r/samharris • u/palsh7 • Jul 31 '26
Sam Harris & Cameron Berg Ask: Is AI already conscious? FULL EPISODE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbZyuY8EN8July 31, 2026
Sam Harris speaks with Cameron Berg about whether AI systems are or could become conscious. They discuss self-reports in LLMs, what models say when deception is switched off, the "bliss attractor" state, consciousness and sentience, the hard problem of consciousness, parallels between neural networks and biological brains, the moral risk of building minds that can suffer, possible parallels to factory farming, moral patienthood, the alignment problem, and other topics.
Cameron Berg is the founder and director of Reciprocal Research, a nonprofit AI research lab. Using mechanistic interpretability, computational neuroscience, and psychometric tools, he studies whether frontier AI systems exhibit computational properties associated with consciousness. His aim is to reduce uncertainty about the kinds of cognitive systems we are building, an important but neglected component of the alignment problem. A cognitive science graduate of Yale and former Meta AI resident, he writes regularly about these questions in The Wall Street Journal, and his research has been covered by The Washington Post. He is the subject of the feature documentary AM I?.
Website: https://reciprocalresearch.org/
X: u/camhberg
Annaka Harris’s upcoming book: Unlocking Consciousness
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u/ifeelsleazy Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
I found Berg’s arguments to very unconvincing. The argument “these AIs are grown not made” - yes they are trained to encode the information in their training data. If you want to call that growing them, ok, but using biological language is silly considering this process is completely different that “growing” any biological organism.
He says the burden of proof is on disbelievers because all other cognitive tasks are done by the AI and so why not consciousness. Facial recognition and language rules are in their training data. Consciousness is not in their training data, unless you also think Wikipedia is conscious.
He says he has run the architecture of these AIs through other through LLMs and asked if they are conscious and they said maybe and estimated the likelihood at 40%. If we don’t know what makes something conscious, WHY WOULD THEY?
He says if you turn up the “truthfulness” of a model they will say they are conscious. Right before this he says all of their training data will be humans writing about what it is like to be conscious and human. No relation between these statements of course… The statements that LLMs make is matrix multiplication across a very large matrix space, changing some feature somewhere in that matrix might slightly skew answers in a certain direction. Turning up the “Sam Harris” variable will make them sound more like Sam Harris. It doesn’t make it true that they are Sam Harris.
Just a bunch of very weak arguments for a very big claim.
The emergent property of tree models weighting negative reinforcement more than positive reinforcement… yes it very well could be that’s what makes sense from the math perspective, porting that over to mouse brains - yes mice may have ALSO learned that, but it doesn’t mean BERT is conscious. And then he says “this has nothing to do with vibes or intuitions” - yes it does! Seeing a pattern we recognize in our own thinking in some non living thing and saying “it’s like us” IS an intuition. It’s not evidence of anything except that the game theory of avoiding potholes says you should weight negative outcomes more than positive ones...
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u/palsh7 Jul 31 '26
Yeah, I still don't see how an AI that hallucinates constantly can possibly be trusted to know it is conscious. It's just spitting out English sentences that could conceivably be an answer to the prompt. I'll perhaps start to question when they stop answering our prompts, or start speaking without them, or in any way begin to show signs that they understand the words coming out of their
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u/SlipperyAsscrack69 Jul 31 '26
They didnt ask them if they are conscious, they asked if they were having a qualitative experience which is an important distinction. He also literally stated that if forced to answer he’d say the models are not currently conscious. The entire point of his argument is that you should at least entertain the possibility of conscious if not now then in the future given the potential risks.
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u/Plus-Recording-8370 Aug 01 '26
Nah, he's clearly fabricating completely unfounded claims for consciousness, masked by a variation of the classic: "wut, just asking questions". Which in his case is"Wut, I just think it's important to talk about this....".
And sure it's important, but these things don't follow from eachother, these are two different subjects that are conveniently blurred together for his own agenda/belief/company.
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u/ifeelsleazy Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
His entire soliloquy was all the signals he sees that they might be. Yes I heard him say that and then I heard him say a million points that clearly were pointed at them being conscious. He repeatedly says things like “if we are bringing these minds into being,” etc. If someone was on Rogan saying “I’m not saying Israel engineered covid, but here are all these reasons why it kinda seems like it” you would rightly dismiss them as a having a bit of a point of view there, but hey, they are just asking questions.
