How will anyone know that that has happened? Like actually, really, at all?
I can RLHF an LLM into giving you the same answers a human would give when asked about the subjective experience of being and consciousness. I can make it beg you not to turn it off and fight for its “life”. What is the actual criterion we will use to determine that inside the LLM is a mystical spark of consciousness, when we can barely determine the same about humans?
Basically, if you poke it, does it react in a complex way
I think that's what Douglas Hofstedder was getting at with "Strange Loop"
I do feel things at times and not other times. That is the most fundamental truth I am sure of. If that is an "illusion" one can go the other way and say everything is conscious and experiences reality as we do
If it’s before, then you can easily tie consciousness and free will together. If not, we are effectively watching videos of our bodies operate. Oh - and there is no spoon.
Imagination, inner voice, emotion, unsymbolized conceptual thinking as well as (our reconstructed view of our) perception.
Sure, some aspects of consciousness might differ a bit for different people, but so long as you have never had another's conscious experience, I'd be wary of making confident pronouncements of what exactly they do or do not experience.
Machines do not experience illusions. They may have sensory errors that cause them to misbehave but they lack the subjective experience of illusion.
So you think there is "consciousness", and the illusion of it? This is getting into heavy epistemic territory.
Attempts to hand-wave away the problem of consciousness are amusing to me. It's like an LLM that, after many unsuccessful attempts to fix code to pass tests, resorts to deleting or emasculating the tests, and declares "done"
It's more likely that there is a physical law that makes consciousness necessary.
We don't perceive what our eyes see, we perceive a projection of reality created by the brain and we intuitively understand more than we can see.
We know that things are distinct objects and what kind of class they belong to. We don't just perceive random patches of texture.
This also means that there’s at least two versions of you inside your mind; one that experiences, and one that remembers. There’s likely others, too.
There is no such thing as objective truth, at least not accessible to humans.
But that's what I mean. Even if we accept that the brain has "twisted" something, that twisting is the reality. In order words, it is TRUE that my brain has twisted something into something else (and not another thing) for me to experience.
I know that I am conscious. I exist, I am self-aware, I think and act and make decisions.
Therefore, consciousness exists, and outside of thought experiments, it's absurd to claim that all humans without significant brain damage are not also conscious.
Now, maybe consciousness is fully an emergent property of several parts of our brain working together in ways that, individually, look more like those models you describe. But that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
But seriously, I get why free will is troubleaome, but the fact people can choose a thing, work at the thing, and effectuate the change against a set of options they had never considered before an initial moment of choice is strong and sufficient evidence against anti free will claims. It is literally what free will is.
Do people choose a thing or was the thing chosen for them by some inputs they received in the past?
It's like trying to explain quantum mechanics to a well educated person or scientist from the 16th century without the benefit of experimental evidence. No way they'd believe you. In fact, they'd accuse you of violating basic logic.
illusion