[ExI] My theory of consciousness

Tue Sep 22 07:44:40 UTC 2026

On Mon, Sep 21, 2026, 5:00 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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", *
>

I did not write "an appearance of consciousness".

I am afraid you have chopped up my replies to the point of reversing or
entirely obfuscating my original intended meaning. This makes replying to
you next to impossible, as it serves to confirm these
misattributions/induced obscurities.

If you truly seek a serious engagement/discussion on these ideas (I know I
do), I would ask that you please leave my replies in their original form. I
think you will also find that many of the questions you pose below were
already addressed in my original reply. (And not to mention in the paper).

Are you unable to open PDF files on your system? If that is the issue I
also have word formats available.

Jason

*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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