Regarding consciousness , I like the explanation by neuroscientist Ramachandran:

https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ramachandran07/ramachandran...

In short, as far as I can remember: evolutionary, it makes sense to understand other humans, to feel what they feel(empathy - the mirror neurons system), and simulate their thinking and feelings.

And once we have those systems, we can also use those on ourselves. And that's consciousness.

Edit:And I wonder if this is a testable hypothesis, in a simulation.

>I have a linguistics background and a lot of my philosophizing lately has been on whether or not the emergent abilities of the LLMs is deep down a similar mechanism that creates our consciousness.

Then you shouldn't have dropped out of your linguistics programme.

This read like poetry to me

It's terrific, but the poetry is from the original it links to, in case you didn't realise.

It's a brilliant and timely update though.

Aside, there are various recorded versions including video on YouTube but this is my favourite, a radio play:

They're Made Out of Meat

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/studio/segments/168264-...

For obvious survival reasons we evolved to have sensory/cognitive access to our own activity, self-monitoring, and self-modeling ourselves.

The self-modeling, is in such a tight loop, it melds "ourselves" and our model of ourselves, our thinking and choices, and experience of our thinking and choices, into one component.

Like you can't analyze half a wheel of a bicycle and be talking about the same thing.

This awareness, increased modeling, control, feedback loop has tightened up over many stages. Just a few:

1. The body-sense loop

2. The internalized-environment-model loop

3. The body-internal-function loop

4. The body-internal-model loop

5. The emotional-cognitive loop

6. And finally, the tightest loop of all, our high-level cognitive activity, experienced as feedback directly, our self-model, and our self-direction, all merged into one thing.

We literally spend almost all day, every day, thinking about ourselves, in terms of our inner self.

That is consciousness. Rich self awareness, a merger of self-model and self-direction, and all in service of understanding and managing ourselves. Hw we can leverage our greatest tool, our self-directable mind, its habits, views, and behavior.

This wasn't an accident. A happy side-effect of our brains. It is a biologically evolved focusing of our highest-level behavior, with tight feedback, constant self-modeling and continuous focus on our inner status as motivation and most privileged object of our control. It has been ruthlessly optimized for, for a very long time.

Yeah, I currently suspect that consciousness is an emergent property. I read elsewhere (it's somewhere in my HN history, I'm sure) that the biggest compute we can currently muster is something like three or four magnitudes away from the number of neurons / connections (or their analog) that our brains have, so it may be a while until we can expect to see it in our machines. But, if the emergent phenomenon hypothesis is correct, then we eventually will. I'm more scared than pleased by the prospect, but there you are.

Time is entropy unfolding as things with nonzero temperature do what they do.

Psychological time is your own weights being updated in response to stimuli and internal processing.

When there isn't anything interesting happening, no updates are needed, and you don't perceive much time. That's why there's a logarithmic effect on the "density" of time as you age.

It seems obvious to me that language and consciousness have nothing to do with each other. My dog doesn't speak any language, but she's obviously aware of herself and the world around her. Plus there are the occasional cases of children that grow up without any language. Are they therefore not conscious?

Quantum Field Theory visualized

https://youtu.be/MmG2ah5Df4g

Here's a more general idea. Our modern physics says that the whole universe is filled with fields and field is composed of numbers. What if we take that literally? When we say an electron is present here, we actually mean that there are more copies of particular number superposed at that place.

AFAIK every argument against conciousness being emergent is just a weak "God of the gaps" argument (since we don't fully understand it all) or a nonsense analogy like the Chinsese room where if you seperate the hardware and software it's not concious anymore (like, duh, remove a brain from a body and it is no longer concious either).

Yeah, the weights not updating online makes them less like a living organism that can update and learn and evolve ... ok ....

I’ve wondered the same myself, without being a cunning linguist.

I understand the math pretty well but still find it crazy that a bunch of matrices can converse in human languages without ever being “taught”.

Imagine decoding an encyclopedia written in a foreign language where the characters, punctuation, and grammar are unknown — supplemented by a million other texts the same way. Feels like it should be utterly impossible with any amount of computing power…

Today I asked my employer’s Claude to proofread a short software user manual written in markdown. (Trying this with a LLM was a first for me!) It pointed out not only grammar mistakes but also cases where I did not follow my own self-imposed conventions that were never explicitly stated. (I didn’t have a chapter detailing all the typographical conventions the way specification documents often do)

I also asked it what parts might be unclear to a user. The response was surprisingly good — no worse than asking the QA tester for the same feedback.

Also find the LLM seems to “comprehend” subtle technical details of obscure technical specification documents that nobody on the Internet ever discusses.

As for time and the universe, Stephen Wolfram’s theories seem intriguing. He seems a bit obsessed with pretty diagrams but the idea of time dilation being the result of computation seems somewhat more appealing than trying to imagine relationships between time, gravity, and the speed of light .

The difference with biological brains is that the 'weights' (or synaptic action potentials) are updated with greater frequency. If one were reaching to make some kind of analogy to consciousness, this update frequency could be considered the 'resolution' of consciousness.

Wait, aren't I the universe experiencing time as a lowly worker in cubicle 4C?

Read the original mentioned on top for full effect.