Daniel González

Improving how we think by understanding how we think.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@Anonimoversion2 fumes

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

The really important question is why everyone is focusing on whether AI is conscious or not, AI religion or AI art, when the important issue here is how AI is being implemented by big companies and the people behind that implementation. AI is a tool. Chatbots are just a fancy implementation deceiving all of you into a false interpretation of what AI really is. I think you all need to start paying attention to the real world instead of losing yourselves in fantasies.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

The debate around AI art is often framed as a question about quality. Can we tell the difference? Does it look real? But that framing misses the point entirely. The issue isn't the final product. It's the process that generates it.

It doesn't matter whether you're standing in front of a real Monet or a perfect AI replica. What made Monet's work art wasn't the image. It was the movement of a human being confronting his own perception of reality and finding a new language for it. He didn't just paint water lilies. He interrogated how light behaves, how time dissolves in a surface, how the eye constructs what it thinks it sees. The painting is the residue of that inquiry. The art was the inquiry itself.

AI has no inquiry. It has no reality to explore because it has no internal experience. It optimizes patterns extracted from the accumulated output of human exploration, but it skips the part that matters: the subject, the need, the risk of trying to articulate something that doesn't yet have a name.

In that sense, AI-generated art is a statistical average of human expression, not a new instance of it. It distills everything humans have already seen without anyone having to see anything. The output can be beautiful. It can be technically indistinguishable from the real thing. But beauty and art are not the same category.

Art is what happens when a human being uses a medium to expand the boundaries of shared thought. That requires someone standing somewhere, looking at something, and not quite having the words for it yet.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

The debate around AI art is often framed as a question about quality. Can we tell the difference? Does it look real? But that framing misses the point entirely. The issue isn't the final product. It's the process that generates it.

It doesn't matter whether you're standing in front of a real Monet or a perfect AI replica. What made Monet's work art wasn't the image. It was the movement of a human being confronting his own perception of reality and finding a new language for it. He didn't just paint water lilies. He interrogated how light behaves, how time dissolves in a surface, how the eye constructs what it thinks it sees. The painting is the residue of that inquiry. The art was the inquiry itself.

AI has no inquiry. It has no reality to explore because it has no internal experience. It optimizes patterns extracted from the accumulated output of human exploration, but it skips the part that matters: the subject, the need, the risk of trying to articulate something that doesn't yet have a name.

In that sense, AI-generated art is a statistical average of human expression, not a new instance of it. It distills everything humans have already seen without anyone having to see anything. The output can be beautiful. It can be technically indistinguishable from the real thing. But beauty and art are not the same category.

Art is what happens when a human being uses a medium to expand the boundaries of shared thought. That requires someone standing somewhere, looking at something, and not quite having the words for it yet.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

The debate around AI art is often framed as a question about quality. Can we tell the difference? Does it look real? But that framing misses the point entirely. The issue isn't the final product. It's the process that generates it.

It doesn't matter whether you're standing in front of a real Monet or a perfect AI replica. What made Monet's work art wasn't the image. It was the movement of a human being confronting his own perception of reality and finding a new language for it. He didn't just paint water lilies. He interrogated how light behaves, how time dissolves in a surface, how the eye constructs what it thinks it sees. The painting is the residue of that inquiry. The art was the inquiry itself.

AI has no inquiry. It has no reality to explore because it has no internal experience. It optimizes patterns extracted from the accumulated output of human exploration, but it skips the part that matters: the subject, the need, the risk of trying to articulate something that doesn't yet have a name.

In that sense, AI-generated art is a statistical average of human expression, not a new instance of it. It distills everything humans have already seen without anyone having to see anything. The output can be beautiful. It can be technically indistinguishable from the real thing. But beauty and art are not the same category.

Art is what happens when a human being uses a medium to expand the boundaries of shared thought. That requires someone standing somewhere, looking at something, and not quite having the words for it yet.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

The debate around AI art is often framed as a question about quality. Can we tell the difference? Does it look real? But that framing misses the point entirely. The issue isn't the final product. It's the process that generates it.

It doesn't matter whether you're standing in front of a real Monet or a perfect AI replica. What made Monet's work art wasn't the image. It was the movement of a human being confronting his own perception of reality and finding a new language for it. He didn't just paint water lilies. He interrogated how light behaves, how time dissolves in a surface, how the eye constructs what it thinks it sees. The painting is the residue of that inquiry. The art was the inquiry itself.

AI has no inquiry. It has no reality to explore because it has no internal experience. It optimizes patterns extracted from the accumulated output of human exploration, but it skips the part that matters: the subject, the need, the risk of trying to articulate something that doesn't yet have a name.

In that sense, AI-generated art is a statistical average of human expression, not a new instance of it. It distills everything humans have already seen without anyone having to see anything. The output can be beautiful. It can be technically indistinguishable from the real thing. But beauty and art are not the same category.

