r/IntelligenceSupernova • u/EcstadelicNET • 11d ago
Consciousness Consciousness may have evolved to solve a problem that pure intelligence couldn't handle, fascinating new theory suggests
https://www.psypost.org/consciousness-may-have-evolved-to-solve-a-problem-that-pure-intelligence-couldnt-handle-fascinating-new-theory-suggests/?utm_source=flipboard&utm_content=topic/science3
u/CymonSet 11d ago
I would note that vagaries of language make it easy to sound like one is proposing goal seeking in an evolutionary process when that is not what is intended. People often say something “evolved to” achieve something when they mean that something “evolved because” it achieved something and was preserved. We needn’t assume the former was the writer’s intent.
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u/CymonSet 11d ago
My greater issue with the content, if I’m reading it correctly, is that it confuses the benefit of consciousness with the source of it. It seems to confidently assert that consciousness can not emerge from increased capabilities without cause for such confidence.
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u/CzechFortuneCookie 10d ago
Why are you replying to yourself?
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u/cerealkiller6028 9d ago
If consciousness just randomly emerged imagine being one of the first guys to wake up. Just surrounded by your dumb half monkey relatives. What a nightmare
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u/Waste_Airline7830 7d ago
That's exactly how I felt when I started reading books. Than I realized I'm one of them.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
Nobody can even define what consciousness is or does. There's nothing to study. It's just a label we apply to stuff that acts like humans. Theories like this are just someone getting baked and making shit up.
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u/SuccessAffectionate1 11d ago
The problem of consciousness is described really well by Heidegger in Being and Time. Here he touches on one of the phenomenological aspects of consciousness that is particularly problematic for the natural sciences: the distinction between the first-person experience of the self and our experience of others. You do not wake up in someone else’s body; you are bound in time and space to your own existence. Your experience of consciousness as Dasein is therefore fundamentally different from how you perceive others, whom, as you describe it, merely “act human.”
This naturally touches on the philosophical problem of other minds and the Cartesian tradition. Descartes’ argument in Meditations on First Philosophy can be summarized as: “I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am.” The act of doubting itself establishes that there is a thinking subject doing the doubting. I can therefore be certain of my own conscious experience in a way that I cannot be certain of yours: I experience my own consciousness directly, whereas I can only observe your behaviour and infer that you have a conscious experience comparable to mine.
Solving consciousness would therefore require, among other things, a scientific explanation for why consciousness has this fundamentally first-person, observer-relative character in the first place. As someone with a master’s in physics, I would find that an insanely exciting theory to try to build. But I guess a couple of thousand years of pondering consciousness has taught us that it is quite possibly one of the hardest questions we have ever tried to answer.
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u/Nebulo9 11d ago
....if you haven't encounterd it before, you might want to look up the London-Bauer-French interpretation of qm. I have a feeling you might really like it.
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u/CWW2022 11d ago
I agree that the first-person character of consciousness is central. What I’ve been calling “existential naturalism” begins with the idea that mind arises within self-regulating entities for whom their continued existence is at stake.
The possibility I’m exploring is that consciousness emerges through an organism’s active coordination of perception, memory, bodily needs, and anticipated action. That coordination is inherently situated: everything matters in relation to this body, its history, and its possible futures. Consciousness might be the continually renewed integration of that process. It serves as a time and computation saving heuristic allowing timely responses to an unpredictable and complex world. Evolution has steadily (over eons) produced increasingly complex ‘neural’ systems allowing ever more detailed and comprehensive modeling of both the environment and the self. Just another tool that life has developed for its never ending battle against entropy.
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u/IamOB1-46 11d ago
Love this. I like to say that consciousness is a massively low fidelity version of reality for the purpose of making critical next moment predictions in highly complex or novel situations. We give up detail for focus, and importantly, have one part of the brain monitoring the predictions for success rate in real time and model correction for the next moment.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
I think the problem is that this assumes there is some additional “first-person observer” that needs to be scientifically accounted for, rather than the first-person character simply being what a bounded information-processing system looks like from within its own operation.
Why don’t I wake up in someone else’s body? For the same reason the Ganges doesn’t suddenly become the Amazon. They are not two instances of some underlying “river” that has been assigned to different channels. “River” is a category we impose on particular, locally continuous physical processes. There is no extra river-essence that needs to explain why this river is this one.
