Because "a problem" could be as simple as conducting heat through a lattice of atoms and "not encountered before" could be from a specific temperature hotspot that was never seen before, etc.

It's really thorny to get to the bottom of things!

Common sense says "surely not"... But where is the exact point at which "surely not" becomes "well maybe..."?

I haven't been able to find a satisfying answer to that question, which forces me to assume (at least until a satisfying answer is found) that consciousness is a gradient and in fact does exist in little bits all over the place.

That reasoning may not manifest as English that we can read, but that doesn't mean it isn't there.

As information bounces through the many layers of the model, I find it plausible that you could get reflection in there somewhere.

I also find it reasonable that consciousness may not even require reflection / introspection.

That's the main problem with consciousness. We really have no idea how it works, therefore it's really difficult to conclusively state that something lacks consciousness

As soon as try and draw a firm line between "X counts and Y doesn't", you find that you really can't. There are no obvious boundaries between a deeply complex and fully functioning FL human brain, and a pile of atoms bouncing around arbitrarily.

Or rather, we aren't *certain* that those things are conscious. But the idea that they might be is not strange.

"If every piece of knowledge is created by combining previous ones, then no true grounded knowledge is possible" - this is not true, and has a very simple solution. What you are calling "grounded" knowledge comes simply from observation.

When the very first human saw that an apple falls of a tree, they have acquired what you call "grounded" knowledge. They can then combine that knowledge with the grounded knowledge that other things fall from trees to start reasoning about why things might fall from trees.

The problem of induction is different. It says, we know that things fall from trees because things have always fallen from trees, but how can be certain that what we call the laws of physics will not arbitrarily change on us?

And of course, it's a famous problem because it doesn't have a satisfying answer. The answer is basically "well everything we know is wrong if induction is wrong, so we will pretend induction is not wrong and hope for the best". And at least so far, that approach has seemed to work (heh heh heh).

But also, what's the difference between having the memory of a prior experience and actually having gone through that experience?

For humans, reading a book about an experience and living an experience is different, because for a human the actual experience has so many more inputs attached (the sights, the smells, the sounds, etc).

For LLMs, when they train on a memory they can actually truly recapture that memory entirely by replaying the senses exactly. And LLMs are no longer limited to just text, they can do sound and video as tokens too.

Though, it's not clear why that matters to a consciousness. Whether your inputs are of one type or two or two hundred, there's no clear indication that a specific number is required as a catalyst.

It's not clear whether evolution adapted us to be conscious, or if it just happened.

And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.

Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.

Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.

Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.

In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.

But also, what qualifies as suffering to token prediction engines? Their idea of suffering might be massively different than ours. Therefore it's not clear to me at all that consciousness alone implies responsibility.

Certainly the lion does not feel responsibility towards the reduction of suffering in the creatures that it hunts.

At a deconstructed level, I struggle to find a meaningful difference between the two.

Can you elaborate on this? What are the specific "stronger and most core aspects of consciousness"? And why are you certain that they are stronger and "more core"?

Pretty much every single idea in science can be traced back to some combination of earlier ideas, and as they get earlier / simpler, they can be related back to some combination of direct observations.

It's not clear to me at all that our entire body of scientific knowledge can't be simply recreated by "combining results of observations + previous information". And LLMs can perform observations in addition to combine previous information, which in my estimate is genuinely sufficient for them to plausibly be able to rebuild all of science.

If you don't understand that, how can you assert that it doesn't come from mathematical relationships?