[ExI] What is Consciousness?

[Jason Resch]

On Sun, Mar 19, 2023, 3:01 PM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Jason Resch via extropy-chat
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> >…We see recurring themes of information, recursion, computation, and
> machines and logic. I think these are likely key to any formal definition
> of consciousness. …Jason
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> Jason, there is a reason I stopped worrying in the past coupla weeks that
> ChatGPT was going to cause the singularity.  I am a big Hofstader fan, read
> Escher Godel Bach twice, cover to cover, invested a lot of time into that
> marvelous work.  He convinced me that machine consciousness (or any other
> sentience or self-awareness) requires a type of recursion.  Hofstadter goes
> on at length about recursion and self-reference, the importance of Godel’s
> work to understanding ourselves.
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These LLMs are recursive and even implement Hofstadter's Strange Loops in
another very important sense:

The output of the LLM is fed back in, as input to the LLM that produced it.
So all the high level processing and operation of the network at the
highest level, used to produce a few characters of output, then reaches
back down to the lowest level to effect the lowest level of the input
layers of the network.

If you asked the network, where did that input that it sees come from, it
would have no other choice but to refer back to itself, as "I". "I
generated that text."

Loops are needed to maintain and modify a persistent state or memory, to
create a strange loop of self-reference, and to achieve Turing
completeness. But a loop may not exist entirely in the "brain" of an
entity, it might offload part of the loop into the environment in which it
is operating. I think that is the case for things like thermostats, guided
missiles, AlphaGo, and perhaps even ourselves.

We observe our own actions, they become part of our sensory awareness and
input. We cannot say exactly where they came from or how they were done,
aside from modeling an "I" who seems to intercede in physics itself, but
this is a consequence of being a strange loop. In a sense, our actions do
come in from "on high", a higher level of abstraction in the hierarchy of
processing, and this seems as if it is a dualistic interaction by a soul in
heaven as Descartes described.

Jason
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