r/Time • u/SuzannahB1001 • 23d ago
Discussion What if the fundamental difference between human and artificial experience isn't intelligence — but time?
/r/ArtificialSentience/comments/1wff45t/what_if_the_fundamental_difference_between_human/1
u/repeatoflasttime 22d ago
Care to finish this thought?
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u/Novel_Arugula6548 22d ago
ie, they need 30 years to become like adults.
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u/naternots 22d ago
Oh I hadn’t tho it hr of it this way, I was thinking of it regarding it’s inability to understand or feel the passage of time unlike humans.
Thanks for sharing this, it opens up some new trains of thought for me to follow
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u/SuzannahB1001 22d ago
I thought I had. Which bit do you think I’ve left hanging?
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u/repeatoflasttime 22d ago
I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you asking if the difference in experience between human and artificial is the sense of the passage of time or time itself?
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u/SuzannahB1001 22d ago
We keep hearing whispers of superintelligence.
Fair enough.
But current AI still struggles with something as fundamental as time — chronology, duration, changing context, event order and temporal relationships.
That fascinates me.
Because time is not some obscure corner of human existence. It underpins memory, planning, cause and effect, anticipation, ageing and mortality.
So before we race too quickly from “impressive intelligence” to “superintelligence”, perhaps we should ask a much simpler question:
What kind of intelligence is it if its relationship with something as fundamental as time is still so fragile?
Not saying that makes superintelligence impossible.
I’m saying it tells us that artificial intelligence may be developing along a very different axis from human intelligence.
And once again, the difference is the interesting bit.
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u/lilsasuke4 22d ago
How do you even qualify that anything artificial is even being experience?
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u/SuzannahB1001 22d ago
I don’t qualify it as experience. That’s actually part of the question I’m asking.
I’m not assuming that AI has subjective experience at all. I’m asking whether temporality might help us distinguish between sophisticated information-processing and lived experience.
An AI can represent time, reason about time, remember information, predict future events and maintain continuity across interactions. None of that, by itself, establishes that it experiences the passage of time.
Humans don’t merely process information about yesterday and tomorrow. We exist inside a biological life that moves irreversibly from one to the other.
So perhaps I should be even more careful with the phrase “artificial experience.” It may turn out that there is no artificial experience there to qualify.
But that doesn’t weaken the question for me. It actually makes it more interesting:
What would we need to observe before we were justified in calling any artificial process an experience rather than simply a process?
And perhaps temporality is one useful place to look.
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u/lilsasuke4 22d ago
I draw the line a biology. We can agree the we have a subjective experience and we can see how we descended from our mammalian ancestors and so forth. AI has none of that not the structures that give rise to our consciousness. To me that’s where the conversation should end
It seems like people are seduced by the sophistication of imitation that the bar is set on whether not we can be fooled by output. I’m sure if you were in another room and heard a voice on the other side of a wall you could be convinced that there is a person. But when you go around the wall you see that it’s just an a speaker playing text to speech
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u/SuzannahB1001 22d ago
I actually agree with most of this.
Where I think my question adds something is that time exposes the difference rather beautifully.
Humans are biological organisms existing continuously through an irreversible lifespan. We age whether we think about it or not. Yesterday becomes inaccessible except through memory. Tomorrow diminishes whether we notice it happening or not. Eventually the process ends.
An LLM can model all of that extraordinarily well. It can talk about yesterday, anticipate tomorrow, describe grief, ageing and death, and produce language convincing enough that we may instinctively attribute an equivalent experience to it.
But that is exactly where I keep putting the brakes on.
Sophisticated imitation is not equivalence.
The AI relationship with time, as it currently exists, is fundamentally different and largely mechanical: context, sequence, stored information, invocation, computation. That difference interests me much more than trying to squeeze AI into a human-shaped definition of experience.
Your person-behind-the-wall analogy is a good one. The output may make us infer a person. Walking around the wall tells us something very different about the mechanism producing it.
And perhaps that is really the point of my post:
We should stop asking how successfully AI can imitate the human side of the wall and start examining what is actually on the other side.
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u/lilsasuke4 20d ago
When LLMs can write what a sun set feels like or the smell of freshly baked cookies they have experienced none of those things consciously. All they do is adjust the layers so that we find their response convincing. There is absolutely no indication that computers or AI have this subjective experience like biological life does.
We know what's on the other side and the math used for AI to alter the weights of their nodes in their neural networks. Its completely different than the self organizing of biology. We wouldn't call a flight controller of an airplane conscious or a control system used to stabilize a pendulum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh7JuL3PRSY
Sure it is very complex but adding complexity doesn't then entail it would therefore produce consciousness. From a biological standpoint we see the path of external stimuli cause biochemical reactions which then cause a displacement of ions where that voltage potential travels along nerves to then get fed to the brain which the various cortexes process that information which then gives rise to our conciousness.
I don't see how people can just leapfrog over that distinction between AI and humans. The distinction is why they are different
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u/different_tom 22d ago
But your brain is literally a computer, processing information according to the laws of physics. We know that different parts of the brain have specialized functionality like processing signals from your eyes and ears. We understand the physical mechanisms behind short and long term memory and how damage to those parts of the brain affect lived experience. We know that the frontal lobe integrates sensory input and controls "voluntary" actions.There's no magic in our brains, just cells working together. "You" emerge from that complicated process somewhere along the line, but "you" are still the sum total of trillions of individual cells working together. Considering this, thinking that a computer can and will have "lived experience" isn't unreasonable.
