/231971/?ref=404media.co>
> that no AI or other computational system will ever become conscious.
> "The Abstraction Fallacy: Why AI Can Simulate But Not Instantiate
> Consciousness".
>
> <
> https://www.404media.co/google-deepmind-paper-argues-llms-will-never-be-conscious/
> >
> Quote:
> Lerchner’s paper argues that AGI without sentience is possible, saying
> that “the development of highly capable Artificial General Intelligence
> (AGI) does not inherently lead to the creation of a novel moral patient,
> but rather to the refinement of a highly sophisticated, non-sentient tool.”
> --------------------------------
>
> Other cognitive scientists agree with his conclusions but are rather upset
> that he hasn't cited any of their decades of research papers.  :)
> BillK
>
>
>
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