Art is what happens when a human being uses a medium to expand the boundaries of shared thought. That requires someone standing somewhere, looking at something, and not quite having the words for it yet.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@elonmusk For God’s sake, you were raised during apartheid and possibly by pro-Nazi grandparents.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@aspiringpeasant

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@mono_prosaico Pero el humano posee la razón, y la razón no es solo un instrumento de los deseos: puede volverse contra ellos, trascenderlos. El ideal surge entonces no como utopía del deber ser, sino como un estado alcanzable para quien decide librar la batalla interna que cada uno cargamos.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@Bunagayafrost It’s like trying to assemble an egg with a broken shell and then asking why evolution didn’t produce empty eggs.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

Hi, I’m curious about your opinion on this: how viable do you think the possibility is that the hype around AI consciousness is largely a strategy by companies to promote their products and increase market speculation?

I understand that there is ongoing research in areas like cognitive science and philosophy of mind exploring the nature of consciousness and whether it could, in principle, emerge in artificial systems. However, when it comes to current large language models, many public claims about “consciousness” seem overstated.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

@Robsitoo Uyyy y no has visto lo peor fruta en bolsitas individuales y luego todas las bolsitas en su empaque. Los humanos nos merecemos el infierno.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

I genuinely mean that I don't want or need to win anything here. But from what I understand, the only conversation you consider valid is one conducted within your own framework. And that raises an honest question: if the only valid criterion is what changes predictions, behavior or measurement, then from the outside you and a philosophical zombie would be operationally identical. So what does your framework actually do with that?

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

And regarding the deeper layer, I did not want to go further into it in this conversation because it is still an idea I am working on. But I did not use that term arbitrarily. It is grounded in something specific. What I believe underlies conscious experience is the evolutionary development of structures specialized in stimulus reception, signal transduction and internal interpretation. Over time these systems generated internal signaling languages based on electrochemical gradients whose properties in terms of frequency, temporality and intensity are specific to each area and its phylogenetic history. Multiple internal languages emerged from this process, each generating qualitatively distinct forms of inner experience.

The reason I do not think continuity and self reference are at the core of conscious experience is phylogenetic. Sensory systems specialized in vision, audition and somatic processing existed in primitive vertebrates long before the structures that support episodic memory or narrative self modeling appeared. The hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, which are central to the kind of continuity and self reference you describe, are comparatively late developments phylogenetically. Something was already being processed and experienced internally before those structures existed.

So continuity and self reference may be important properties of a highly developed conscious architecture but I do not think they are its origin or its core. They are a later layer built on top of something that was already there.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

I am not trying to win anything. I am just trying to understand this better and I genuinely appreciate that you shared your position and kept engaging. It was helpful. I used the words deeper layer because I am aware there is a limit to my understanding there. But I also think that limit exists for everyone on this problem so far. I do not believe your criteria of operability is pointing in the wrong direction entirely, but I do not think it is sufficient either. That is just a personal opinion. So it is not that I am protecting the hard problem. It is that I think none of us are anywhere close to solving it satisfactorily yet.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

I agree with what you are saying but that is exactly where the hard problem of consciousness lies. You are right that I am not closing the gap, and I want to be honest about that because nobody has. But I think your framework does not close it either. It dissolves it by changing what counts as an explanation. If we define consciousness as whatever produces coherent self modeling and behavioral consistency then yes, the problem disappears. But that is not solving it, that is deciding it does not exist because it is not operationally distinguishable.

The deeper layer I am pointing to is not a placeholder for mystery. It is an acknowledgment that a system explaining why it behaves as if it has a point of view is not the same as explaining why there is something it feels like to be that system. Those are two different questions and collapsing them into one is precisely what the hard problem is about.

You are right that I cannot point to something operationally different. But neither can you point to an operational account that explains subjective experience rather than just describing its functional correlates. We are both standing at the same edge. I am just not pretending the edge is not there.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

What you describe, the observer, the I that watches thoughts and feelings, is a real and valid phenomenological observation. But I think it reflects a very specific property of a highly developed cognitive architecture, one with metacognition, a narrative self, and a separation between observer and content. That is not the foundation of consciousness. It is one of its most phylogenetically late and sophisticated expressions.

A newborn does not have that separation between observer and content and clearly experiences. An octopus likely lacks that narrative structure and probably has some form of experience. So using that particular quality of your own inner life as the universal criterion for consciousness is, I believe, precisely the kind of anthropocentric projection the original post was pointing to. You are taking your singular qualitative configuration and making it the definition of what all possible experience must look like.

The failure to distinguish between a system that simulates consciousness and consciousness itself is a real problem. But the solution is not to anchor the definition of consciousness in the specific texture of human self awareness. That just moves the projection one level deeper.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

I understand your point and continuity and self reference are meaningful criteria for building an operational internal model. But I think that still works on the surface of a much deeper problem. A system can maintain a coherent model of itself across time without there being anything it feels like to be that system. Functional self reference explains operability but it does not explain the qualitative dimension of inner experience.

What we call consciousness is not just a system that tracks and updates itself. It emerges from a deeply layered architecture where I believe the quality of inner experience lives at a structural level far below what continuity and self modeling can account for. We are describing surface properties of something whose depth we have barely started to map.

[Daniel González @DGXhelios]

I never argued that AI has true understanding. The point of my argument was that we as humans think propositionally, so we give reason a privileged place in our understanding of what consciousness is, and therefore we project that onto AI, assuming that since it creates the illusion of understanding it must have consciousness. I also clarified that there is something AI does, not similar to what humans do, that might possess some form of internal space.