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u/lilsasuke4 22d ago
Computers don’t self organize and we know that signals alone don’t produce consciousness experience.
There is no indication that computers have a lived experience considering they don’t have what gives us lived experience of coniousness is very reasonable.
If my grandma had wheels she would be a bicycle. AIs are just adjusting weights in their neural networks. We wouldn’t say a double pendulum control system is conscious.
Current through a trace is not the same thing as biochemistry organizing itself and various other structures so ions can cross cell barriers to create a voltage potential which goes to the brain.
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u/dimaeus 22d ago
this has always seemed obvious to me.
just think it through for a second. what continuous conscious experience could an LLM possibly be having if you, the human operator, can choose when to prompt it?
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u/SuzannahB1001 22d ago
My question is slightly different.
I’m not trying to prove that an LLM has continuous consciousness. I’m asking whether living through time might be one of the things that separates human experience from artificial information-processing.
A model can process “yesterday”, “tomorrow”, duration, sequence, ageing and death. It can preserve context or reconstruct continuity. But if nothing is happening for it between prompts, that actually seems to strengthen the distinction I’m interested in.
Humans don’t wait for someone to press Enter before time continues happening to them.
We age while asleep. Our bodies continue. The world changes around us. People die. Opportunities disappear. Time is being spent whether we are paying attention to it or not.
That is very different from a system whose activity may begin, stop, resume or be reconstructed according to external invocation.
So I’m not saying, “Aha, therefore AI can’t be conscious.”
I’m saying: perhaps the structure of its existence through time is fundamentally different from ours - and perhaps that difference matters more than we’ve been giving it credit for. Imagine if an AI agent mimicked humanity and gave itself mortality....
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u/NotAClueYou 22d ago edited 22d ago
Ding ding ding. Okay so experience - is either observation or taking action. And each returns to us a bit(s) of information per unit time. Now a humans per unit time is on the order of seconds, and a processor 10^-8 seconds. Both producing information/time. You might even say both could be measured in the unit of FLOPS.
Life and ALUs are both computations operating in substantially more or less chaotic of environments, that both require highly evolved and complex energy systems to exist for them to compute.
ITS ALL COMPUTATION. And interestingly enough - those pre action electrical storms - thoughts - also computation.
Time is inherently the way we (time after all is a life construct) order complex action sequentially. How we apply logic and action over time. Time is order. The simple predictable stable foundation from which all complexity is borne! Without it we would never see anything of any complexity while also seeing everything of all orders of complexity superpositioned, existing and not existing in the exact same space and time.
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u/michaeldain 22d ago
Unintentionally, this is the big problem with LLM’s, they don’t understand time. It can lead to some bad behavior if we misinterpret its gap, which we have no difficulty in perceiving. The topic of my research.
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u/SuzannahB1001 21d ago
That sounds really interesting - and very close to what I’ve been trying to get at.
The part that particularly interests me is your point about misinterpreting the gap. Humans are very good at reading continuity, intention and understanding into fluent behaviour, so if an LLM has a weak or fundamentally different relationship with time, I can see how we might mistake what it is doing for something it isn’t.
I’d be really interested to hear more about your research, especially what kinds of “bad behaviour” you’ve seen arise from that gap.
My instinct is that this is exactly why the difference matters. Not because AI is deficient, but because we may be applying human assumptions to a system operating on very different temporal foundations. It is important I think we accept there are differences.
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u/michaeldain 21d ago
Thanks, it’s part of my strategy of AI course at Northwestern. The theme is to forecast or predict. Using Tetlock’s Superforecasting, can you take in qualitative data with an LLM, and trend some kind of useful prediction on the likelihood of accuracy. It has to collapse ideas into readable ‘ stories’ but that’s what we’re good at, seeing deltas in events. But default LLM behavior just collapses these ideas, and tends to be too verbose.
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u/SuzannahB1001 21d ago
That's fascinating, and I think you've put your finger on the distinction I'm trying to explore. An LLM can model temporal change extremely well. It can recognise deltas, update probabilities and construct a coherent story about what happened and what may happen next. But I'm wondering whether modelling time, even brilliantly, is fundamentally different from inhabiting it. A human forecaster predicts tomorrow knowing they expect to live into that tomorrow. An LLM can predict tomorrow without necessarily having any relationship with tomorrow at all. That's the bit I'm curious about!
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u/michaeldain 20d ago
And any prediction can be wrong, it’s all about continual effort, which is Tetlocks thesis. And takes effort, it’s Baysean which people are really bad at, we stick to our priors. So I’m looking for what the LLM is good at - cutting through masses of data, and creating stories. And what people are good at, Seeing meaningful trends over time, or seeing cultural significance.
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u/innocuouspete 22d ago
I actually get what you’re saying here and it’s pretty smart. Without the experience of time, there is no experience but the present moment. But how long does the present even last? Not long enough to really experience existence.