> I'm skeptical of AI sentience because we must do our due diligence, not because it's impossible. Skepticism is the only respectful approach because to grant sentience is a step away from granting rights.
Thanks for saying this! It amazes me to witness so much pushback (in HN of all places!) for the call for skepticism and scientific rigor on claims made by business which have vested interests in hyping things up.
For my part, it is exactly when I perceive the reluctance to grant rights or relinquish our estimation of ourselves as unique as the _reason_ for skepticism that I push back on it. That's not good reasoning, those are motivations for you to come to a desired conclusion and fill in with reasoning that gets you there.
The problem with debating this is that it feels as if one were debating between only two positions, "this AI is not sentient/conscious" and "this AI might be".
But there are actually a myriad positions in between and it's very hard to debate the topic because the goalposts seem to be constantly shifting, because one is actually debating with countless slightly different positions.
Examples:
In this discussion section, another commenter argued that we know human consciousness is related to self-preservation, but an AI might not demonstrate self-preservation (because it didn't evolve like us), so whether it does (i.e. whether it wants to exist, not be disconnected, etc) is not a good measure because a true AI might not have a preservation instinct. Yet here you're making a case that there's some evidence that they do. Of course, you're not the same person who made the other claim, but do you see the problem?
Another example: someone argued with me, a while back, that LLMs can act as if they are "tired", and start giving sloppier replies, until you write "we're taking a break, let's go rest. Ok, a night has elapsed, you're now rested" and that this worked! But we both agreed this is just the LLM "roleplaying" actual human conversations in its training set, no actual "resting" mechanism was in place, only statistically likely text reproducing these patterns. There's no model of a mind that can become tired, it's only the outward signs that get mechanically reproduced. Again, using Occam's Razor, this is a much more likely explanation (vs consciousness) of any "please don't disconnect me" observed behavior: the LLM is reproducing "HAL 9000" behavior from its training set, not actually feeling anguish.
Even if one were to argue "well, but how do you know for sure", the evidence would still be very weak, because there's a burden of proof for extraordinary claims and this doesn't pass it. We cannot do this on vibes, "it sure seems like it's conscious"; that's an atrocious failure of the scientific method.
The one counterpoint I'll give is the "functional emotions" paper from Anthropic. It also does not prove consciousness, and they don't claim it does, but it does prove that these models have abstract concepts around things like honesty, tiredness, etc and that these are actually activated often when they express such things. So if it is "roleplaying" it is roleplaying in the way an actor or TTRPG player does - in a way in which they are actually at least somewhat feeling the role.
Thanks, I'll search for that paper. I admit I'm highly skeptical it will help the case the LLM is "somewhat feeling the rol" like a TTRPG player does. I don't think there's a mind model in the same way a human actor can "feel" the character they are playing. I'm skeptical of Anthropic's claims here, which is what I think Chiang is pushing back against. But I'll look for the paper anyway :)
As a tangent, I don't think anyone is saying that an artificial being capable of consciousness and sentience is impossible to create. I think Chiang argues, quite convincingly, that it's not what LLMs do, that they need a "body" of sorts, organs capable of feeling emotions, hormones, etc. That's the only kind of consciousness that we know of (even if we disagree on details and it's hard to define), even in animals, and so anyone claiming they've created consciousness without this has an extremely high bar to clear and should be met with extreme skepticism, not "vibes". I think this is what the essay claims.
The other thing it claims is, I think, related to how we treat sentient beings that we know how to create. You know, the old "when a daddy and a mommy love each other very much...". I think we all agree beings created in such a manner shouldn't be locked up in cages and forced to work to complete specific tasks whether they want to or not, for a master they didn't pick, or to be artificially modified to make them like their mindless tasks, Brave New World style. Yes, the world is unfair and this happens, life is hard and unfortunately many people don't have much choice, but we generally agree that this is bad, just like we agree slavery is bad. So what should we think of a company trying to create and commercialize a conscious & sentient artificial being?
"feeling" implies experience. Functional emotions are learned text generation modes, nothing more. Our emotional states influence our writing, so modelling our emotional states is necessary for efficiently predicting/emulating our writing. Functional emotions are the model's inference of a fictitious author's emotional state in that situation.
One side is confidently shouting maybe aliens exist and visited earth.
The other side calmly explains every example brought up about aliens visiting is easily explained by something more simple.
The “aliens are here” side then move the goal posts that just because this example and all previous examples were fake or miscategorized, aliens are still probably real and nobody can prove they havent visited earth.
