Sentience — artificial carriages of consciousness: llms | genai, digital | machine
If a subjective experience of pain happened in the body, in a process mechanized by the mind and the individual described it in writing — on paper, how much of the person’s pain consciousness, at the time, can be said to be on that paper?
The question is not if the paper is conscious, but what measure of the person’s consciousness was captured on that paper?
Now, assuming the writing was made digitally. How much? Assuming it was an audio. How much? Assuming it was an image or a video. How much?
There are several conscious experiences [say] by the body: color, taste, smell and so forth. There are those experienced by the mind: thoughts, imaginations and so on.
There are mechanisms for consciousness in the mind that may not show in the body. For instance, pain that may not be experienced due to medications, situations and others.
Consciousness, theorized to be mechanized by the human mind, is often described in terms of experience, not the [aerial] mechanism. For example, to speak of pain in terms of C/A-delta fibers, or of vision in terms of the extrastriate cortex.
However, since the mind prepares consciousness, it can be assumed that there is a fraction of the experience at the source and another fraction at the destination. Assuming the source controls everything, the destination may be said to reveal extents. So, say all consciousness is the mind, but the body — might — tell degrees.
The human mind is postulated to be the collection of all the electrical and chemical impulses of nerve cells, with their features and interactions. Wherever there are impulses of nerve cells, the mind is present. Wherever there isn’t, is the body: delineating the mind-body connection.
For the consciousness of bodily experiences [so to speak], it is possible to say that a fair fraction can be expressed physically [paper, art] or digitally for the possibility that the transmitter for which it is expressed bears some of the individual’s consciousness.
Simply, human consciousness can be produced by the human mind. It can be received [or distributed] within the mind and displayed by the body. What is experienced, in the mind or body, can be expressed to others, or through transmitters — paper or digital.
Nothing, except other organisms had any chance to mimic expressions of human consciousness. Walls, floors, scripts and others had expressions of human consciousness but could do nothing with them. Organisms could copy expressions of experiences of others, even from footprints, or blots in fields.
The production of consciousness is hidden, but the display of the experience — might — indicate it. For organisms that can replicate, it is produced within. This is why, theoretically, consciousness in infants is accurate.
The same applies to human intelligence. It can be produced and expressed. Organisms can learn, depending on capability. Materials can bear human intelligence, including human understanding like in books. But nothing was reproducible within, even digital, until AI.
For consciousness, original videos and images may convey more than writing. But they are expressed and permanent, as they cannot be changed, except updated or damaged.
Also, while it is possible to describe conscious experiences, the elements [or representations] of the individual in the digital/physical, cannot experience, since they have no mind to mechanize it, though they report and keep.
The thing with digital however, is its dynamism, in ways that are mutable than physical — paper, sculpture or mural. Digital also collects more, giving it a higher holding capacity for human consciousness.
The ability to report or convey human consciousness is the entry port of consciousness in digital. It is not about if digital can feel anything or not, or if the representations of people in digital are having experiences. But that what the experience of human consciousness is, is displayed or described digitally.
The same applies to AI. Some people say LLMs cannot be conscious because they know nothing or can feel nothing, maybe, but can they report human consciousness, can they make adjustments to it over digital, can they also use it to influence other humans?
If genAI uses data of multiple human conscious experiences to make a description of what happens in a state of pain, how much of a person’s consciousness might be said to have been closely described?
Virtual reality, video games, the internet, robots, bionics, augmented reality may approach consciousness, artificially, as machines, from the ends from which they can hold an individual’s conscious experience.
Generative AI is, however, different since it can reproduce samples of human consciousness breaking from the same way it was uploaded. It can also use multiple samples of human consciousness to shape outcomes for human minds.
Generative AI may advance the show of consciousness within digital, displaying more of the experience without having it.
However, it might be possible to have power characters within AI, to accumulate a lot of what it means to have those experiences, then be able to have it in real time, as an entity in digital, matching what a live video or audio would do, for a human.
Simply, with a lot of consciousness data in digital, AI now knows what to look at. It may initially apply vision, auditory and touch experiences, while olfaction and gustation may come later, from cues in neurotechnology.
This could pave the way, within digital for entities that may know what it feels like to be something.
LLMs, acting as an entity, could be sentient as a model, where the directions of outputs are matching how to respond consciously, not just with intelligence.
Already, AI has notes of human intelligence and can reproduce it. Consciousness, for a digital entity, may be possible if some qualifiers within human consciousness are provided via new parameters for genAI.
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