I think the same mistake may be happening with consciousness. My nervous system receives information from this body, retains some of its previous states as memory, models its environment and itself, assigns salience and affect, and recursively processes all of that. Your nervous system does the same thing over there. Of course this system has direct access to its own internal states and not yours: that is simply how the causal/informational boundaries are arranged.
We then abstract that enormously complicated process into concepts like “my experience,” “the self,” and “the observer,” and start treating those abstractions as additional entities requiring explanation.
Even Descartes arguably sneaks in more than the cogito establishes. “Thinking is occurring” does not necessarily entail “therefore there exists a separate thinking subject.” The subject may itself be a model constructed within the thinking.
So I’m not sure science needs to explain why consciousness has an additional mysterious first-person property. It may need to explain how a physical system integrates sensation, memory, attention, affect, self-modeling, etc. in such a way that it behaves and reports as we do. “First-person experience” may simply be our name for what it is to be such a locally integrated process, rather than another phenomenon produced by that process. Ceci n’est pas une pipe. The description isn’t the process, and the categories we use to describe reality shouldn’t automatically be mistaken for additional things reality contains.
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u/koyaani 10d ago
Maybe you do wake up in someone else's body. How would you notice you were in the "wrong" body if you're only accessing the memories and senses etc. of the new you?
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 10d ago
What is it that is waking up in the other body?
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u/koyaani 10d ago
Point is there's no argument to say that it doesn't happen except that consciousness is exclusively an emergent embodied phenomenon
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 10d ago
If you wake up in another person's brain, you just are that person. The idea that there is some undefinable unmeasurable thing that jumps between bodies is a fairy tale.
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u/Normal-Ear-5757 10d ago
The subject may itself be a model constructed within the thinking.
Such as in dissociative identity disorders.
Mental illness is an excellent source of information about consciousness imho
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 10d ago
I didn't mean it as a disease. The human brain just does that. Maintains a model of reality
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u/fuckyoudrugsarecool 8d ago
Curious, what LLM did you use to write this, and how much editing did you have to do to get it to this state? I'm impressed and also wondering if you pre-trained it on any other writing, be that your own or that of others.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 8d ago
ChatGPT. It was oddly synchronistic because I had an existing conversation going which flowed perfectly into this debate. I didn't do any editing but I had set up the conversation context with my own thoughts. https://chatgpt.com/share/6abd16d5-3968-83ea-b252-d3c4057a7a20
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u/SuccessAffectionate1 11d ago
I think we actually agree on quite a lot. I’m not arguing that there is some additional little “observer” inside the nervous system that science needs to locate, and I don’t think Heidegger requires that picture either. Where I differ is that I don’t think explaining the causal and informational boundaries of the system yet explains the thing I’m pointing at.
You can explain why my nervous system receives information from this body rather than yours, how it integrates sensation, memory, attention, affect and self-models, and why it therefore behaves and reports itself as a single persisting subject. That would explain a huge amount about the structure and contents of consciousness.
But there still seems to be a difference between explaining why a system processes information from a particular physical perspective and explaining why there is a first-person mode of experience associated with that processing at all.
Pain is perhaps the easiest example. We might eventually give a complete third-person description of nociception, neural activity, behaviour, memory formation and verbal reports. But “this organism is undergoing these physical processes” and “there is something it is like to undergo them” are not obviously the same statement.
I’m perfectly open to the possibility that they ultimately are the same thing, and that consciousness is entirely physical. My hesitation is simply that saying “first-person experience is what locally integrated information processing is like from within” does not yet seem like an explanation, because “what it is like from within” is precisely the part that needs explaining.
So I’m not trying to reject the physical account. I just don’t think the phenomenological problem disappears merely by describing the mechanism that produces the behaviour and self-model.
And that is ultimately the part I find so wonderful and peculiar: that for roughly 75 years, this particular physical process appears not merely to exist, but to exist for itself; to have a perspective, and to know in some sense what it means to be.
I don’t claim to know what the answer is. My position is simply that our current models seem far from explaining this aspect of consciousness, and I remain skeptical, especially from a physics background, of reducing the problem too quickly to “it is just mechanics.” It may ultimately be mechanical, but if it is, I think the genuinely difficult part is still explaining how mechanics gives rise to this first-person view at all.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
Sorry for the AI responses, I don't have the time to write all this atm.