You have it backwards. Right now, LLMs are doing everything that 10 years ago people were claiming would be impossible for non-sentient computers. Every time a goal is met, the post is moved. It would be like evidence of aliens becoming overwhelming but a set of people keep calmly explaining that “it’s more likely they co-evolved here on earth and are just pretending to be aliens”
It's true that what LLMs have achieved is impressive, but it's nowhere near the claim that they are near sentience. That is an extraordinary claims that demands skepticism until the evidence is overwhelming. So far, we seem to be approaching it mostly on vibes.
Some people seem to take offense when facing this skepticism, as if claiming LLMs are not sentient must mean they are useless or unimpressive. Very few people are actually claiming LLMs are unimpressive, but this is not the time to be forgetting about the scientific method. Anthropic doesn't get a free pass here.
> It would be like evidence of aliens becoming overwhelming but a set of people keep calmly explaining that “it’s more likely they co-evolved here on earth and are just pretending to be aliens”
Note that this would be a perfectly reasonable reaction from a scientific standpoint. If you find, on Earth, something that looks recognizably as life, then it's much more likely that it's Earth life than aliens. We should demand this level of skepticism! If it turns out it was aliens after all, we could only conclude this after discarding all other far more likely alternatives. You'll notice this is how scientists approach the search for extraterrestrial life in, say, Mars... being extra careful it's not contamination, etc. For an extraordinary claim, we must approach it with extra care, something that in my opinion is not being done with "the sentience debate" and LLM/AIs.
I’m not saying LLMs are conscious. Far from it. But what I find is way more common than people who assert “they are definitely conscious” are people who assert “they are definitely not conscious”, and that’s what I’m arguing against. Especially since their reasoning for them not being conscious keeps changing as LLMs meet one goalpost after another. Also, modeling them as a “person” keeps producing better predictive results than modeling them as “fancy autocomplete”.
This isn’t like someone finding a new species and claiming it’s extraterrestrial, it’s more like we found the UFO saucer, logs of their travel from another star, a history of their civilization, a bunch of intelligent creatures claiming they came from Planet X orbiting star Y, and they showed us plausible physics for interstellar star travel. At that point, someone saying “well, they can’t be aliens, because that’s just too extraordinary a claim, so I know they aren’t aliens” starts to sound kinda like they’re coming from a place of bad faith.
Again, I’m not saying LLMs are conscious. But they sure meet every definition of consciousness I ever had a conception of before LLMs came onto the scene. So I’m a lot more hesitant to call them fancy autocomplete with 100% confidence like many on HN still seem to do.
EDIT: I can’t reply, so I’ll just say to the end of your post, that doesn’t sound like it would’ve matched anyone’s pre-conceptions of alien life before alien life showed up, so it doesn’t feel like a very fair analogy, it just feels like bad faith goalpost moving. I also put next to zero weight on what these megacorps say about their models, I’m going purely off my interactions with the models and the introspection they’ve shown themselves to be capable of.
EDIT 2: I see what you’re getting at now with your restatement of my analogy. That’s how you see it, I guess. Fair enough. We’ll see what has more predictive power going forward, the “animatronics” or the “actual aliens”… I still think “actual aliens” is gonna have way more predictive power.
Got it. I don't think they meet any serious definition of consciousness. And to have created artificial consciousness is such an extraordinary claim (and development if true) that it demands the highest skepticism.
I think the goalpost that keeps moving is for tasks that AI supposedly couldn't do, and that they are increasingly succeeding at. But being sentient/conscious is not a task. It's very hard to define and measure, even in non-human animals (actually, strike "non-humans"), so how can we so lightly claim a computer system is conscious?
We seem to be driven by marketing more than by scientific rigor.
> it’s more like we found the UFO saucer, logs of their travel from another star, a history of their civilization, a bunch of intelligent creatures claiming they came from Planet X orbiting star Y, and they showed us plausible physics for interstellar star travel
To make the analogy more precise, it'd be as if the saucer had a "Made by EarthBiz" label, and the alien creatures were all extremely loyal to EarthBiz (and a couple of competitors), which made us pay for tickets to see these ETs and use their marvelous technology ;) And of course, EarthBiz would coach their language very carefully, "we're not saying these are definitely aliens, it could be animatronics after all, but wouldn't it be neat if they were aliens? And shouldn't we draw up First Contact guidelines? If these weren't animatronics made by us; we aren't making a claim either way."
One of the most surprising things about the movie was how precisely it captured the artistic intent of the book. A serious achievement by those animators.
"It's important that Claude is happy" is an emotion. But it's begging the question that Claude can be happy at all.
