[ExI] My theory of consciousness

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026 at 11:53 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:

*>> Computational functionalism can explain behavior while ignoring
>> consciousness entirely.*
>>
>
> *> That everything can be explained in terms of third-person descriptions
> is what gives the appearance that consciousness*
>

*There is no such thing as an "appearance of consciousness", but there is
such a thing as an appearance of intelligence. We don't believe our fellow
human beings are conscious when they are sleeping or under anesthesia or
dead because when they are in those states they do not have an appearance
of intelligence.  *


> *> isn't a necessary part of the process, and that is what leads to the
> idea of a hard problem.*
>

*The hardest part of the hard problem of consciousness is figuring out
exactly what the question is, what sort of answer would satisfy you that
the problem has been solved? Simply discovering that X causes consciousness
would not be sufficient because that would immediately generate new
questions like how does X manage to bridge the subjective objective divide,
and what causes X? It is a fact that an iterated sequence of "how" or "why"
questions either goes on forever or terminates in a brute fact. And I think
it's a brute fact that consciousness is the way data feels when it is being
processed intelligently. I know I've said all this before but if you show
me why I'm wrong I'll stop repeating it.  *

*> The idea that you could remove consciousness from a functionally
> equivalent system and change nothing of its functioning, is what leads to
> the inherently self-contradictory idea of philosophical zombies.*
>

*Philosophical zombies are not self-contradictory but if laws of physics
permitted the existence of such a thing in our universe then random
mutation and natural selection could never have been able to produce a
conscious entity, and yet I know for a fact that it did. Therefore I must
conclude that although philosophical zombies do not violate any law of
mathematics they must violate the laws of physics.*


> * >>Computational functionalism is certainly not claiming that
>> consciousness doesn't exist, it's just saying it's not needed to explain
>> behavior. *
>
>
> *> I somewhat disagree here. If a robot responsively and reliably reacts
> to catch a hockey puck as seen
> here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIxu2lv8sI
> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIxu2lv8sI>*
>

*I'm surprised you included that link because it supports my views not
yours. The engineers who made that robot did not need to consider the
nature of consciousness for one instant, and yet it was still able to play
a good game. If that air hockey table/robot was able to reproduce itself
and let loose on an empty planet and you went away and came back 4 billion
years later you might find it had evolved into a race of beings that was as
smart or smarter than human beings. *

*> Most people don't assume any process that receives information and
> changes its state is conscious,*
>

*Most people DO assume such a process is conscious, but only if its brain
is wet and squishy, not if its brain is dry and hard. Call me crazy but I
don't think wetness or squishiness is relevant.   *


> *> Thus they will come to reach states that are private, and ineffable.*
>

*If so then pondering such states is about as useful as navel gazing. The
current revolution in AI happened when people stopped wasting their time
thinking about the nature of consciousness and started thinking about the
nature of intelligence. *


> *> The recurrence-necessity test*
>
[...] *The revealing test is substitution within a mind capable of
> comparison and report.*
>

*The report is the only part of this experiment that a third-party
performing the experiment has access to, and Computational Functionalism
can reproduce that report, or any report, without making use of
"consciousness" or any other state that is not available to a third party.
And a report (a.k.a. behavior) is the only thing that Natural Selection can
see in the 4 billion year long experiment called "life", but natural
selection can't directly detect  consciousness any better than we can see
it in anything other than ourselves and it can't select for something it
can't see. Nevertheless evolution managed to produce consciousness at least
once, in me (and probably you too). The only way that could've happened is
if consciousness is a byproduct of intelligence because Natural Selection
can see intelligence, or at least intelligent behavior.       *


> *> that change only if some later transition also changed. Yet the
> unfolding preserves those transitions. A theory that makes physical
> recurrence constitutive must therefore posit a phenomenal change to which
> the subject has no epistemic access. CKT predicts no change*
>

*CKT insists that in any experiment you could set up it can reproduce the
objective results of that experiment without resorting to any hypothetical
subjective state, it doesn't say there is such a state and it doesn't say
there isn't, it is agnostic on the issue and it only says that however
important it may be to us, consciousness is irrelevant as far as
predicting any experiment you could possibly perform. *


> *> because the center possesses and uses exactly the same distinctions
> before and after substitution. Repeatedly switching between the two
> implementations turns the case into a recurrence-specific version of
> dancing qualia.*
>

*OK. So what? If I am not a noun but an adjective, if I am the way matter
behaves when it is arranged in a Johnkclarkian way then dancing qualia
would be exactly what I would expect to happen.   *


> *> This does not establish that LLMs are conscious.*
>

*True, but I have no way of definitively establishing that you are
conscious and I have no way of definitively establishing that rocks are
not. However I could not function if I really believed I was the only
conscious entity in the universe therefore I must accept as an axiom of
existence that solipsism is untrue, and a simple corollary from that axiom
is consciousness must be a side effect of intelligence.   *

*> A more targeted experiment would temporarily block communication through
> the corpus callosum while leaving both hemispheres active*


*Such experiments prove that a split brain produces a split mind, and
that's not surprising because mind is what a brain does. In looking over
your other proposed experiments it seems to me they all suffer from
problems very similar to the ones described above. They all involve the
experimental subject in some way "reporting" on the nature of his
subjective state, but the trouble is such a report, regardless of what it's
about, is an objective behavior that CKT can reproduce without
consciousness entering the picture. *

*If you feel I've overlooked something important feel free to bring it to
my attention. *

*John K Clark *


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