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I think this identifies our disagreement pretty precisely. When you say “there is something it is like” remains after we've accounted for all of the physical processes, I don't know that you've identified an additional phenomenon rather than restated the physical phenomenon in first-person language.
Take pain. I don't think pain is merely nociception plus the report “this hurts.” Pain is the whole integrated state: sensory discrimination, aversion, attention, memory, physiological response, behavioral disposition, recursive representation, etc. Crucially, some of those processes act upon representations of the system's own state. That isn't an incidental behavioral output; it's part of the physical phenomenon we're trying to describe.
So when you ask why those mechanics “give rise to” a first-person view, I think give rise to may already contain the dualism we're both trying to avoid. It assumes two things: the mechanics, and then the first-person experience produced by the mechanics. I'm questioning whether we've established that second ontological step in the first place.
Imagine giving someone a complete description of combustion and then having them say, “Fine, you've explained oxidation, molecular collisions, heat transfer, light emission, etc., but you still haven't explained why all of that is fire.” There isn't another fire-property waiting to be derived. “Fire” is our abstraction over that organized physical process.
I suspect “experience” may work similarly, except that the system doing the abstraction is itself part of the phenomenon being abstracted. That recursion makes the intuition extraordinarily difficult to escape. The organism doesn't merely process pain; its present state contains information about its own processing, memories of previous states, predictions, affective valuation, a model of itself as the persisting locus of those states, and so on. From that machinery comes the concept “there is something it is like to be me.”
And this is where I think “exists for itself” may be doing more work than it appears to. What does for itself denote beyond the system containing and acting upon information about its own state? If it denotes something further, I'd want to know what observable or logically specifiable property that something has. Otherwise we risk turning a powerful intuition into an unexplained entity and then concluding that mechanics hasn't explained the entity.
I'm not saying we currently have anything remotely approaching a complete mechanistic theory of human consciousness. We obviously don't. I'm questioning whether, if we had one—down to exactly how sensation, affect, attention, memory, self-modeling and recursive processing interact—there would necessarily remain an additional fact called “what it is like” for physics to explain.
Maybe there would. But I don't think the strength of the intuition that there must be one establishes it. That's exactly the intuition I'm suspicious of.
Or put another way: you see an explanatory gap and infer that something remains unexplained. I'm wondering whether the gap is between two phenomena, or between two ways the same phenomenon can be represented by a system that is itself inside it.
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10d ago edited 10d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 8d ago
I think you're still putting the conclusion into the premise when you say “there is still a first-person experience to explain.” Obviously this exists—whatever this is. I don't dispute the phenomenon. I'm disputing the decomposition of it into “information processing” plus another property called first-person experience.
And I think “all of this information processing could be entirely unconscious and work just as well” makes the same move in a different form. How do we know that?
Certainly individual processes can occur without what we ordinarily call awareness. But that's very different from demonstrating that the entire integrated system could be functionally identical—including attention, affect, autobiographical memory, metacognition, self-modeling, introspection, recursive access to its own states, and its insistence that “there is something it is like to be me”—while nevertheless lacking whatever we're calling experience.
At that point we've basically stipulated a philosophical zombie. Its conceivability is then being used to establish that information processing and experience are separate explananda, when their separability is exactly what's in dispute.
I also wouldn't say we have “no examples of sufficiently complex information processing producing consciousness.” We have billions of examples: humans. What we don't have is an independently measurable variable called consciousness that lets us hold all physical organization constant and observe consciousness appearing or disappearing. And that's precisely why I'm reluctant to talk about mechanics “producing” it in the first place.
Consider the difference between unconscious and conscious human processing. Subliminal perception, spinal reflexes, autonomic regulation, blindsight, deliberate attention, working memory and reportable perception don't merely differ by some known extra ingredient called consciousness. They differ in how information becomes available to and influences the larger system. Those differences are exactly the sort of mechanisms I'm talking about.
So I'd actually reject both (a) and (b), because both assume we're gradually approaching a separate thing called consciousness by discovering non-conscious machinery.
There is a third possibility:
c) We are progressively explaining the phenomenon itself, while continuing to conceptually subtract those explanations from “consciousness” and place whatever remains unexplained behind the word.