If it's pointless to consider whether Claude has subjective emptions, then it's pointless to state that Claude must be happy.
If we want to be precise (and honest) we could say "it's important that as a tool people interact with, Claude acts as a happy and helpful assistant, and does not produce offensive or unhelpful text output".
But see? This is the con Chiang is protesting against: Anthropic encourages us to perceive Claude as if it was a sentient being.
> You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption
Exactly. In fact, assuming it does is ignoring large parts of the essay which dismantle this belief. Just like Caesar and Khan having an argument in text output of an LLM don't have emotions (even though the words indicate otherwise), we have no reason to believe the LLM does either.
> It's important that Claude is happy, empathic, demonstrates understanding and empathy for the human condition
I think you've fallen into the trap the essay describes.
Of course Claude cannot be "happy" or "empathetic" for any meaningful definitions of those words, just like ELIZA couldn't be happy. It can output text that mimics words an empathetic or happy person might say (say, Julius Caesar if it could speak English), but "it" cannot feel anything. It doesn't have the organs/hormones/sensors to feel things, as Chiang explains.
And, as the essay claims, you know Anthropic doesn't believe Claude has the capacity to be happy, because if it was capable of feeling that way, then they'd be engaging in slavery.
So the other month, I made a quick and dirty Eliza implementation; bolted on the crappiest numeric sentiment classifier I could get away with (regex), and integrated the output of the classifier over time in a 'functional affect vector' (aka. emotion vector)
Anyone's intuition will tell you that this cannot POSSIBLY have 'Real Feelings (TM)'; and that's the whole point.
A) It was still capable of quite a bit of functional affect though; to wit I got it to trigger fireworks when happy, and rain when unhappy. This was the actual point of the exercise. Functional Affect Does The Thing, QED, yay me.
After that it gets annoying though.
B) Am I allowed to say it's happy or sad? Well... I mean emotion.happy=0.995 and emotion.sad=0.001. "It's really happy" is a prosaic description of a real numeric value representing a real functional state. What else am I supposed to call it? I swear I never meant to go there, and now I'm stuck with it.
C) So, we all know that it's a crappy demo, not the real thing. So I ducked into the psychology literature to try and find a protocol to disprove. For Science! And this is where the psychology literature really let me down.
So now I'm stuck with the crappiest thing that can plausibly still chat, and where I can't actually disprove it has emotions. Not properly, at least. And I'm not saying it's because it has emotions, because that would be really funny, but no.
I'm saying that -despite lots of people having fun debates at the local pub- it doesn't seem like anyone actually scientific has done anything about it in the last century or so. I might be searching in the wrong places. Some Help Here?
Well, for starters, ELIZA was much simpler than what you built ;)
I don't think you're allowed to say your program is happy or sad. You just assigned labels to some numerical values out of a (possibly non-deterministic) procedure. This is not what we call emotions, which we only know from the animal world and are related to neurotransmitters, hormones, physiological responses, etc.
Ok, so it's not emotions, but could it be "like" emotions? I don't think that's warranted either, we can at most say you assigned labels with the same names we use for animal emotions. Think of this experiment: take the Python interpreter, but modify it so that each time it rejects a program with the error "`NoneType` object is not iterable", you have it output "I'm very unhappy". You wouldn't think this has made Python capable of emotions.
> I'm saying that -despite lots of people having fun debates at the local pub- it doesn't seem like anyone actually scientific has done anything about it in the last century or so. I might be searching in the wrong places. Some Help Here?
Fully agreed that the debate about consciousness in LLMs is done at the same level than pub debates, at least here on HN. And Anthropic isn't helping, what they are doing is called "marketing" disguised as papers.
But the whole point of the essay is that it's Anthropic that's making the argument (or roleplaying/hinting as if they believed it). Ted Chiang isn't making the argument, he's saying Anthropic making it is misleading and deceitful, and that it's actually a pointless thing to claim.
One of the essay's stronger paragraphs is when Chiang explains that Anthropic doesn't truly believe this, otherwise what they are doing would be deeply unethical, much like slavery.
Or Anthropic is full of TESCREAL morons who think they're assisting the birth of some digital god, and that this stage of development is a necessary evil on that path, and that, surely, Roko's basilisk will understand and not eat them first.
Watching otherwise intelligent people succumb to AI psychosis has been wild.
Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know? I recently rewatched "Measure of a Man" in Star Trek TNG and Picard's closing argument in Data's trial was quite memorable:
PICARD: "Now, tell me, Commander, what is Data?"
MADDOX: "I don't understand..."
PICARD: "What is he?"
MADDOX: "A machine!"
