Is Consciousness Part of the Fabric of the Universe?

One starting point for me is the way consciousness fades as we get more tired and fall asleep. But then it seems as though we may have another thread of a different type of consciousness while dreaming.

If something like an LLM has any degree or type of consciousness, then it certainly is not very similar to human and animal consciousness. Because LLMs don't have many streams of high bandwidth sensory data connected to bodies being integrated. If it somehow experienced an emotion in a way, it cannot be similar to how we experience it, because emotions (at least strong ones) are felt in the body.

When we feel something like a strong negative emotion, that is driven by a type of intelligence that has to put everything in context and then (reflexively) "decide" to send a signal that we experience somewhat similarly to physical pain. It's a regulatory system with the goal of adaptation. We will seek to avoid those situations or resolve them.

I don't believe you can entirely separate these types of things from the questions of consciousness.

I guess I believe that somehow the capacity for consciousness is fundamental to the universe, but only occurs in certain conditions. It's not like atoms or hydrogen or water but more like a stream or a bottleneck in a stream. Or maybe a convergence of rivers.

But reading the caption on Figure 1 of that paper makes it seem like LLMs would have some type of consciousness. If that explanation is correct.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-25-year-old-bet...

But AI fans have "faith" that it will just "emerge" from really big binary software ... somehow.

Proof in my opinion that religion never really dies, it just continually transforms into ever more sophisticated delusions.

Maybe it is an inherent side effect of consciousness.