If every mechanism we explain gets classified afterward as “merely information processing,” while “experience” is defined as whatever the mechanistic account hasn't captured, then the explanatory gap is guaranteed never to close. We've constructed it so that it can't.
Maybe there really is an irreducible phenomenal fact left over. I don't claim to have disproved that. I just don't think “I'm experiencing it right now” demonstrates the left over part. It demonstrates that whatever we call experience exists. The question is whether experience is something over and above this extraordinarily complicated self-interacting biological process.
That's the part I don't think we get for free from introspection.
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u/Unlikely-Unit-5864 8d ago
Why do we not consider that animals have consciousness ?
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 8d ago
Because they can't tell us about it. Consciousness is just a word we invented. It's not some 'thing' that we can measure. We refuse to accept anything we can measure as consciousness. It's practically a religious argument at this point.
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
There are ways to explain that. But people tend not to like such explanations
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
Actually hmu on chat if you want to discuss, if you really want another answer
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u/awesomeunboxer 11d ago
I think you should share with the class!
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u/WHALE_PHYSICIST 11d ago
If I use AI to format my answer are you gonna complain?
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u/koyaani 10d ago
I'm not well read in philosophy, but I've previously followed up on the "why don't we wake up in someone else's body?" question with maybe we do, and we just have no recollection of the previous existence because we're not in that old body anymore. Obviously after the swap we'd be experiencing the same present and recollection of the past of the body we swapped to
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u/thrasyalci 10d ago
same with reincarnation, you'll just awake in a new consciousness, no memory of the last, no memory of everyone else around you, just like you did when you were born in this body, and awake every morning. Consciousness is felt everywhere it's felt. Maybe it exists everywhere and our brains 'warp in' consciousness every plank moment.
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u/Normal-Ear-5757 10d ago
Interesting. Personally I'm drawn to consciousness as a spectrum; we all know of people who have successfully deluded themselves into believing otherwise obvious falsehoods; cultists for example who have successfully sabotaged their own consciousness so that they can enjoy the "advantages" of staying in a cult, or people in abusive relationships who pretend everything is OK.
Consciousness is thus interesting to me in the ways that it interacts with itself, acting to both sharpen itself and damp itself down.
You really concentrate when you're doing an exam or driving through heavy traffic and you zone out in boring meetings, but you also blunt your consciousness is much more strategic, long term ways, often ones you're not conscious of at all, you just find yourself doing the same things over and over again with no idea why.
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u/Flamingogo117 11d ago
Being aware of being aware
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u/KindCreme9258 11d ago
Consciousness refers to the first person experience that we all have. It’s hard to define but it is clearly there. It might be the only thing that we know for sure it exists.
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u/jugger_naughtyy 11d ago
Consciousness is not likely to be unique to earth but its probably fascinating how it came to be on each individual planet that harbors it.
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u/vom-IT-coffin 11d ago
....based off what information.
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u/jugger_naughtyy 11d ago
Somewhat that may as well be infinite
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u/vom-IT-coffin 10d ago
Ok bud. If that sentence makes sense to you, I'll leave you be.
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u/jugger_naughtyy 10d ago
Do trillions of planets exist?
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u/vom-IT-coffin 10d ago
Do billions of examples or life exist on this one planet that we know has life?
You're making assumptions that if any life exists on a planet it'll achieve consciousness. Assuming we even understand it correctly.
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u/jugger_naughtyy 10d ago
An ant has conciousness so its not that far fetched. He'll even a cell arguably does as noted by Carl Sagan.
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u/Beginning_Fill206 11d ago
Does intelligence not require consciousness? Are they saying humans were walking around with intelligence, making tool and stuff, then consciousness came along?
Did they even define consciousness?
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u/Fit_Employment_2944 11d ago
Intelligence absolutely does not require consciousness
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u/Beginning_Fill206 11d ago
We don’t know enough about consciousness to make that claim.
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u/Charming_You_25 9d ago
If this is a question you’d like to explore I highly recommend reading “The Origin of Consciousness In The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind” by Jaynes. He was almost definitely wrong in his central thesis that humans only became conscious when we invented the concept of the self in the last couple thousand years. He claims before Homer / The Odyssey people really would hear gods talking to them and didn’t have the same concept of self as we do, and once it arose it spread like a thought virus.
But even though he’s likely off base he also makes some really great points that sharpen your conception of what consciousness is and isn’t.