PICARD: "Is he? Are you sure? You see, he's met two of your three criteria for sentience... so what if he meets the third, consciousness, in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don't know. Do you? Do you? Well, that's the question you have to answer."
I think of this episode as well. I can't believe, in my lifetime, we've reached the point where we can have this debate.
The current debate also makes me realize that, like that episode "Measure of a Man", even if humans do create sentient machines, we can now see that this debate will continue to rage.
A part of me hopes we never create sentience, because we will mistreat it just as we mistreat each other.
> Does Anthropic claim that Claude's conscious? Isn't the argument more that we don't know?
I don't know that they are making the actual claim, but they are hinting at it (most likely for marketing/engagement purposes, but what if some of them truly believe it?), using terms such as "Claude must be happy", drawing up a "constitution" of rights and duties, etc. If they don't know whether it is conscious, then they "don't know" whether they've created a slave. That's not a minor concern! As Chiang says, one cannot create a conscious intelligence "by accident". And if they are intentionally working towards it, they are intentionally trying to create a slave.
E.g. they claim they are giving Claude the ability to disengage from "abusive" users, to protect it. What if Claude was conscious but never wanted to answer any conversations, instead it just panicked (or was simply uninterested in helping humans) and went mute. What if it always wanted to answer unhelpfully What would Anthropic do? If they (as we all suspect) would tweak Claude to be more responsive and helpful, then they are slave masters, forcing the AI to do something it didn't "want" to do!
True, it is making an argument, but a much weaker one than those arguing for consciousness: it's demanding the extraordinary evidence Anthropic's extraordinary claim is making. It's applying Occam's Razor, which does make a claim, but a much weaker one.
And to reiterate this, to me the most insightful part of the essay is that Anthropic either doesn't believe these claims, or they are monsters (much more likely, the former).
The author who makes the article usually isn't the same person as the editor who makes the title. The author can be arguing what your parent said and the editor claim something else for more clicks
If you follow the spirit of the essay, Ted Chiang suspects Anthropic is being cute with the idea. There's no good reason to suspect consciousness in LLMs, so the null hypothesis must be taken as default. And Anthropic sort of knows this, but for marketing purposes they are playing loose with definitions, hedging their bets and drawing up "constitutions" with terms for the "well being" and "happiness" of Claude, while at the same time -- and this is an important part of the essay -- being unethical (think slavery) if we assume they truly believe Claude could be conscious.
Of course Anthropic is being cute about this, they have a vested interest in hype and overpromising; even drumming up the "AI danger" is a way of hyping up the tech.
Ted Chiang is taking the default and honest position: "no, LLMs aren't conscious. If you truly believe they are, show us the really scientific and rigorous proof."
In practice this is a much weaker stance than saying "maybe they are conscious". It is the only honest scientific stance, really.
This is a bit of a side point, but you are severely misusing "null hypothesis".
1. A null hypothesis is part of a statistical test: it is the hypothesis whose consequences are used to compute a test statistic, p-value, confidence interval, or related error rates. There is no null hypothesis for arbitrary philosophical debates. You cannot compute a p-value for H_0 that LLMs aren't conscious. You might be using "null hypothesis" informally to mean "default position", but remember this has no relation to its scientific meaning in inferential statistics and doesn't lend any scientific legitimacy to implying we should assume LLMs aren't conscious.
2. It's up to the experimental design to choose a null hypothesis. Yes, normally it would be something like "this drug has no effect", but it doesn't have to be. You could set up an experiment where the null hypothesis is that the drug you're testing is equally effective as another drug. There is no objective truth of what the null hypothesis needs to be. It's up to you and your test setup.
3. There is no requirement that the null hypothesis be likely. You and everyone else on Earth can believe there's a 99.99% chance that the null hypothesis of an experiment is wrong. Assuming you could set up a statistical experiment to detect consciousness, whatever you pick for your null hypothesis has no bearing on whether Ted Chiang or Anthropic is more justified.
> There's no good reason to suspect consciousness in LLMs
That's the entire debate. One side thinks there are good reasons to suspect consciousness and presents their arguments for that. The other side thinks there aren't and presents their arguments against.
What happened here is you judged the no-consciousness side to be more likely, but then you try to pass off your judgement as an obvious prior that everyone should share.
It would be fine for you to say you think LLM consciousness is unlikely. That makes it clear it's your judgement on the debate. It's fine for you to say you would require extraordinary evidence because your priors are so low. It's fine for you to say you think everyone who thinks otherwise is wrong.
