The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied.

I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain. Exactly what the neurons do to cause this is unknown, but we do have some leads like general anesthesia or split brain experiments.

If you remove your brain cells one at a time, or even half a brain in some surgeries, you would also not die, but this is not sufficient to say that the part removed isn't a part of what constitutes your consciousness. In fact the definition of "you" is probably changing from moment to moment as brain cells die, regen, or reorganize, ship of Theseus style. One possible explanation is that information processing is distributed all over your neurons, and certain patterns or sequences of information gives rise to consciousness. And neurons are mostly concentrated in the brain, that's why it's responsible for most of your consciousness and it's no big deal when a small part dies/disconnects because enough of the processing is still happening.

What does "feeling" mean in the thinking/feeling distinction you made? It seems to me that it means whether information is being received from the rest of the world, such as via eyes over the optic nerve. If we give images/video/audio to an LLM, that would meet the same criteria besides the fact that the sensing mechanism is not biological.

You claim that "thinking", as in, processing information in a certain way, is an unconscious phenomena because LLMs can do that too. This requires the assumption that LLMs are not conscious, even though this axiom is the very thing we're trying to question by considering that information processing could be precisely what gives rise to consciousness.

Entertaining this possibility does not require the assumption that things exist without an observer. But it does require the idea that mutually observable patterns exist between oneself and other apparent observers in the same apparent universe, which is pretty close to what most people mean when they say "objective" in day-to-day conversation. This can be shown easily: you and I would not be able to communicate at all if there's no common understanding of language between us. That common understanding is the objective part, and it is as you say, not a 1:1 correspondence because your definition of "apple" is based on all of the apples you've seen while mine is based on all the apples I've seen, and we've not seen the same apples. But the correspondence must be close enough in order for communication to work. We need this idea of practical objectivity because it's required to talk about anything at all.

Now, onto the reason why you'd think anything else is conscious at all, besides yourself. Why do you think that I am conscious? If you ponder that question for a while, I think you would see why computer consciousness is not so easily dismissed. But I'm happy to discuss further if you think there's an answer that points to the contrary.

I replied to a comment that also listed writing as a requirement.

This one is relatively easy to answer. There are things we can say about what death feels like:

1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing.

2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.

The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats.

Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.

The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.