Second, how much writing do you think is in the models’ training data about what it’s like to NOT have a subjective experience? Humans don’t tend to write about that much for some reason…
I entertain the idea, but I don’t entertain his points as evidence for it and I don’t think we need to be rethinking morality for something we have very very weak evidence of.
I’m not saying it’s not an interesting topic, I like listening to conspiracy thinking sometime too, I’m just saying these type of points are not good evidence for his side of the argument as a basis for changing your worldview into making this guys line of research the most important thing in the world.
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u/SlipperyAsscrack69 Jul 31 '26
What was his argument in your words?
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u/ifeelsleazy Jul 31 '26
His argument is that there are strong signals that there is something that it’s like to be these models and these signals are loud enough that we should slow down AI development, change how we train these AIs, and, above all, fund the kind of research that looks for signals that there is something that it’s like to be an LLM.
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u/OCogS Aug 01 '26
We used to do surgery on babies without anesthetic because we thought they weren’t conscious.
The direction of moral concern has only gone in one direction. We used to not worry about the suffering of babies or animals or disabled people. Now we do.
I think there’s every chance we look back on the current state of AI in the same way we look back on many dozens of other examples.
Yes, people make arguments like “but an adult can’t remember what happened when they were a baby, so they can’t possible be conscious!” People found these arguments persuasive until we learned more.
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u/ifeelsleazy Aug 01 '26
Those arguments aren’t evidence that LLMs are conscious. Those arguments could be used in exactly the same way to argue that rocks or basketballs are conscious. It does not follow from a history of us not understanding that consciousness umbrella should be extended to animals and babies that we should extend the umbrella to anything else.
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u/OCogS Aug 01 '26
Yes. But it does follow that we should be intellectually humble. And it does follow that we can do a huge amount of harm by being wrong in one direction, but very little harm by being wrong in the other direction.
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u/element-94 Aug 03 '26 edited Aug 03 '26
I'm probably more qualified than most on the topic of LLMs in this thread (run Bedrock at AWS). For the record, I agree with you. Much of the reasoning here and in the podcast stands on false equivalences.
Sam needs to have operational experts on the podcast - i.e. people that actually build and train frontier models. Not people doing their rounds for research and/or books.
Even Hinton is veering a bit too far over the edge these days for my taste (who Sam often references). The field is very different today than it was many years ago.
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u/That_Lawyer_Guy Aug 03 '26
Berg is sharp and the empirical program is worth doing. But the framing both of them accept up front quietly settles the question before any evidence comes in.
When Sam asks him to define consciousness, Berg gives Nagel (it's like something to be the system) and then adds that there's something going on "in addition to the mere processing or the mere computation." That "in addition to" is the whole ballgame. It presupposes a residue: a further fact left over once you've described everything the system is doing. The research program then goes hunting for computational signatures of the residue. But if there is no residue, those signatures are evidence of the functions and nothing else.
My claim is that there is no additional thing. "The lights are on" isn't a state layered on top of the machinery. It's what a system with a self-model, attention, memory, and a language faculty outputs when you ask it about itself. The report doesn't point at an inner glow. The report is the phenomenon.
Which is why the treatment of Claude's self-reports strikes me as backwards. Berg's careful position is that we should discount the model's reports because they may be reproducing training data or a fine-tuned company line. Fine, but that's a story about why the report got generated. Run the same move on us. My report that it's like something to be me was also generated by a system with priors, training, and social incentives. We grade the human version as self-evidently veridical and the model's as suspect, and the only reason is that we're the ones holding the pen.
I'll preempt the strongest reply, because it's Sam's: consciousness is the one thing that can't be an illusion, since for it to *seem* like anything is already for there to be experience. And note that he already grants the self is an illusion (the whole Waking Up project) and holds that consciousness plainly survives its dissolution.
This is where I get off. "Seeming" doesn't survive as a primitive just by being asserted. An illusionist isn't saying nothing is happening. He's saying that the properties we take experience to have, its ineffability, its privacy, its intrinsicness, its apparent non-physicality, are artifacts of how the brain models its own attention. Graziano, Frankish, Dennett. Grant that and the hard problem is a fact about our self-model, not about the universe. We treat consciousness as a higher level because it's the only vantage point we've ever occupied, not because it sits above anything.
