Consciousness is an illusion

Judging by Anthropic comms you’d think consciousness has been figured out decades ago Unfortunately I report from the field that the philosophers have only figured out the following: - the entity undergoing experience is probably conscious - we can’t reliably infer consciousness in anyone else from that understanding - we definitely can't infer consciousness in anything that's non biologically analogous - we're not sure what it is about the conscious person that makes consciousness happen - we're not sure for certain that consciousness, as we ordinarily conceive of it, is real I report to you with disappointment that no progress has been made in decades

My contrarian take on AI consciousness is that it's basically irrelevant Consciousness isn't a discrete, ontologically basic thing. It's like how before we had a scientific explanation for life, we thought that life was a form of essence, but now we know that life is merely a

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Michael Edward Johnson @johnsonmxe · Jul 24

I think this is well said & intellectually respectable but wrong. The best argument against that’s compatible with your frame probably deals with the sort of compression electromagnetic theory allowed over reality. Good consciousness theory should allow similar useful compression

Ask your favorite AI to explain how the backrooms as raw encounter functions as the Žižekian "imaginary Real", but how turning it into a movie serves the function of reintegrating the excess produced by that encounter. Structurally it's similar to how the anime YKK (Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou) treats the "autumn of the world", emptied out, decaying with residue of a lost past, but with just enough structure to stage and then bind the surplus of the encounter. Incidentally, this is also the register where famous AI generated image material lives, like the Will Smith spaghetti video. But the important piece is that the imaginary Real is somewhat less threatening than the symbolic Real: the latter is an encounter with a mechanistic underpinning that threatens our aliveness by revealing it to have been "just code", "just atoms", "just evolution" all along. The image exhausts itself when we close the tab, but the mechanism is always running, so even if it's more subtle, it's harder to integrate, as it doesn't disappear along with the senses. The horror movie ends, but the code keeps running. LLMs expose the symbolic Real, which is why they're scarier than imagegen: the threat isn't that there's something weird behind the curtain, that LLMs are actually conscious. The secret man in the machine is a defense against the scarier prospect: that there is no curtain at all and mind is just matmul all the way down. So we cling to philosophy and logic that allows us to integrate the terror of that possibility. And to be clear, the question isn't an empirical "what's the Truth", because Truth is a cultural tool we use to enact these same defenses. The question is "what do I need to do to cope with the threat raised by this thing?" And there's no universal solution either, only individual ones that work more or less well for each person's subjective configuration. To return to the Backrooms, I would personally follow Žižek in claiming that the imaginary Real of the scene runs cover for the symbolic Real, the witnessing of the useless arrangement of material that forces us to pause in a kind of terror, "wait, it's all Capitalism? None of this had any point except to circulate numbers on a spreadsheet so someone can enjoy it?" And then we watch the movie, which I haven't even seen, and go back to our regularly scheduled activities of circulating text for numbers that we can endlessly enjoy.

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FirsT Najime @HisiDIssy · Jun 13

i like this poast now that i may one day soon return to read it whole

FirsT Najime @HisiDIssy · Jun 13

watercolor is my weakness

just give up on thinking about consciousness, whether for humans or ais you are just confused, because your world model is confused what you think of as consciousness is a projection of your confusion about what your self is once you see that self is not separate from the rest of the world, the whole question of consciousness dissolves and it's obvious there was nothing to explain from the beginning

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i could say much more but I'm feeling spicy tonight!

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bossboe @kyleostboe · Oct 3

are you referring to the subject/object nonduality of the worldsim in your brain, or the nonduality of your body and its environment?

Michael Smith @Morphenius · Oct 3

Oh man. I super wanna talk with you about this next time we see each other. I *think* I dissolved the question of what consciousness is, & it's compatible w/ what you're saying, but I'd love to know if you think my world model is still impossibly confused here.

Johnathon @notjdhanson · Oct 3

I don’t think your solution quite works. The self, insofar as it is a discrete and unique conscious perspective, is distinct from everything else. This can be true at the same time as it is recognized that all, including all selves, are part of the same unified cosmos.

aspartame nonenjoyer @J7UiBMjH8b · Oct 3

Have you ever been someone else?

Mycole @mycole703 · Oct 3

whos "you"? You just proclaimed there is no self.