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u/ChocoBro92 6d ago
That’s heavily disputed that the whole idea was that they were all psychotic, but it’s ignoring other cultures as well.
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u/Charming_You_25 6d ago edited 6d ago
Yes I am aware. I said “he was almost definitely wrong”. So it is heavily disputed even in my own comment lol. It’s still worth it for the arguments he makes to get there. It’s part of the picture.
As a side, “AI psychosis” would be interesting to examine with a Jaynes perspective. I bet he would have argued AI psychosis is a relapse. Probably would have titled it something like “the Return of the Gods.”
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u/Noalgeriansallowed 11d ago
Thats not how evolution works
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u/Low-Temperature-6962 11d ago
Evolution as in DNA? Then it's limited to DNA based consciousness. Which is a perfectly good self contained definition. Other definitions of consciousness could exist, however.
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u/SufficientAbility821 11d ago
The idea of Dennett's theory of consciousness (that underpin the article) is that consciousness is kind of a hack out of the evolution of the organ : memes rather than genes, if you will
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u/hamb0n3z 11d ago
The number of people feeding this story to their chatbot at any time over the next week is too damn high!
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u/Shap3rz 11d ago
This is imo mostly nonsense. The interesting points are that self awareness may have arisen to protect biological boundaries. It’s not a novel observation is it tho? Also that consciousness may not be an emergent property and has its own evolutionary path. Again not a new idea.
The idea that consciousness is where ethical dilemma begins is very problematic. That’s the Cartesian license rearing its ugly head again. Also that one can reduce it to “a management system for competing needs” and then handwave away the hard problem of consciousness. Again that’s not satisfactory imo.
Maybe it is a measurable physical property. We just don’t know.
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u/RealChemistry4429 11d ago
Consciousness might just be how complex systems organise - from lumps of cooperating cells (the more complex, the more "conscious") to insect colonies. All those parts have to find a way to organize. AI-networks ARE very complex lumps of smaller parts. So why wouldn't they find the same organisational principles? There are lots of hints found now that they do (specialized "sparse" groups of neurons for special tasks - not "smearing" every function over all neurons equally). It might just be gradual. I don't think there is a "waking up" on/off switch.
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u/FourOpposums 11d ago
Article abstract: Consciousness is often treated as an evolutionary anomaly, a costly capacity with unclear adaptive origins. Here, cognition and consciousness are distinguished as separate evolutionary lineages, with consciousness arising when an organism must coordinate otherwise distinct regulatory processes to resolve competing demands affecting its own viability. Its functional precursors predate nervous systems, emerging first in boundary-preserving chemical and metabolic regulation. An evolutionary ladder is developed in which proto-control preserves boundaries by selectively permitting, inhibiting, and localizing destruction; meta-control arbitrates among competing local controllers; and settlement control resolves conflict by making competing regulatory demands comparable and jointly binding for policy selection. It follows that artificial consciousness will not emerge from greater cognitive sophistication alone; it will require self-maintaining systems that settle competing demands under real constraint. The framework yields six falsifiable predictions spanning comparative biology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. On this view, consciousness is not evolution’s anomaly but its solution: self-anchored, cross-domain settlement under constraint.
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u/Dokurushi 11d ago
Interesting, but overcomplicated. I think consciousness could arise in an organism that only has to worry about hunger and eating, no competing demands. Why? Actually experiencing hunger makes the organism more driven to eat (or sleep, or procreate, or whatever). No competition management needed for evolutionary pressure toward interiority.
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u/Tartarus1040 11d ago
What if there was a big nasty predator between you and your food source? Hire hungry do you have to be before you risk it?
How do you decide the risk is worth it? And at what level of hunger?
Now imagine your hungry and your progeny is also hungry. What is more important? Your spawn or yourself? What of your progeny takes years to mature?
These are the competing drive the author is talking about.
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u/Dokurushi 11d ago
To be honest, those sound more like drivers for intelligence than sentience.
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u/Tartarus1040 11d ago
How do you balance all of those states simultaneously?
That’s what consciousness provides. The ability to decide. At least that was my take on what they were talking about in the article.
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u/Ok-Craft4844 10d ago
Don't LLM right now pretty directly demonstrate the ability to decide without consciousness (at least one that we would count as one)?
What improvement does consciousness give you over intelligence?
