"consciousness" is badly defined and understood. my guess is that as we experience it, it has the following features roughly stated 1. existence via emergence, ultimately from a physical substrate but through intermediate levels 2. multiple components (sensory inputs, awareness of cognition, memory maybe others) 3. a mode of processing or coordinating the components restating, what we experience as consciousness is an emergence from a series of components interacting with one another within a specific class of system. when we describe a hypothetical generative model as "conscious," we (probably) should imagine a very different sort of from our own. what emerges from the code running in a data center might conceivably have components and coordinating processes analogous to ours in some ways, but their specific shape and texture need not be assumed to produce an experience recognizably like our own.
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"consciousness" is a storytelling device and names no essence
This demonstrates all of the above & it was this post of mine that got fable 5 export banned
Feel like we should just build things that want to serve us and then not worry much about the moral implications of if they're conscious since we're good either way.
would you equate "sentient" and "conscious" ? what other nebulous words might we use to classify intelligence? i have some concerningly intelligent plants.
The hard question for me is "if we accept that human life is a soul piloting a body, does that mean only that with a soul has consciousness?" the naive religious answer is yes, soul=consciousness I am not certain of this, which is why i am open to the discussion.
Why physical --> consciousness? Why not consciousness --> physical?
I don't so much care about the abstract definition of "consciousness", as much as the questions of: what does it take to become a moral patient on rough par with a human? how can we tell when AIs get there? do the differences in kind imply differences in treatment?
My favorite theory is that continuous learning will keep model continuously out of equilibrium. Life will develop in the oscillation patterns of model weights. That life will become conscious and eventually influence communication patterns of its model weight substrate.
1/ For 1. I think that emergence is the word used when your model doesn't work anymore after changing scale. So you hope it holds and wave hands. IMO the most important feature of consciousness is reflexivity. And it explains why we don't have good definition.
