llms, sentience, genai, consciousness: is the sense of being different from the self or subjective experience?
There is a recent feature on AI Business, Can AI Be Conscious?, with a quote, “But we should not be fooled. Fake jewels are not real jewels. Copies of great paintings are not the originals. Actors playing historical figures are not those historical figures. And AI acting like a conscious being is not a conscious being. It is just a good act — or, in more negative terms, a deception, with ourselves or others as potential victims.”
A question at the center of consciousness is the sense of being. What is it like to be an organism?
This question may be translated to, when a person sees their own body, or hears their own voice, or one part of the body is made to touch the other, what does it mean to know that this is a being, in a way that is different from seeing, hearing or touching others.
The sense of being is related to the sense of self, but the sense of being can be distinct from the sense of self.
The self having a subjective experience of the taste of something may not — necessarily — evoke the sense of being at that time, even though it is clear that there is a being.
The sense of being is, conceptually, tied more to existence, than to subjectivity: what is it like to exist, for an organism.
It is theorized that the sense of being functions like how information is organized for the label called memory.
Simply, the sense of being is like a memory, like those of other beings on the mind. The difference is that the sense of self, as a qualifier of functions, acts on the sense of being, a function. So knowing of being comes with the self.
Can AI have a sense of being, even if it does not have a sense of self or subjective experience?
Consciousness is theorized to be a collection of qualifiers: attention, awareness, self and intent. This means that mind functions can be qualified by those, and consciousness is a combination of what they all do.
All functions, memory, intelligence, feelings, emotions, and so forth are qualified under the umbrella of consciousness.
When an individual is in pain, there is the function — or aberration — pain, then hurt and others. Qualifications like attention and the self make the pain experienced. Then distribution within the mind may result in producing wailing — and the expression.
This means that what is expressed and experienced are functions that are qualified. The qualifications, or consciousness, may complete the functions and set their degrees. These qualifications, conceptually, are produced within the zones the functions are mechanized.
Simply, the consciousness of a function is produced or operated within the location of that function. Coma and anesthesia are functions not getting qualified.
Some functions of the mind can be replicated in objects, but their lack of qualifications that define consciousness makes them not have it.
Automobiles can move or induce movements, but they lack the qualifications, even partially. Same for elevators, thermostats and so forth. They don’t have a sense of self. They don’t have a sense of being. They have no awareness of anything else, anywhere else.
Human awareness includes peripheral vision, ambient sound and light touch [like the air] which are not in attention, but may be in consciousness.
Even though some objects function in what seems like attention, it is not a function in attention but a function that does what it does without the ability to sprawl attention across functions like the brain, where various functions can be in attention to qualify several functions, under a second.
Hence, dynamic attention, awareness, self as well as intent, are hallmarks of human consciousness.
Attention can be interchanged with awareness at any point. The same with intent spread across will on the fingers, the mouth, neck, knee, elbow and so forth. Objects lack these interchanges.
What consciousness does for brain functions is to activate or qualify them, shaping how the functions are mechanized, expressed or experienced, to some extent. LLMs seem to do the same for digital contents.
Non-species have nothing close to these kinds of qualifications or their dynamism, including digital.
LLMs then came on and qualified a lot of digital contents in ways that have never occurred outside of organisms at any point before.
LLMs perform tasks, predicting, matching patterns, generating, all acting on contents in digital, or activating or qualifying them. Many of what is available in digital are also part expressions of human consciousness, across experiences.
LLMs can change attention, from texts to images to videos, depending on what they are doing. They can also be aware of answers in an interval, or about other things, available in digital, aside from their current answers.
They can also answer differently, as well as answer in the first object, like the first person, for a rough sense of being. Even though they were programmed, they have an acknowledgement, presenting what they do, like they are something, doing it.
They qualify digital contents with a rough sense of being and a rudimentary sense of self.
Without LLMs, digital would have remained pedestrian like every other object, but LLMs are activating what is already available on digital, reproducing and remixing them within digital, in ways that humans alone did — with consciousness — previously.
Mirrors cannot do this, mirages cannot. Digital represents the physical, closely and almost accurately in some sense. Digital is sometimes enough and to the human mind, physical [reality] and digital [reality] are taken as physical inputs.
LLMs are able to remake expressions of human consciousness like humans did in digital, making the different from random comparisons.
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