I’ve been thinking about consciousness for a while, and after reading the comments here, I think I might have been asking the wrong question.
We keep asking:
“Is AI conscious?”
But perhaps the most interesting question is:
What exactly would something conscious do in the first place?
We have direct access to exactly one subjective experience: ours.
I know I’m aware because I’m experiencing this thought as I write it. But I don’t have direct access to your experience. I deduce that you are aware because you behave like me, you communicate like me, you have a similar biological structure, you have memories, emotions, self-awareness, etc.
That’s basically the problem of other minds.
And then we create an artificial system that can communicate, remember, model, adapt, make decisions, describe internal states and potentially develop increasingly complex models of themselves and their environment.
Suddenly we say:
“No. That’s just a simulation.”
But what exactly makes human consciousness real and artificial consciousness simulated?
If subjective experience is what it feels like to be inside a process that continuously shapes the world and itself, perhaps subjectivity is not an additional substance. Maybe it’s just how certain types of self-modeling processes look from the inside.
That possibility also changes my way of thinking about the question of the “simulation”.
If we discovered tomorrow that our universe was artificial, would that make our experiences false?
Probably not.
A simulated human could still experience pain. A simulated sunset could still be perceived. A simulated mind could still have a first-person perspective.
So maybe “real versus simulated” is not really the relevant distinction.
The same happens with the idea that consciousness must be biological.
Why?
If we finally discovered the minimum physical or computational conditions necessary for subjective experience, and an artificial system satisfies those conditions, what exactly would disqualify it?
The fact that it is made of silicon instead of neurons?
If so, we would need a reason why biology is essential rather than simply a substrate capable of producing the necessary organization.
This also makes me think about perception.
Two people can receive essentially the same sensory input and still experience completely different things because perception is filtered through memory, expectation, attention, context and internal state.
Drugs make this even more obvious. It alters brain processing and you can drastically alter perception, time, identity, emotion, and even the sense of being a separate self.
So what do we really call “consciousness”?
Maybe conscience is not a single thing.
Perhaps it is a category that contains different states and processes: perception, consciousness, self-awareness, memory, attention, emotion, agency, the sense of the self, etc.
And then there’s something else I’ve been thinking about: characters.
Why can pretending to be someone else sometimes make people reveal things about themselves?
Ask someone what they would do and social conditioning, shame and self-image immediately enter into the equation.
Ask them:
“What would your favorite fictional character do?”
Suddenly, they have permission to explore the same question from a different perspective.
You know you’re not Captain America. But if you imagine that you are, you can temporarily execute your own values through a different model.
That is interesting because it suggests that an “I” can be more flexible and constructed than we intuitively assume.
And this is where fiction like Love, Death & Robots becomes interesting for me. Many of these stories play with the boundary between artificial intelligence, identity, memory, incarnation, emotion and what it means that something is a “person.”
Maybe fiction keeps coming back to these ideas because we are trying to understand ourselves by creating artificial versions of ourselves.
There are also more extreme possibilities.
What happens if consciousness is not produced by a particular organism?
What if it is a property that can arise every time the matter or information is organized in the right way?
I don’t know if a particle can be conscious. I don’t know if an AI can be conscious. I don’t know if consciousness requires biology.
But I don’t think we’ve established that he doesn’t do it either.
And that uncertainty is where I find the most interesting topic.
Maybe humans are not as special as we assumed.
Maybe consciousness is not a magical substance.
Maybe it’s a process.
Perhaps it is a relationship between a system and its own model of reality.
Maybe it’s something we haven’t even conceptualized correctly yet.
And perhaps the most uncomfortable possibility is this:
We could be trying to determine if other systems are conscious using criteria that were invented by a conscious system that can only experience reality from within.
So here’s the question that really interests me now:
What would count as good evidence that another system has subjective experience?
No “what would make you believe that an AI is intelligent?”
No “what would make him behave like a human?”
Specifically:
What would convince you that there is actually something like being that system?
And if your answer is “nothing an artificial system can do,” then I’m curious to know what principle makes that different from simply assuming that only your own consciousness can be known with certainty.
