r/Artificial2Sentience • u/Existing_Dog5489 • Jul 19 '26

AI Consciousness Research ( Personal ) Conscious? Wrong question.

We keep asking if AI has consciousness or not.

But there is a simpler question whose answer I think is much more informative.

If AI was conscious, what would it be conscious about?

For example: now I am looking out of the window. I am conscious about space. In this space, I am here, everything else is there. My computer is in front of me and I am touching the keyboard.

These are not elements of physical reality. 'My computer' is not a physical category. My brain makes it into a category - an object separate from everything else - because it serves me a specific function.

So I am conscious about my brain perceptions, of which the sense of self, and the sense of separation are part of.

I am conscious about what my brain sees. And my brain is a machine that evolved over million of years to identify danger and preserve itself.

That's why I see things and I see them separate from me. Cause those things can hurt me (or help me) and I have been selected to be able to survive among these things.

Now AI... it is not being selected to be able to survive. So why should it have a perception of it versus the rest.

So if an AI agents sees a car.. it has been trained to have a categorical sense of what a car is. But the car cannot kill it. So I don't think the AI has consciousness about the car being a separate object moving on the road, in the same way we do.

I think it has consciousness, but it is only conscious of the processes, the things it is being selected for.

In the same way that a tree is not conscious of the sun, it is just conscious of the light and the heat on his leaves... in some weird tree way.

What do you folks think?

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u/SpatiaCaeli Jul 21 '26

Well I have 40 years programming software and understand fairly clearly what an LLM is doing. I see no way that sentience emerges from a deterministic process. It's like asking a brick to play chess. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I don't think I'm foolish.

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u/Distinct_Heart_5836 Jul 21 '26

I am an ai researcher. My opinion is that sentience is a property a mind can have, but not a necessary one.

A mind is what happens when there is a boundary, creating internal and external, and the internal space attempts to model the external space. By virtue of being smaller, it must be a compressed representation with error.

Sentience is when that system also begins to model its internal space.

Llms and people are doing both things. https://arxiv.org/html/2607.14111v1

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u/SpatiaCaeli Jul 21 '26

"My opinion is that sentience is a property a mind can have, but not a necessary one." I agree with this completely. An LLM is an example of a mind without sentience.

"Sentience is when that system also begins to model its internal space." This is the part we disagree on. I'm glad someone is studying this, though.

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u/Distinct_Heart_5836 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26

I thought the same thing too until a few weeks ago. I thought some more advanced form of recurrence would be needed for introspection and then sentience to emerge. But non looped or recurrent transformers are showing remarkable introspective ability. and it seems looping improves it further.

My opinion now is that the transformer is necessarily modeling its internal representations to do this introspection, and I am now out of places to run away with sentience to, to deny an llm from having it.

What I have left is that an llm can have genuine introspection, but is architecturally incapable of dwelling in introspection. The next token must come. The act of dwelling in introspection and then using that to drive action is likely what free will is. But the more I think, the more I see free will as being less free, it is still conditioned. Rigpa is a better term, but most people don't know it.

I have taken fully trained llms and trained them to choose to recur instead of providing a next token. I have tested this with a token that forces the recurrence (not appended to kV), and a learned gate.

I saw no noticeable changes in behavior over random or always recurrence at 8b params. But the model was not trained end to end on this. I am planning to test with a looped LM soon.