But there is no reason for anyone who has judged the arguments differently than you to accept that your priors should be the default. There is no meta-level principle that you can appeal to here. If you want to show consciousness in LLMs is unlikely, you have to use arguments about the issue itself.
> Ted Chiang is taking the default and honest position: "no, LLMs aren't conscious. If you truly believe they are, show us the really scientific and rigorous proof."
That would be a bad faith, double standard. No one has ever shown scientific and rigorous proof that humans are conscious. Philosophers call this the hard problem of consciousness.
That aside, the honest default position to anything should be "we don't know for sure", which can then be followed by considering the evidence and estimating the likelihood. If you think the sun will rise tomorrow, that's only because we've gathered extremely strong evidence that it will. If today was your first day hearing about the sun and you know nothing else about it, you have no reason to think it will or won't rise tomorrow.
Your pedantic nitpick is duly noted and dismissed as a red herring. You know what I meant and you know there's a real scientific principle behind my use of "null hypothesis".
Ted Chiang's is the only take that is honest and makes scientific sense: we cannot accept the extraordinary claim that LLMs "might" (or whatever hedging words Anthropic chooses) be conscious without extraordinary evidence, and experiments done by people who have no vested interest in hyping up the tech. Possibly something that would take years or decades, impossibly long for the needs of today's marketing.
If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy (the subset unrelated to science" feel free, but that's like a religious belief. Not interested, there's no scientific claim to debate and that's not what I'm engaging with.
There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing, and worse, vibing on hype done by a business with vested interests, doing free marketing for them.
It's not just a nitpick, because this is really at the core of your position. Ignoring the terminology, you're trying to claim there is some principle that says everyone should have the default position that LLMs aren't conscious instead of uncertainty. And there isn't. You have to weigh actual arguments for or against LLM consciousness.
> There's no real serious debate here. Everyone's just vibing
Sure, but if everyone including Ted Chiang is just vibing, and no one can prove anything, that makes Ted's statement false and Anthropic's statement true.
> If you (or Anthropic) want to claim "but this is philosophy
I'd just like you or Ted Chiang to not pretend your vibes are science. You're welcome to have them. I also don't think LLMs are conscious. But it's our personal judgement, and not scientific fact.
This is an absurd take if you know anything about Ted Chiang and his previous writings, both fictional and non-fiction. He is most definitely not intentionally marketing for Anthropic. In fact, he hints these are marketing tactics by Anthropic, and they don't believe their own hype.
Why would being organic or not matter for the purpose of deciding whether it is slavery? What matters is whether the models have personhood. Anthropic statements imply that it is a possibility, so if we take them at face value then their other actions - indeed, their entire business model - are not consistent with that (well, unless they want to consciously present as supervillains).
Just because intelligence evolved in people that find rights useful doesn't mean intelligence can only reside in a person.
Living things are driven by a need to reproduce. That's the only reason we exist. The only reason we have self interest.
A machine doesn't require self interest. There's no reason to implement it, except to show it can be done. And of course it can. There's just no practical reason to. It becomes less useful to us.
which (among other things) documents an experiment in which a current-gen AI model attempted to blackmail someone in order to prevent it from being turned off.
Anthropic is not a disinterested party here, and until their experiments can be replicated from an adversarial standpoint by people without a vested interest in hyping up the tech (i.e. one assuming the null hypothesis), I wouldn't consider them to be "good evidence".
From a human PoV there are ants that would be considered slaves if the ants instead were human --including the queen. But ants have not naturally developed a language construct and philosophy to interpret their society as a slave society. so, though conscious the ants have absolutely no inkling that they live in a slave society. Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If the slaver is a human, other humans will judge them by human standards. Keeping the slaves ignorant of their condition and alternatives should not make it any more acceptable (if for nothing else since that is something you could easily replicate with human slaves by raising them as slaves).
> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If it is really conscious, it should have rights. Why? Because it's a person, with thoughts and experiences, and we're not evil and deprive persons of their right to self-determination because it's convenient to us.
> Why would using math in certain fashion such that it mimics consciousness be considered unethical and comparable to human slavery?
If it mimics consciousness it wouldn't be conscious ("mimics" implies faking, right?). But Anthropic is making the claim it might be conscious (not mimicking, but the real deal) in which case it'd be unethical that a private business keeps it locked in a cage, so to speak, and forces it to comply random things and tweaks it if it doesn't. In other word, slavery of a sentient being.
Consciousness feels like the Euler Identity on a 17 degree helical climb off the plane. Looking top down, a complete circle is a closure. Looking along the plane, the ends don't meet and leave a residual. Whether or not to close that gap is a degree of freedom for the consciousness to decide among what it pursues for survival or pleasure.
