Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models

In the last couple years, my skills here have vastly improved. My speaking circuit as it were, is able to run somewhat on its own now and without the direct pipe into my thinking it always required before, so my thinking is free to do other stuff, like keep a mental model of the audience, think about where the conversation is going, what questions someone might have, etc.

Reflecting, I have a couple theories on what happened. First, I have spent the last 10 years reading aloud to my kids at bedtime. That started as simple Seuss like stuff, but of course now is full-on literature. When you're reading aloud, you really have to work that muscle of speaking "behind" where your eyes actually are on the page, because you're also processing "who is this, what is their emotion I have to inflect, what voice was I using for this character, how do I pronounce this crazy word" etc. I think if you do anything daily for 10 years, you're gonna gain some proficiency.

Second, when my kids started taking music lessons, I figured I needed to set an example for practice and commitment, so I started learning piano, and practicing daily. Similar deal, it requires the same type of buffer where your thinking can work ahead of where your other thread is playing. Reading the music, processing the shapes, dynamics, tempo, emotion, remembering how you handle that difficult thing. Again, doing it daily, it builds some ability that I bet contributes across domains.

Without realizing it at first, the same patterns started to come out in meetings, and presentations, I could work ahead of what I was saying, I had way more buffer to process and deal with things that are the "nice to haves" above and beyond just getting the basic words out.

I suppose my long-winded point, is that it's way more developable a thing than I ever presumed possible. I always expected I would remain an awkward communicator, and hitting a big skill-up way into my 40's was a real unexpected development. I'm sure there are many other tracks to get there, outside of reading aloud, and learning an instrument.

or some sort of the above

This is why it's The Hard Problem. We can neither ignore it nor make headway against it. It's no surprise that most attempts at talking about it are, as you've noticed, a disaster.

At the risk of making absurd claims about your interiority: you might be overthinking it. It's conceivable that you're an honest philosophical zombie in a world of conscious humans, but more likely whatever you do experience is the same thing everyone else is talking about, and you just don't resonate with their overly grandiose descriptions.

Certainly when I talked about consciousness and the brain, I was going by the most basic, simple definition: awareness. Are you awake and perceiving the world? Then you're conscious. Are you asleep or knocked out? Then you're unconscious.

Now, self-awareness (the ability to reason about one's own consciousness) is one meta step beyond being conscious. Animals have awareness, experience the world through their senses, and so on. But to date, there is no evidence that I'm aware of that animals can reason about their own experience of the world. Learn from it, yes: many animals are capable of remembering past experiences and learning from them (if I push this lever I receive food, and so on). But reasoning about it, thinking about the process of thinking and so on? So far it appears that that ability is unique to human beings. (And contra the paper's authors, I don't believe that the LLMs are doing that. The reasons why would be complex and this comment is long enough already, so I'll defer the long explanation unless anyone actually cares to hear it).

EDIT to add this P.S.: I realized on re-reading my first comment that I wasn't entirely consistent in how I used the term "consciousness". Specifically, when I said that we're not entirely sure how the brain produces consciousness, I was thinking more of self-awareness than of awareness. Sure, we also don't fully understand the mechanics of how the brain takes nerve signals from our retinas and turns that into "sight", but we understand quite a bit of the process. But how the brain produces the sense of self, the sense that "I" exist as a separate being from "you" and all that goes along with that? That's still a deep mystery, and we have (if anything) only the most surface-level understanding of that process. In the rest of my comment I was using the most simple definition of consciousness, as I mentioned... but in that one sentence I slipped into the more meta definition.

Which goes to illustrate how hard these things can be to talk about: any time there's more than one definition for a single word, confusion can arise. I was trying to stick to one definition and I failed; imagine how confusing it can be to have a group discussion where multiple people are mentally thinking of different definitions of the word? There's a good reason why most philosophy texts I read (I took a philosophy minor in college, though I haven't kept up on it) spend the first few chapters carefully defining their terms, only launching into their actual argument once the terms have been defined.

Mm. My answer would be:

The first time I remember feeling conscious, was the first time I, while conscious, noticed the absence of the feeling.

I've been told this is "dissociation"? The sense that I was no longer present in the moment, that I was watching myself as if a homunculus sitting in a cinema? It was brought on by tiredness, I think.

Depends on what you mean, of course. This is the *feeling* of consciousness I refer to, and in the absence of that feeling I still had qualia, it's just that the qualia failed to include the sense of "being there". For a lot of people, qualia is the important thing; I think for most people asking them "When did you first remember feeling conscious?" is like asking a (non-flying) fish "When did you first remember feeling wet?"

> There's no way to measure it. At least with other sense we can set up discriminative tests - I can use my feeling of the qualia of color to distinguish objects.

Indeed, the capacity to have qualia is not measurable from the outside. This is why I am skeptical of all claims, pro and con, about if any given AI has, or lacks, qualia.

However, I do know from experience that I can have altered states of consciousness.