What is Consciousness?
Wondering about conciousness is something we humans have been doing for a very long time. Are we Hofstadter’s “strange loops”? Is there really no there there? Is consciousness the bit that distinguishes us from Chalmers’ philosophical zombies? Do cats, or birds, or grubs and worms have consciousness too, and is it relatable to ours? What happens when we dream?
I’ve been reading and thinking about this, on and off, for decades. Not just about what consciousness is or isn’t, but also about what we already know, or what some really smart people have suggested (see reading lists at the bottom of this article).
It’s clear we have a pretty good idea about intelligence, as a kind of optimising prediction system, and tools like LLMs and Diffusion Models have shown incredible progress in regards to AI’s utility, but no-one is claiming that DALL-E is excited about the pictures it makes, or even that it understands them, or even looks at them once its made them. We have good theories for how neural networks store memories, and we’ve barely scratched the surface with regard to building machines that reason and learn.
But even GPT-4 is never going to be moved by a poem you write, find itself just singing a song for no reason, or feel proud of a clever answer it gave…