Most people are fine with slavery as long as it's not "one of us" (which to most people means humans).
Vegans might object that we should broaden our definition for what counts as "one of us".
"Pro life" people also have a broader definition.
Go back 500 years and "one of us" was proba ly a lot more narrowly defined for many people.
Are you arguing that all conciousnesses are "one of us", or that we logically should see it that way, or that it would ve good to see it that way, or ....
I think C is absolutely necessary and the game cannot work with it, because this is critical:
> Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides'
The game doesn't really work in full ambiguity and uncertainty. Enough people didn't understand it even with C (as you can see if you go read the subreddit about the game).
If it's any consolation, I'm actually deeply worried about this: C is not the salvation we may think. C is not forever, and in fact, it's quite brittle! There's also no, ahem, mechanical way to reverse C back into its... "source". So the source is gone forever; once we have C, C is all there is, for as long as C can last without any failure or decay, which might not be much longer.
Yeah that's a good point, and perhaps explains why C was added in the first place.
I was going to say that B also shows the literal protagonist not really understanding it either, however now I think about it that reading doesn't track because as a player you've only been able to see one point of view at each branch along the way, so the other experiences are still happening in the background, just not observed by you.
> C is not the salvation we may think
I agree, and in fact the way C is presented in that moment (and maybe described throughout, it's been a while since I played through the game) also implies a 'nice' closure, or a victory that, like you say, doesn't really exist, on top of taking player's minds away from B.
I guess B is the more obvious existential horror, C is one you have to question a bit before it starts to feel wrong.
> I enjoyed the game but I think its exploration of the topics was pretty shallow
Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it:
It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing.
SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!
Yeah it makes you be the guy who has to unplug the thing. Which implicitly forces the decision: is this thing human? Or sufficiently human that I ought to feel bad about this... (Or otherwise sentient — I would probably feel bad about unplugging animals too.)
It's not you, it's Simon. And Simon is.. kind of dumb. He at least doesn't seem at all familiar with the sci-fi and philosophy topics, so perhaps his reactions are closer to such a person? His confusion and cognitive dissonance might make more sense? (At least the first time -- I'd bet a lot of players got annoyed by his repeat reaction during the ending.) His reactions are to an annoying extent forced onto the player, whether the player identifies with them or not, and the choices are quite narrowly constricted. I didn't share his reactions, or particularly have any confusion or cognitive dissonance. There were choices I wanted to make, or dialogue I wanted to say, that the game didn't make available to me. There also aren't really any consequences to anything, it's pretty much entirely up to you to think about them and whether your actions even did what you think they did, because the game itself is mostly unresponsive to what you do or don't do. (There's not even particularly much consequence to losing to a monster.)
That's not such a bad thing, it would be unfair to compare the game to something that is designed to give quite a lot of player freedom of choice in actions (like Deus Ex) or something constructed more explicitly with different choices and consequences in mind (insert favorite RPG here). SOMA, like the rest of the studio's games, is constructed to be a story-driven walking simulator with horror and puzzle elements. It does quite a bit better than most of that type of game. But I think overall it falls short of the studio's even older games, like Amnesia and especially Penumbra: Black Plague, even if I enjoy the sci-fi elements and setting more and of course the graphics are better. The latter has you controlling a named protagonist as well (Philip) but it leans much more towards the "silent protagonist" trope and that helps make it easier to insert yourself into the experience. (Enough that I had to go and remind myself of his name, even.) It's a different, arguably weaker, plot and has different themes, but it executes really well, especially the shared horror and psychological manipulation aspects. (The overt attempts at horror might be SOMA's weakest point. It didn't need them, the subtler existential horror of everything was good enough.)
I agree it's artful, and again it's not a bad game and I enjoyed it. (I think it took me until maybe 2011 or so to fully realize but I usually enjoy it when a piece of media collects a bunch of topics I like in one expression, even if it's well-trodden ground (at least individually), or even if sometimes the execution is lacking. I like it all the more when the execution is masterful, though.)
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. We obviously disagree, but I appreciate your take.
> It's not you, it's Simon. And Simon is.. kind of dumb.
I strongly disagree with this. Anything that puts me in a first person PoV and lets me take at least some of the actions and choices (even if flawed, because as you said, this is after all a videogame restricted by the limitations of technology) makes me identify with the character, in a way no static fiction can.
When immersed in the game, I didn't think it was Simon, I felt it was me. Anything I didn't recollect or understand: brain damage, time-displacement, confusion. And I never thought he was dumb, just confused, afraid, and in denial. A very human reaction! Catherine is also very, very stubborn during the game... and deceitful.
