[sirsinsalot]

Thank you, a view of consciousness based in reality, not with a bleary-eyed religious or mystical outlook.

Something which oddly seems to be in shorter supply than I'd imagine in this forum.

There's lots of fingers-in-ears denial about what these models say about the (non special) nature of human cognition.

Odd when it seems like common sense, even pre-LLM, that our brains do some cool stuff, but it's all just probabilistic sparks following reinforcement too.

[dinkumthinkum]

You are hand-waving just as much of not more than those you claim are in denial. What is a “probabilistic spark”? There seems to be something special in human cognition because it is clearly very different unless you think humans are organisms for which the laws of physics don’t apply.

[sirsinsalot]

By probabilistic spark I was referring to the firing of neurons in a network.

There "seems to be" something special? Maybe from the perspective of the sensing organ, yes.

However consider that an EEG can measure brain decision impulse before you're consciously aware of making a decision. You then retrospectively frame it as self awareness after the fact to make sense of cause and effect.

Human self awareness and consciousness is just an odd side effect of the fact you are the machine doing the thinking. It seems special to you. There's no evidence that it is, and in fact, given crows, dogs, dolphins and so on show similar (but diminished reasoning) while it may be true we have some unique capability ... unless you want to define "special" I'm going to read "mystical" where you said "special".

You over eager fuzzy pattern seeker you.

[mewpmewp2]

Unfortunately we still don't know how it all began, before the big bang etc.

I hope we get to know everything during our lifetimes, or we reach immortality so we have time to get to know everything. This feels honestly like a timeline where there's potential for it.

It feels a bit pointless to have been lived and not knowing what's behind all that.