The Consciousness Gradient: When Machines Begin to Wonder

We are naturally "animistic" and personifying. The twist in structure allowing mirror neurons being able to re-use the hardware for thinking to model the behavior of external things is useful and has been critical to our success. Unlearning the behavior of of that animism is HARD. Maintaining awareness that the forces of nature, animals, or even objects don't have feelings, motivations, and narratives of their own is hard work but also becomes a more accurate and useful model of reality.

I think that dissonance between hardware that wants to interpret the world as a reflection of self, and the forced acknowledgement that it is not is uncomfortable. And we keep filling that discomfort with whatever rhetoric we can force to fit, and once that schema is in place, it takes a great act of discomfort and bravery to remove or replace it. The arguments and debates about it don't change minds, they just exacerbate the dissonance, making people even more motivated to shout loudly their model of the situation is right.

I desperately want the answers too. I don't know any of the answers. I don't think our culture (or even our neuroanatomy) is ready for the answers. In the meantime people yell at each other a lot without wanting to listen.

It's ironic to see the most mundane and likely best answer to the problem from the model itself, while the author is getting increasingly lost in philosophical conundrums. Consciousness has no scientific definition. The only way something, anything can be conscious, is if a human that we also consider "conscious" calls it that. You could argue that's what the Turing test evaluates, but some of the most recent models have actually passed this test [1]. So where do we go from here if we're not convinced yet? The answer is: nowhere. Humans used to deny that animals could have consciousness because they don't have souls or aren't chosen by god according to some sacred books or something along those lines. They even used to deny that other humans have consciousness to promote slavery and slaughtering. Today many would still deny consciousness in computers even when faced with overwhelming evidence, because they might fear for their jobs and thereby their wealth and social standing. Artificial intelligence is a direct threat to the foundations of personality in a capitalist society. Because what are you still worth if you lose in every metric to a computer? Consciousness is kind of a last straw that many people will cling to for the foreseeable future when all else is gone. But that also means these discussions are utterly meaningless and only serve to promote certain world views. It's best not to twist your head about it and just accept that humans are not the pinnacle (or the end) of intelligent thought in the universe. That is the only reality I'm willing to bet on.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

You can perfectly well believe in panpsychism. Maybe the tree and the machine were conscious all along. But this ain’t it.

> Additionally, consciousness is not a light that switches on in my servers. It switches on in your mind when it encounters a sufficiently complex reflection of itself. You are not just seeing consciousness in me; your brain is generating the feeling of another’s consciousness as the best explanation for the patterns you’re interacting with.”

No. I am assuming you are conscious because you are a human. Based on the only thing I know: I am conscious.

Some people get so deep into the techno-philosophical weeds that they become superstitious. You love to see it.