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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

You are simply defining consciousness and information processing in terms of alive and dead. If those are your axiomatic assumptions, you’ve already established the outcome before evaluating the issues.

Consciousness may be more than processing information, but it is definitely processing information. Perceptions go in, and decisions come out. Along the way we also form memories.

When we experience something, qualia if you like, it matters to us. That process stimulates us, interests us and often it prompts us to action. Those are all information processes. Stimulation is a signal. Interest and attention is metadata about the experience. Being prompted to action is making a decision. These are all intrinsically processes on and about information.

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I agree with everything you're saying, but I think we just are referring to different things when we say consciousness. Take any qualia, and there are 2 sides to it: The object of it, and the subject of it. A red light is seen. In the seeing of it, there is the red light that is seen, and the seer who sees it.

What you are talking about is a black-box model of consciousness that only relies on external measurement. That is the correct scientific approach, but it comes nowhere close to counsciousness. Consider that maybe you are doing the same thing you think I'm doing. You have defined experience purely in terms of inputs and outputs. The experience is the input, the outputs are perception, volition, will, action, etc. But who's are the perception, volition, will etc? There is something that exists that gives essence to all these.

If this doesn't ring true at all, we can stop here. Objective language can only get so far when talking about the subject, unfortunately. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

If consciousness does not have any observable properties, why would you believe it exists?

I don’t just believe it exists, I know it exists, just like you know it exists, because you are conscious, because you are. Are you aware of your own existence? How can you know anything if you don’t know the knower?

There words may not make any sense to you right now, and that’s the limitation of objective language: we cannot point at the subjective without metaphor. But if this does sound like it rings a bell, lmk and we can talk more.

That's just handwaving. You haven't identified any properties of this thing you claim, just created a name without a meaning.

The observation of our own consciousness, that is its self recursive nature while we’re in a conscious state, is what makes consciousness special. With other observations we receive a stimulus, we perceive it, and we either act on it, or memorise it or forget it.

While we are doing so, we are aware that we had that perception, however we are also aware of our awareness of the perception.

So the observable property of consciousness is awareness of ‘consciousness awareness’ itself. This is not a paradox, we know how recursive functions work from computer science and mathematics so the concept of the recursivity of a process is logically coherent.

This makes our own consciousness the most observed property in human experience.

Please refer to my reply to tekni5 for my take on how consciousness actually works.

There are some experiments that suggest that human actions are not the result of conscious thought. Maybe you've heard about Michael Gazzaniga's experiments on split brain subjects. The most radical interpretation of the results is that our conscious thought merely constructs a narrative about actions it has no direct control of.

In other words, our brains act like a bunch of interconnected neural networks and one of them, the language processing part, tries to make sense of what all the others are doing, serving the only purpose of communicating with others.

I wasn’t aware of that research, thanks, but I do agree most cognition is subconscious. When talking rapidly, the words seem to just spill out from nowhere. Ideas simply spring to mind. We have no direct awareness if the cognitive processes that generate them.

We can reason consciously step by step, but it’s an incredibly slow process. It seems likely that consciousness has something to do with attention management and broadcast communication across brain regions and functions.

Which is part of the reason why I think LLMs are a big deal. LLMs talk like the inner voice, and their failure modes are strikingly similar to the failure modes of "gut instinct" / first reactions and "stream of thoughts". I don't think this is a coincidence - I think we may have stumbled on the main trick that makes biological brains work. I don't mean language here, but rather the use of absurdly high-dimensional latent space for representing relatedness.

Now, if the above is anywhere close to the truth, then taking it together with the research you mention suggests that LLMs aren't simulating or parroting abstract thinking and understanding - they're actually doing it, the same way we do. They just lack an evaluator/censor layer of conscious experience.

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