[ARandomerDude]

Likewise, the nobody knows what consciousness is mindset is smuggling in the idea that in order to know something at all, you must know it comprehensively. I know exactly what consciousness is based on my experience with it, even though I could not possibly give a comprehensive account of everything consciousness entails.

By analogy, I've been married for just shy of 20 years. I know my wife very well. I certainly do not know everything there is to know about her, but I do know her.

[Symmetry]

Scientific study of consciousness comes from ignoring our subjective impressions of our own consciousnesses, which might be illusory, and going only by what can be seen by other people. So you have experiments doing things like showing subjects subliminal images trying to probe the boundaries between conscious experience and unconscious experience. You start with results like "If we show this image to subjects for 50 ms it only has a slight effect on their behavior which fades out after a second, but if we show it to them for 60 ms it has a large effect for the rest of the experiment including being able to talk about it" and then you keep going from there.

[dinvlad]

This is kind of a stretch of an argument though. We could say the same about physics and any other sciences - everything is an abstraction at some level, but if this abstraction is reproduced by multiple independent types of measurement and is falsifiable, that is what we call scientific. I don't think LLMs pass this test.

[Symmetry]

I certainly wouldn't say that a traditional LLM is conscious. Once an input falls off of a LLM's input buffer it ceases to have any effect on its output, the exact same way that a subliminal stimuli's effects are limited in a human brain. The size, in bytes, of a LLM's input buffer isn't all that far off from a human brain's input activations either. So strictly feed-forward neural networks aren't conscious in this sense but its easy to image that architectural changes might provide an analogue to what a humans' consciousness provides.

[mo_42]

> I know exactly what consciousness is based on my experience with it, even though I could not possibly give a comprehensive account of everything consciousness entails.

Not sure if personal experiences count. Generally, we laugh at people who talk about esoteric experiences.

So a simple explanation could be that consciousness is an illusion?

Or put differently, is there any phenomenon that needs the assumption of consciousness?

The way I experience myself could be just the history of experiences. So there is something that the brain can refer to.

[ARandomerDude]

> So a simple explanation could be that consciousness is an illusion?

Doesn't having an illusion presuppose consciousness?

[nathan_compton]

What perceives the illusion?

[visarga]

So "the illusion" is like a GPT or StableDiffusion model making stuff up based on conditioning. Nothing mysterious, we have AI that can do that. The same simulator predicts not just how the world will evolve, but also actions and their estimated rewards. It's an imagination based planning system.

Bringing all perceptions together into the simulation, integrating them into the same reference system, and using them to imagine, plan, act and learn - that could be consciousness.

[nathan_compton]

Yes, but why would such a system experience anything? I'm a died in the wool monist materialist but I can acknowledge that there is something tricky (at the very least) going on here.

[visarga]

We create representations from our sensorial data and values from our reward signals. We are part of a larger system and our actions are filtered and rewarded by the environment. We feed on this system to learn, basically we train on it.

[eimrine]

> I know exactly what consciousness is based on my experience with it, even though I could not possibly give a comprehensive account of everything consciousness entails.

What is the price of that kind of knowledge? You don't even know where is the border between your knowledge and your absence of knowledge. How much can you tell about consciousness without stepping on "absence of knowledge" field? Pretty nothing, isn't it?

> By analogy, I've been married for just shy of 20 years. I know my wife very well. I certainly do not know everything there is to know about her, but I do know her.

I have a better example. I speak English for 20 years if to start counting from my first English lesson when I learned my first English word. You can find plenty of silly mistakes in my comments. But at least I know what I can express or understand and what I can not.

[JohnFen]

> I know exactly what consciousness is based on my experience with it

OK, then what is it?