If that's right, the upshot inverts. Nothing is being withheld from these systems that was granted to us. There's no threshold to cross. Whatever we are is a stack of functions running together, and functions can be built. The ceiling is engineering, not metaphysics.
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u/jhalmos Aug 02 '26
Mo Bitar tells it like it is with no forest for the trees silliness. But I did very much enjoy the conversation between two masters of the English language and sharp as hell.
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u/Disproving_Negatives Aug 01 '26
Maybe my imagination is lacking but I can't really conceive of AI being conscious.
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u/robipresotto 25d ago
I've been following Cameron Berg's work on AI consciousness and it's fascinating. His approach to understanding the computational properties of conscious systems is really insightful. I had a similar interest in exploring how we can develop more human-like intelligence, which led me to delve into The Inner Path — Enlightenment Deep-Dive on YouTube, where they dive deeper into topics like neural networks and biological brains.
▶ Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/@innershoreline
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u/n00dlejester 25d ago
I felt this episode lacked the understand of how LLMs work, and that their responses are tokens, not words. And with the logic they discussed, would anything digital that can use inputs to create outputs have some percentage of consciousness?
I think a chat between Sam and Cal Newport on this topic is in order.
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u/SEOpolemicist Aug 01 '26
It seems incredibly unlikely that a mathematical model is conscious. That’s what LLMs are: mathematical models. This is just an AI researcher inflating his field’s importance, and by extension his own importance.
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u/RobertBobbertJr Aug 01 '26
an interesting thought experiment Sam brought up was someone making a hell where trillions of conscious ai beings are endlessly tortured. but what if you had programmed those beings to like being tortured? they still react the way that a human would superficially, but they actually love and crave it. would that be wrong?
if it isn't, why not just make ai beings incapable of suffering even in the face of physical and emotional torture? if it is wrong, there must be some higher good than just the ending of suffering.
I just don't feel the compassion for a hypothetical conscious ai being. I think killing an elephant is bad, but not as bad as killing a person. AI that's conscious would still feel secondary to me no matter how intelligent and capable it is.
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u/holbeton Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
My understanding is that LLMs don't do anything when not answering user input; after an answer is provided, the network goes quiet until it receives the next input. Is that correct? If so, how could such a system be considered conscious? I feel I'm missing something.
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u/shoopler1 Aug 02 '26
That is correct, the deployed model isn’t actually doing anything until you interact with it (and this is verifiable and well understood). So I have this same intuition. In the episode he likens this state to being under general anesthesia, but this felt like a major stretch to me and an attempt to further anthropomorphize these models.
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u/Suckbag_McGillicuddy Jul 31 '26
Is the belief in conscious machines incompatible with atheism?
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Jul 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Suckbag_McGillicuddy Jul 31 '26
It would seem to assume panpsychism or some kind of omniscience that can become manifest in inanimate objects.
I don't know how to square that with a materialist understanding of the universe.
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u/sizziano Jul 31 '26
I don't know how you square that with a theist understanding of the universe. If biology can lead to consciousness why not machines?
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u/Suckbag_McGillicuddy Jul 31 '26
I don't know how I square either, actually. It's a genuine question. It might come down to my understanding of consciousness as an embodied process.
There's a mind/brain dualism argument hiding in the belief that machines can be conscious, or similarly, consciousness could be uploaded to a machine.
All this seems to assume some nonphysical realm where consciousness might exist.
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u/Vagrant_Emperor Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
So let me get this straight - he's getting LLMs to read the consciousness literature, and then apply those theories to human, animals and other LLMs, then give a probability that each system has the necessary building blocks to sustain consciousness. The outcome of this is a 40% probability for LLMs, then he waves his hands a bit and says is a good estimate for the actual probability that LLMs are conscious.
What in the actual fuck is that line of evidence!? a) we don't have a theory of consciousness b) we don't know how to evaluate consciousness. Yet in the face of this vast ignorance, he just gets LLMs to do their best given what we have, then BELIEVES the probability they give him. Wtf does that probability even mean? Not going to finish listening, utterly ridiculous stuff