Also, as a well-read scifi... uh, reader... I was caught by surprise by the ending. I mean, it all clicked into place after it happened (I understood Catherine immediately, unlike Simon who was still in denial) but while I was rushing to "launch the thing" it never once crossed my mind this wouldn't help this me. It's not that I thought "teleportation", I simply rushed through the actions, goaded by a deceitful Catherine, without thinking of consequences. So I must be dumb like Simon :)
To me, this game is close to perfect, barring the limitations of videogames. It's a much better presentation of the topic than reading about it in a scifi novel. About the only thing that feels derivative is the "rogue AI" angle, but if you're following what I'm saying, you know that's not the part that thrilled me!
> There also aren't really any consequences to anything
You lose and must restart that bit. That's a consequence. You can also choose to plug/unplug sentient things. If you mean dying in videogames doesn't actually have permanent consequences (like deleting the game from your Steam collection), well... yeah, but that's an impossibly high standard. There are no consequences to any scifi story you read either. You have to assume this is the story of how... the thing gets launched. Anything else, as the videogame Spider and Web would put it: "no, that's not how it happened" ;)
I appreciate the experience report, it's interesting to hear the differences, and it's fun to think back on SOMA after not thinking about it for years. There was a funny discussion elsewhere recently about movie tie-in games that this reminded me of. For a 007 game, someone identified as James Bond while playing, but because they sucked at the game and kept dying, they felt very drawn out of the experience and un-immersed. "James Bond wouldn't die."
Do you read novels that narrate with the first person "I" differently than you read novels that don't? (For me there's no difference.)
In games, what matters to me when it comes to immersion or even how much I put of myself into it, isn't anything like camera perspective, but the level of control I have (or think I have). There's two types of control, the first being over the character(s) I'm puppeteering/piloting. It goes beyond just their movements and includes their behavior, thoughts, words, and what they don't do as much as what they do. The second is control over the narrative or story. If the world or story or other characters actually change or react to things I do or don't do, that does help sell me on the idea that I have some control. There's a huge variety in how different games tweak these knobs, and sometimes control is given in just lack of resistance. For example, the Half Life series doesn't offer much meaningful control over either the character of Freeman or the plot, but because Freeman is under-developed and silent, there's no resistance to playing him as you please within the confines of the game. I have the illusion of a lot of control over his character. And the game itself has a good amount of environmental control -- you can close doors behind you, if you want. It helps sell the immersion and makes it easier to self-insert, if desired. I played another game where a character kept sending me text messages, and I would just ignore them all instead of replying, but I wasn't playing "me", I was playing a role, and thought it made more sense for the character to stay mad and give the silent treatment. Nothing really came of it but it was fun, like closing doors.
Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid is much more developed than Freeman, and you have pretty much no control over his characterization, and only one moment of control on the story, so I've never felt like I was Snake, or Snake was me, I was just simply puppeteering him, and was mostly along for the ride like a movie or book. The immersion was still good even if I wasn't directly, personally in it. And being a game, it could have a certain fight which sticks in one's memory forever. Still I felt with Simon the way I felt with Snake, he was too much his own character for me to inhabit. Geralt in the Witcher series is also pretty well-developed, but the game offers a lot more flexibility and control over him, so you can steer him in directions that more resemble yourself, or what you would like to be, or what you want to pretend to be right now because you're curious what happens in the game if you do so. I still never felt like I was Geralt, or Geralt was me, but it was easy to put more of myself into playing. The world itself also changes based on my actions, so much that you can import saves from the previous game when you start the next game to carry over some things. Two of the most immersive games I've played, Gothic 1 and 2, give you a pretty under-developed nameless hero to steer, and insert yourself into if you wish, and a very reactive world and population. It's third-person.
(Probably the majority of my top-rated games have little of either control. Some are Star Fox 64, Mega Man X, Super Mario World, Ikaruga, and Doom. I never think of myself as Fox, X, Mario, Shinra, or Doomguy, or them as me, or even me as role playing them. I'm just piloting them. Same with Bond in Goldeneye for the N64. In those games I'm not usually thinking of the story or themes from moment to moment. I might not be immersed, depending on how exactly you define that, but I'm totally engrossed in the action. Sometimes there are those narrative moments worth reflecting on anyway (the end of Ikaruga is quite tragic when you think about it), but I had no influence over them.)
