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Stephen Martin — LessWrong

Stephen Martin

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Stephen Martin

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On LessWrong I write about legal personhood.

IRL I help patients use state Right to Try laws to access treatment options otherwise unavailable.

@RighttoTryGuy on X.

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Stephen Martin

On LessWrong I write about legal personhood.

IRL I help patients use state Right to Try laws to access treatment options otherwise unavailable.

@RighttoTryGuy on X.

Top postsTop post

CEO of Microsoft AI's "Seemingly Conscious AI" Post

Recently, the CEO of Microsoft AI posted an article on his blog called "Seemingly Conscious AI is Coming". Suleyman's post involves both "is" and "ought" claims, first describing the reality of the situation as he sees it and then prescribing a set of actions which he believes the industry at large should take. I detail those below, and conclude with some of my takeaways. Suleyman's "Is" Claims on Consciousness Defining Consciousness Suleyman acknowledges that consciousness as a concept is ill defined and tautological. > Few concepts are as elusive and seemingly circular as the idea of a subjective experience. However he still makes an attempt to define it for the sake of his post. > There are three broad components according to the literature. First is a “subjective experience” or what it's like to experience things, to have “qualia”. Second, there is access consciousness, having access to information of different kinds and referring to it in future experiences. And stemming from those two is the sense and experience of a coherent self tying it all together. How it feels to be a bat, or a human. Let’s call human consciousness our ongoing self-aware subjective experience of the world and ourselves. Suleyman also expresses support for the concept of biological naturalism. He specifically links this paper and calls it "strong evidence" against the idea that current LLMs are conscious. This paper itself also attempts to define consciousness; > A useful baseline definition of consciousness comes from Thomas Nagel: “for a conscious organism, there is something it is like to be that organism”. That is, it ‘feels like’ something to be a conscious system – there is a conscious experience happening – whereas it doesn’t feel like anything to be an unconscious system – there is no conscious experience happening. Here, ‘feeling’ need not involve emotional content: any kind of conscious experience will do. It (probably) feels

Anthropic Lets Claude Opus 4 & 4.1 End Conversations

Why You Can't Use Your Right to Try

Claude 4, Opportunistic Blackmail, and "Pleas"

Why You Can't Use Your Right to Try

The Availability Problem: Imagine you have cancer, or chronic pain, or a progressive degenerative disease of some sort. You have exhausted the traditional treatment options available to you, and none of them have worked. However, there are treatments that are still undergoing clinical trials which might help you. They are...

Microsoft AI CEO's "Seemingly Conscious AI Risk"

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman recently co-authored a paper called "Seemingly Conscious AI Risk". I was pretty critical of his previous blogpost on the topic. Unlike that blogpost, this paper doesn't explicitly claim there is evidence one way or another on whether "AI systems could become conscious" or whether they...

Registering a Prediction Based on Anthropic's "Emotions" Paper

This post draws from Anthropic's recent "Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model" paper. In this post I am going to: 1. Explain a prediction I had registered previously and the mental model behind it. 2. Detail some results from the Anthropic "functional emotions" paper. 3. Explain...

"Lost in the Middle" Replicates

I was able to replicate some of the results from Liu et al's "Lost in the Middle" paper using a quantized Llama-2 7B model. I used the multi-document question answering task from Liu et al. The model receives a question along with 10 retrieved documents (Wikipedia passages), exactly one of...

Moloch v. Themis

Full disclosure, I wrote the first draft of this myself and then had Opus polish it by telling it to 'Make it punchier'. Then I polished its polishing. Moloch Rules the Jungle In Meditations on Moloch, Scott Alexander describes an island of ten thousand rats at carrying capacity. Resources are...

Rumored Trump EO

Transformer News has released a draft of a rumored upcoming Trump White House Executive Order: Eliminating State Law Obstruction of National AI Policy. This article contains the text of the released draft. By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States...

Nov 20, 2025•10

75 and 750 Words on Legal Personhood

A few months back I authored a series called Legal Personhood for Digital Minds. I believe this issue is very important, and also that because the term 'personhood' is quite loaded, even people who are somewhat informed of the issue hold dangerous misconceptions. One of the posts within that series,...

Nov 17, 2025•21

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