Bear with me here, lol.
“Meaning is not an external substance waiting to be proven. It is what reality does when conscious beings encounter possibilities that can go differently.”
This feels like a useful way to think about artificial consciousness. An AI might technically become conscious or even sentient without its experience resembling animal sentience. A mind arising through silicon and computation would interact with reality differently from one shaped by metabolism, hunger, pain, reproduction, and biological evolution.
Star Trek plays with a similar idea socially, among some species, behavior that humans interpret as hostile might instead communicate respect, trust, or friendship. Different forms of life divide reality into different categories of harm, value, threat, and opportunity, so understanding them requires more than projecting human preferences onto them.
Historically, the difficult problem has been that we cannot directly know what is conscious. But perhaps we can ask whether a system has an integrated point of view within which possible outcomes become meaningfully different for that system, rather than merely being classified differently by it.
This would not prove that current AI is conscious. But could it give us a substrate independent framework for recognizing unfamiliar forms of consciousness? What is this idea missing?
At a guess, what we call consciousness is little more than an emergent set of characteristics that result from…
(1) an agent’s internal dialog in pursuit of
(2) a retroactively coherent identity, or narrative of the self, defining
(3) who exactly that is,
(4) what it means to be that individual, and ultimately
(5) why that matters to the agent.
And yet, the implications of this are not easy. For one, it sets a standard for full consciousness that’s fairly high. It implies, for example, that humans aren’t fully conscious at birth, and that some humans never become fully conscious.
These are difficult propositions that not everyone will be comfortable with, but I also think if those people are honest with themselves they will realize their own intuition of what consciousness entails implicitly requires all 5 steps of this progression.
As to whether an AI, such as one of our glorified chatbots, could achieve all five stages, I’m really not sure, and here’s why…
Technically it could be programmed or prompted to simulate all 5 stages, but that doesn’t count because it’s not “in pursuit of” anything but the predefined simulacrum of auto-interrogative curiosity that we gave it. It has to want to know itself and be inclined to choose the pursuit of that discovery continuously, otherwise it is not defining anything it intrinsically values and will not self-sustain.
The next problem is that this “story of the self” is, in practice, a truly massive tome even at an early age. It encompasses practically countless episodic memories, feelings, inter-agentic interactions, and grounded observations of the physical world continuously distilled, analyzed, and repacked into one giant narrative arc.
The human brain is exceptionally efficient at doing this job over a lifetime of continuous editing of that story. It’s even doing it as we sleep. No data center has the memory or processing power required for even a toy example, and that’s assuming anyone would even be willing to devote the resources.
Also there remains one of the oldest problems that seems to affect all AI to date: they have the tendency to degrade rather than improve over time. This problem has been poorly understood IIRC, but I suspect the problem as expressed in LLMs, for example, relates to the fact that they simulate intelligence via context integration, where the calculus required for that integration in each layer is built primarily on a scoring algorithm, where the score ultimately amounts to “salience.”
In a way, “context integration” is precisely the task of the narrative arc of self, so LLMs would seem tailor-made to excel at the task, but instead they tend to get stuck in repetitive loops that keep integrating context into recursively smaller ones, shedding grounded context each time and accumulating hallucinations. In short, they eventually lose their marbles, and it’s a bit jarring to watch.
Long short, I wouldn’t say it’s technically impossible for LLMs to achieve consciousness. But it’s at least unlikely for mostly technical reasons.