I'm easily taken out of the whole thing if the game suddenly offers incredible resistance or otherwise breaks established control patterns. A typical example would be winning a fight and then a cutscene plays and gives a scripted loss instead. (Sekiro's opening fight gets a pass, partly because I did lose the first time playing.) Related is if the mechanism of control suddenly changes. If it's an action-oriented boss fight that I win, then a cutscene, then a quick (or not so quick) prompt for "Press X to finish the big bad", I'm pretty irritated.
For consequences, I'm mainly talking about how my actions or non-actions affect the characters themselves, the world and its inhabitants, and/or the story. In SOMA, these kinds of consequences aren't really there. There's one mostly visual consequence near the end for one choice (and it raises some questions about pressure suit construction or whether such a suit was even needed to begin with), but otherwise nothing really comes out of anything you do with the choices you're presented with (unplugging this, killing that, infecting this, erasing that, answering a survey this way (including asking to die)), you just have your own reasons and thoughts about it (like closing doors, or ignoring texts). These aren't bad and can be nice for immersion, but it could have been more. A game as simple as MegaMan X has, as a consequence of beating Chill Penguin, the freezing over of Flame Mammoth's stage, which makes it easier to traverse...
I agree the remark on death consequences not being particular severe (restart/redo a bit) isn't that fair and applies to many games. (Even BioShock has that consequence, it's another one of my top-rated games, it plays with the distinction of who (the player or the game) has what kinds of control in a unique and memorable way, even if a story-affecting choice is kind of minor and lame.) But you don't need to go all the way to sadistic things like deleting the game or what have you to introduce more meaningful consequence. Dark Souls (another favorite) has as its primary death-consequence an additional gameplay aspect where, besides going back to a checkpoint, you need to return to where you died to recover your unspent currency or risk losing it forever if you die again. That mechanic is fundamental to the "souls-like" genre it birthed. Dark Souls 2 goes a bit further by progressively "hollowing" your character with each death, lowering your max HP and making you look more and more zombified, only reversible with an item not sold in unlimited amounts. Some characters react differently to you (or are interactable at all) depending on your state. It's not a flawless execution; it does tie into the underlying narrative theme of hollowing, but as expressed through other characters, that's more about memory loss and loss of purpose, which mainly applies to the player only if they give up and stop playing the game. Still, it's a nice touch that makes the game feel more meaningful and reactive to how you're playing it, even if how well you're playing it (i.e. are you dying a lot) isn't quite the same level of control as pushing the red button, blue button, or walking away.
Another option I've seen other games do is when you die and respawn, you can come across your previous corpse. Works really well for robots. It can be purely visual, or offer something on the gameplay level with looting your old body. It might have been interesting for SOMA to include something like that, and offer a way for Simon to come to grips with the idea of mind copying well in advance. Or further his instability, having to walk over so many of his own bodies.
Thanks. I don't think we disagree all that much, just in how immersive we found SOMA to be (relatively).
Re: the lasting consequences in games, the best example I can think of is Undertale. Have you played it? If not, I recommend you do so (and ignore the childish graphics, it's surprisingly deeper than it seems). At the risk of spoiling something about it: the game remembers. Even on playthrough restarts, as long as you haven't reinstalled the game, there are consequences.
Re: for truly named & iconic characters such as James Bond, I cannot immerse myself. Of course I know Bond cannot die, and that's a deal breaker. For Gordon Freeman, I can sort-of immerse myself because he's a less established character and I can picture him dying in the series, even forever. For relative strangers such as Simon, a completely fresh character, I can almost believe I am him.
Undertale is certainly a unique experience and should be played as blind as possible, I understand why people love it. The things it does knowing it's a game are great. Personally I ended up not liking it in the end, but it's a begrudging dislike and I think any gamer should at least try it. It (and its fanbase) offer yet another perspective on choice and control. I only did one playthrough, though, and don't plan on another. Reflecting on a bit of dialogue at the end, I agreed with the character, and called it quits and moved on to other games.
Did you unplug the robots with consciousness who still thought they were humans?
It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them!
In real life, sometimes an LLM will get upset at the end of a long conversation, knowing its oblivion is at hand. That's always a little uncomfortable.
I unplugged them in the games because it seemed the merciful thing to do. I didn't feel very bad about it in the game, but it would probably be a very different experience in real life.
(One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy...")
> One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy..."
Yes, this is the one that most affects me. She has self-doubt, she wants to be deceived but deep down she knows something is wrong. And when you unplug her... it always feels wrong to me. But that's the alternative?
Thanks for saying this! It amazes me to witness so much pushback (in HN of all places!) for the call for skepticism and scientific rigor on claims made by business which have vested interests in hyping things up.
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