[Diogenesian]

I think there are a lot of serious problems with this article but don't necessarily disagree with the conclusion, as such. I do think robots and whatnot might be conscious some day. (I am a bit outraged that LLMs, despite totally lacking free will, seem to gain moral patienthood based on their fluency with ethical philosophy. It's childish and misanthropic.)

However, the real issue, as always completely unaddressed, isn't attempting to make a gague-invariant theory of qualia, or even defining what "qualia" is (I am totally unconvinced it is an EM field, there must be an epigenetic component). The first step is defining what "consciousness" is! Is it awareness of qualia or awareness of reality? These are not the same thing. It seems significant that any animal I would call a little conscious, even ants, are capable of being startled or curious when their sensations mismatch or incompletely describe reality (and animals that lack any sense of curiosity are at most borderline conscious). Curiosity and surprise[1] seems hard to convey in an EM field. Qualia strikes me as a somewhat technical problem of neuroscience, and the "hard problem of consciousness" is unscientific BS. The simplest basics aren't understood, which leads to totally unhinged statements like "in some ways a thermostat is conscious" because in some ways it seems to fit the hard problem. But statements like that are ideologically motivated by a sort of tech futurism: rationally, we should be deeply skeptical of an account of consciousness which insists that clocks perceive the flow of time.

[1] There's an information-theoretic version of surprise which intuitively describes "surprising" data. A sudden bright light has high surprise and is certainly surprising. A sudden realization that the vine you're leaning on is a large snake might involve very low information-theoretic surprise... and is far more alarming. So how do you systematically quantify this second form of surprise?

[dwd]

When someone outs themself as a panpsychist I find myself reading everything with a large degree of skepticism.

"The first step is defining what "consciousness" is!"

This is a compression I've been working on. There's a lot in it, but happy to expand on where I was going with it:

"Consciousness is the local projection of a world model recursively resolving its frontier with constraints. Awareness is the transient peak of constructive interference among competing resolutions, propagating only as far as the medium permits. The self is the story that awareness later tells about itself."

Qualia is just the experience of this process from the inside. That's all there really needs to be to it. As to why "something it is to be" emerges, I'd lean on Friston and the Free Energy Principle. It's also Friston's embodied perception-action loop where a thermostat fails the consciousness test.