If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM).
We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.”
But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience.
I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation.
I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.
> If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.
This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer.
If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on.
There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality.
If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space.
So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.