Well, I do not proclaim consciousness: only the subjective feeling of consciousness. I really 'feel' conscious: but I can't prove or 'know' that in fact I am 'conscious' and making choices... to be conscious is to 'make choices'... Instead of just obeying the rules of chemistry and physics... which YOU HAVE TO BREAK in order to be conscious at all (how can you make a choice at all if you are fully obeying the rules of chemistry {which have no choice}).
A choice does not apply to chemistry or physics: from where does choice come from - I suspect from our fantasies and nothing from objective reality (for I do not see humans consistently breaking the way chemistry works in their brains) - it probably comes from nowhere.
If you can explain the lack of choice available in chemistry first (and how that doesn't interfere with us being able to make a choice): then I'll entertain the idea that we are conscious creatures. But if choice doesn't exist at the chemical level, it can't magically emerge from following deterministic rules. And chemistry is deterministic not probabilistic (h2 + o doesn't magically make neon ever, or 2 water molecules instead of one).
Experience and choice are adjacent when they are not the same.
I specifically mean to say the experience of choice is the root of conscious thought - if you do not experience choice, you're experiencing the world the exact same way a robot would.
When pretending you are in the fictional character of a movie vs the fictional character in a video game. one experience's more choice, is making conscious decisions vs a passive experience.
Merely having an experience is not enough to be conscious. You have to actively be making choices to be considered conscious.
Consciousness is about making choices. Choices are a measure of consciousness.
I don't think this is clear at all. What I am experiencing is mostly the inner narrator, the ongoing stream of chatter about how I feel, what I see, what I think about what I see, etc.
What I experience is self-observation, largely directed through or by language processing.
So, one LLM is hooked up to sound and vision and can understand speech. It is directed to “free associate” an output which is fed to another AI. When you ask it things, the monitoring AI evaluates the truthfulness, helpfulness, and ability to insult/harm others. It then feeds that back as inputs to the main AI which incorporates the feedback. The supervisory AI is responsible for what it says to the outside world, modulating and structuring the output of the central AI. Meanwhile, when not answering or conversing, it “talks to itself” about what it is experiencing. Now if it can search and learn incrementally, uh, I don’t know. It begins to sound like assigning an Id AI, an Ego AI, and a Superego AI.
But it feels intuitive to me that general AI is going to require subunits, systems, and some kind of internal monitoring and feedback.
Because you don’t see X is not a proof that X doesn’t exist. Here X may or not exist.
X = difference between simulated and real consciousness
Black holes were posited before they were detected empirically. We don't declare them to be non-existent when their theory came out just because we couldn't detect them.
