Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
Thats a excellent question. Not sure.
I think it requires motion of choice to some degree, like an ai making decisions people don’t expect, not in the sense of like breaking its own programming but in the sense of people not being able to anticipate what it does in the same way you dont know what its next token predictions will be until you run it, which is the same way as how you don’t know what a friend is going to do next even if you understand them deeply.
Maybe technically when the LLM is running and making the bomb choice it would be but its not because it is understanding choosing bombs but because it is making any choice at all as per its programming making it produce choices in the same way that we as humans produce pee and poo.
And yes this would be very much moving the goal post, but at least it is a goal post move that is a result of some kind of reasoning related to trying to label consciousness from a more fundamental perspective that exists across possible different lifeforms rather than just moving it to somewhere else because it feels more arbitrarily conveinant.
Yup, free will is what I was alluding to. Part of the difficulty of defining “consciousness”, is to first define “free will” and “understanding”
those things are well understood. consciousness isn’t.
and again, not everyone believes in them.
free will is your choices. whether or not you believe those choices are determined or undetermined, is the problem where people don’t agree.
When LLMs output words, are those choices? What’s the difference between a neural net producing output and biological neurons producing output, in terms of free will?
No. LLM is code, determined inputs make determined outputs.
Biological neurons don’t work like that. You can give them the same input and they can have wildly different outputs.
LLMs are usually designed with a “seed” number that changes the result. If you feed a random number generator to this seed input, it will effectively make the outputs non-deterministic.
So if you combine the LLM with this random number generator, this system as a whole would act like the biological system you described: same input, different outputs.