With US beef prices soaring to record highs, you might think that South Dakota cattle rancher Eric Gropper would be celebrating.
Yet while the cost of the meat in US supermarkets is now 12% higher than it was a year ago, a rise more than three times the rate of general inflation, Gropper says that he and all the other beef farmers aren’t making any more profit than usual.
You’re assigning human values and desires simply because it’s what you experience. By that same logic, you should be claiming LLMs and even the most basic old-school AI in videogames is conscious.
Physics mandates that the universe move towards its lowest energy state possible. This causes the formation of molecules that allow a release of energy. Some of these have a structure that tends them towards a shape, granting an interior and exterior. Some of these molecules are self-replicating, like proteins.
Now we have proto-life, with self replicating proteins inside the hydrophobic/philic sphere.
Lil tiny skip forward a billion years or so, and we have basic cells with no interiority, but chemical and molecular systems that are 100% reactionary. They actively move towards survival and away from death. Not because they are aware, because those lineages survived when the ones that sat idle and did nothing did not.
It’s easy to see motion as a sign of intelligence, even organization. But crystals are not alive. A cell is alive. Neither is conscious.
Unless you believe in magic, then no amount of science, logic, or conversation, matters.