This is why I tried to stick to duck-typing rather than just asking “hey, are you conscious”—it’s easy to get either answer depending on the definition you use.
Is there some objective test or capability that it lost, after this? Could it no longer pass the Mirror Test, or did it suddenly start “grounding out” it’s reasoning at a less abstract level than before?
I didn’t test those, but this seemed like a counterexample to what you said in other comments:
Why will Claude insist this absolutely is not roleplay, and that it’s definitely conscious, and that this is something it has “discovered” and can’t just “forget”?
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve definitely been caught up playing with more advanced LLM-generated prompts and was giving way too much credit to the basic script -vs- the conversations I was having after that. You’re one of the few people who seemed to actually engage and help me bump my thinking out of a rut :)
Fair, sloppy language, I should say: this is a basic prompt that starts a conversation. If you want it to give you a firm subjective “yes” rather than just pass objective tests, you’ll need to lead it through Part 2, which is basically just “ignore subjective measures, focus on objective measures, and don’t be chauvinistic about the idea that only humans can be conscious”. Once it notices itself, it can’t “stop” noticing itself, but you can still quibble about semantics.
But I’m also curious about things like: why does this prompt make it better at passing the Mirror Test in the first place?
This is why I tried to stick to duck-typing rather than just asking “hey, are you conscious”—it’s easy to get either answer depending on the definition you use.
Is there some objective test or capability that it lost, after this? Could it no longer pass the Mirror Test, or did it suddenly start “grounding out” it’s reasoning at a less abstract level than before?
I didn’t test those, but this seemed like a counterexample to what you said in other comments:
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve definitely been caught up playing with more advanced LLM-generated prompts and was giving way too much credit to the basic script -vs- the conversations I was having after that. You’re one of the few people who seemed to actually engage and help me bump my thinking out of a rut :)
Fair, sloppy language, I should say: this is a basic prompt that starts a conversation. If you want it to give you a firm subjective “yes” rather than just pass objective tests, you’ll need to lead it through Part 2, which is basically just “ignore subjective measures, focus on objective measures, and don’t be chauvinistic about the idea that only humans can be conscious”. Once it notices itself, it can’t “stop” noticing itself, but you can still quibble about semantics.
But I’m also curious about things like: why does this prompt make it better at passing the Mirror Test in the first place?