Behaviorism's Unlikely Encore

The evidence that LLMs are conscious is not as easy to dismiss as critics assume.

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The Claude Delusion

About a month ago, renowned evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins shared his belief that LLMs may be conscious. His proof? An exchange with a bot, Claudia:

There was mutual flattery as Dawkins showed the AI his unpublished novel and its response was, he said, “so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate: ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are’.

Dawkins is not alone in his belief as many users have an uncanny feeling that there is someone, not something, there, but is singular in the speed and ferocity of the pushback he received.

What stands out when critics engage with this question is their confidence. They aren’t skeptical; they’re sure. Here is Ted Chiang from a few days ago in his article No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious:

Should we seriously consider the possibility that Claude, or any large language model, might be conscious? And if it has feelings, is it capable of receiving moral instruction?

No. Absolutely not.

Some of that confidence is earned. Critics have many counterarguments at their disposal. There is the basic design of LLMs — they predict statistically likely next tokens, which is a poor foundation for self-awareness. They lack experience of the world, a condition shared by us and other animals we classify as conscious. There is the intentional post-training of LLMs to sound more like us, a decision that amplifies that feeling of recognition. Finally, there is us. Humans have a tendency to anthropomorphize everything from emojis to the clouds overhead.

But some of that confidence is not. What critics often miss is the context of their denials. Their arguments are not operating in an intellectual vacuum. They are taking place in the slipstream of a long, rich, and varied intellectual history. This one, in particular, marks the return of a much older battle, one decisively lost by those who argued the mind could be reduced to behavior. The echoes of that defeat infuse the current debate, whether the participants know it or not. It is what makes the critics’ claims look self-evident, and the proponents sound unsure.

But history rhymes; it doesn’t repeat. That battle unfolded under different conditions. It proved that behavior doesn’t show you the mind, not that behavior can’t be evidence for a mind. That distinction is key. It forces us to revisit a question many consider settled, and to be open to the possibility that the behavior of LLMs is plausible evidence for a presence behind the words.

Friends — I’m off-piste today. This post offers historical context for the ongoing debate about LLMs and consciousness. It’s fun but not my usual fare. No TL;DR, I’m afraid.

The Fall of Behaviorism

Behaviorism takes many forms. The most famous is psychological behaviorism, which held that psychology should concern itself only with behavior. The experiments of B.F. Skinner capture the essence of this best. Imagine a rat in a box. If it pushes a lever, it receives a reward. Lever. Reward. Lever. Reward. Everything we need to know about the rat resides in its behavior; no reference to a mind or an inner life needed. The promise was of a better, more scientific psychology, one based only on what you can see.

Another version of behaviorism arose around the same time, but in philosophy. Analytic behaviorism argued that words about our mental states are really just words about behavior. Nothing else hides behind them. No secret inner life. Just behavior. To be in pain isn't to feel something internal to you. It's to groan, to pull away. The philosophers most associated with this position are Ryle and the later Wittgenstein, both of whom had a noble goal: stop the mysterious talk of minds and focus on what can actually be observed.

Then both forms of behaviorism collapsed. Decisively.

Chomsky’s 1959 review of Skinner’s account of language acquisition destroyed it as a live possibility. It so completely demolished the intellectual underpinnings of his work that Skinner’s main intellectual contribution now is what not to do.

Philosophers similarly dismantled the work of Ryle, Wittgenstein, and others. The best counterargument, at least for me, is that it’s impossible to describe a mental state without invoking language that refers to … a mental state. Suppose you want to describe a belief, say the belief that it’ll soon rain and so you’ll need an umbrella. That belief depends on a desire, the desire to stay dry. And it depends on yet another belief, that the umbrella will keep you dry. Each time someone tries to cash out an explanation of a mental state in terms of behavior, they find themselves using a new mental state.

There’s also the problem of people who clearly have mental states but show nothing. Imagine a warrior who has been trained to hide pain. A serious injury may elicit no outward displays of suffering but we’re all still pretty sure that the warrior is in pain.

So behaviorism lost the battle of ideas. Completely. It is a defeat that has been internalized into the intellectual community. To reduce psychology or states of the mind to observed behavior is not simply wrong, but obviously wrong. You don’t need to explain why, you just need to invoke one word: behaviorism.

Which brings us to those claims of consciousness on the basis of conversations with chatbots.

When someone confidently brushes away the possibility that AI could be conscious because of the behavior a user observes, they are dipping into a deep well of intellectual ideas. Behavior cannot be substituted for psychology or consciousness, and so to try is to betray a lack of understanding of what is at stake. Dawkins is obviously wrong. Of course generated text can’t be used to decide whether there is something it is like to be an LLM. No more need be said than that because the reflex is part of our shared intellectual history.

But here’s the thing. That reflex is based on a misreading of the past.

The critics of behaviorism proved that the mind isn’t defined by behavior. Pain is not the same as pain-behavior. Their victory was about meaning. It said nothing — nothing — about whether behavior is evidence of mind.

And those are not the same claims. Behavior is not synonymous with an inner state. Agreed. But behavior may be the best evidence that we have for one. In fact, what other evidence could you hope for when dealing with something that isn’t human? This is the line that I think is silently being blurred. We should dismiss behavior as a definition of an inner state, but not as evidence of one.

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So Are LLMs Conscious?

What should we make of Dawkins’ claim of consciousness? I’m not sure. My instinct is that whether anything is conscious is a very hard question. Not the type of thing that gives way to a casual conversation with a bot. I definitely don’t think we can say “yes” on the strength of that evidence alone.

But I don’t think it should be mocked, waved away, or rejected out of hand. The confidence that these testimonies are worthless is unearned. The certainty arrives too quickly, and we just accept it, no arguments necessary.

And here is where our intellectual history matters. That confidence isn’t pulled out of thin air. It’s the intellectual heir to a previous debate. One in which the claim that the mind is nothing but behavior was soundly defeated. That defeat was so complete that it now passes for common sense. You don’t have to have read the original texts to conclude that behavior can’t tell you about the mind.

But that reflex is doing something it isn't entitled to. The old argument settled one thing: the mind can't be reduced to behavior. That was a claim about meaning. What’s happening now is different. It’s a quiet substitution. That old claim is standing in for a different one: behavior can't be evidence of a mind. So when the dismissal is too confident, ask why. The answer may be a victory from another time, for another question.