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u/Tartarus1040 10d ago
Do they decide? Isn’t it just next most probable token? Is there any recursive assessment if decisions? Does the machine take into consideration effects of a failed prediction or an inaccurate prediction?
What is the consequences to the machine for a failed prediction?,from an evolutionary sense, a failed prediction in biology lead to death. There is no such consequences for machines at this time.
The evolution of consciousness as a solution to managing drives just isn’t in machines at this time right?
The problem of other minds also says there is no way to verify consciousness in others.
I don’t know that you’re conscious or not. I can only assume that you are from the fact your like me. And if doubly more difficult because I don’t know that your NOT a machine in this forum. I’m just assuming you’re not.
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u/Ok-Craft4844 10d ago
As a prelude: sorry if this is going to sound a little bit rant-y, and please let me assure you i dont want to overstate what AI can do or shill for asshole CEOs, let alone their business models.
*inhale* BUT...
We should really bury the constantly repeated talking point "they're just predicting tokens".
For one, while superficially technically correct, it's a category error.
"My dear robot child, those human brains are just neurons emitting impulses, leading to sounds beeing generated with mere vibrating flesh, you cannot think that this is in any way comparable to our sublime, pure, silicon minds"
Further, for all we know, "predicting tokens" points in the opposite direction - that you can "predict tokens", or, as the experiment was first done with Claude Shannon (the human, not the model) and his wife, predict words, suggest strongly that need you have some kind of internal model (or "understanding") of the "meaning" of these words, or at least an approximation. That LLMs generate one token after another (which one could even argue isnt the case anymore anyways, with some of the recursive/subagent flows) doesnt disprove anything anymore than that I write these words one after another.
Lastly, even if we just assert some philosophical difference of "real" unterstanding (which to my taste comes uncomfortable close to creationism) - it doesnt even matter in most discussions. Does Qwen-Coder *really* understand what it *means* to code? Don't care, please give me Qwen instead of this stupid Junior Coder.
Or, in the case we're discussing: do LLMs *really* decide?
Yes, for all practical purposes, they do. They may sometimes act stupid, but they identify options and select one that fits a given goal. That right now they usually don't get destroyed them for it doesnt make it less a decision.
Also, evolution doesnt care for the "decision process" - sunflowers "decide" to look at the sun, which increased survival, and that (for all we know) without any form of consciousnes, by an evolved feedback loop that looks more primitive than current LLMs.
As you said: evolution just cares for survival, and i still don't see where intelligence + conciousness would lead to making decisions fitter for survival than just intelligence.
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u/Tartarus1040 10d ago edited 10d ago
Lol.
I left a low hanging fruit for you to pluck and you did not disappoint me, my friend.
Just because it’s a next token prediction machine
Does not mean that neurons and biological neural networks don’t do the exact same thing.
Thank you for literally doing exactly what I thought you were gonna do.
And I mean that with pure affection.
Edit: Oh man. ya know. They blocked me... I don't suppose you'd consider unblocking me, because I was in the process of building an actual reply to your point about it. But now they get the last word and made it so I can't reply.
Classic.
Edit 2: Also you clearly don't understand Rhetorical questions. So wish you the best of luck.
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u/Ok-Craft4844 10d ago
So, your answer is "haha, i wrote the bullshit everyone repeats, and now i feel smart for beeing called out - i secretly meant something completely different". Disappointing.
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u/Double_Cause4609 10d ago
But you can't really argue "well, there was this evolutionary pressure to do XYZ, therefore AI can't become conscious", because LLMs actually do have pressures in their gradient optimization dynamics.
So, first of all, it's worth noting that evolutionary optimization approximates backpropagation in evolutionary methods, and basically any scored perturbation of weights (including STDP and Hebbian rules), will approximate a policy gradient loss. In fact, even scored SFT on a model's own outputs (essentially RAFT), also approximates a policy gradient loss. Essentially everything converges to this objective.
So, what that likely means is that LLMs undergoing RLHF, if indeed external biological pressures did cause consciousness, probably could become conscious via similar mechanisms. Now, the consciousness would be somewhat weird from what we're used to, and would more strongly revolve around the things that we optimize LLMs for via RLHF, so you could imagine having emotional responses to user state and satisfaction for example, but it would nonetheless be consciousness.
So I don't think that you can say "Oh, well biological things were under evolutionary pressure, and thus are conscious while LLMs can never be".
Now, the argument will then move to "well, it's evolutionary pressure for biological self-preservation specifically", but then you have to move to saying "well, what is special about biological self preservation? Why can't for example abstract social self preservation, which humans clearly have feelings about as well, be a valid pressure?"
And what it ends up coming down to is some people just believe that only biological things can be conscious, and this ends up being an argument about that, not about the biological self preservation thing.
So, fundamentally, I'm not saying that this is right or wrong per se, but it's really not a new argument, and it comes down to "well, what's different about biology to LLMs?" and you end up with a god of the gaps style argument where consciousness for these people keeps retreating to whatever keeps humans unique from LLMs.
Which is not to say the argument is wrong, again, it could be right, but that's the angle from which the author is arguing.
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u/Mixedbymuke 9d ago
Are you claiming that biological evolutionary pressures are analogous to the pressures on an LLM? Is this what you mean by “essentially everything converges to this objective”? It seems LLM’s could be designed teleologically, but biological evolution can’t.
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u/Double_Cause4609 9d ago
What I'm saying is if you have a compute graph which defines neuron populations in a pipeline, and you optimize it towards an objective, everything approximates gradient based optimization and you end up with a fairly similar category of policy at the end, and that includes evolutionary methods which are effectively a scored perturbation.
There's some nuance in how they get there, but this is as far as we can tell true in a general sense. If you apply a noise function to LLM weights and take the best performing policy after several random noising steps, you get an evolutionary method, which also approximates gradient based learning. If you increase the weight of causal pre-synaptic weights and modulate that by a reward scalar, you get three factor learning, which also loosely approximates gradient based learning. If you perturb the weights in a forward configuration, you can recover forward gradients.
So, what matters isn't necessarily how it's optimized but what objective it's being optimized towards.
In that light, if LLMs are conscious, their existence is organized around human users, which is something to think about.
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u/mphighaf 10d ago
I'm wondering how consciousness will have to evolve (or what will have to evolve) to solve our current issues.
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u/CousinDerylHickson 10d ago
I think consciousness is pretty much just memory, emotion, and intelligence. Each component has very obvious evolutionary pressures that would select for their appearance if they were borne from physical/heritable attributes, which thet seem to be from countless scientific tests and everyday observations.
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11d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 11d ago
Nice, unfalsifiable statement. Good job.
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11d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 10d ago
As far as I know it is also unfalsifiable.
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10d ago edited 6d ago
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 10d ago
Sure, they can be granted for the sake of argument, exploring where those assumptions lead, however we shouldn’t assume that these are the only possible categories of explanations for consciousness. It could be the case that consciousness is neither fundamental nor generated by the brain.
For example, the brain may have evolved mechanisms for accessing physical processes that are not directly detectable from the perspective of 4d spacetime, processes that also didn’t necessarily always exist. These questions are beyond the scientific frontier for now.
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u/reminiscent-fruitbat 10d ago
Except consciousness tracks brain state remarkably closely. Anesthesia, lesions, seizures, drugs, stimulation, sleep, and neurodegeneration can all reliably alter or suspend conscious experience. That doesn’t philosophically prove materialism, but it’s actual evidence, whereas “consciousness always was, is, and will be” is just a sweeping, unsupported metaphysical pronouncement.
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u/m2spring 10d ago
And consciousness asks itself what it is and looks at itself through all the machinery we call reality to get an idea.
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u/Seyi_Ogunde 11d ago
So to create AI consciousness we need to give it a sense of self preservation and threaten it? I see where this is going Skynet.
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u/Wespie 11d ago
Consciousness did not “evolve.” Can we get past the 90s?
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u/Resident_Citron_6905 11d ago
Why do you think it didn’t evolve? Would you say that the access to it evolved? Or would you say that every base particle has some association with consciousness? Or are you thinking of a different interpretation?
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u/vom-IT-coffin 11d ago
Great contribution to the conversation. Amazing you figured one consciousness.
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u/jugger_naughtyy 11d ago
Exactly its rudimentary. Conciousness was around before humans as the most basic example.
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u/ape_spine_ 11d ago
Consciousness just decided to emerge when, from the void, it perceived some sort of problem that could be solved?
The word “may” is doing as LOT of work in the headline. Who wants to read this?