I think this is a circular argument. It defines a separation between computation and experience (between the abstraction and the "mapmaker") and then concludes that computation cannot be experience because they are in separate categories.

There are really only two solutions to the Hard Problem of Consciousness:

1. Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever). 2. Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something.

[Some people would add "3. Consciousness is an emergent property of certain systems." But that just raises the question of what emerged? Is it a physical structure, like a tornado (also an emergent property) or an internal feedback loop (i.e., an illusion).]

The problem with #1 is that it's hard to cross the chasm from non-conscious to conscious with a bucket of parts. How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain?

#2 makes more sense. Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.

Originally rejected the paper premise, but I get it now, certainly made me question my belief that consciousness binds to any arbitrary information processing that's of sufficient complexity.

IIUC the author is saying that the human brain is running directly on "layer zero": chemical gradients / voltage changes, while AI computes on an abstraction one layer higher (binary bit flips over discretized dyanmics).

In essence, our brains are running directly on the "continuous" physical dynamics of the universe, while AI is running on a discretization of this (we're essentially discretizing the physical dynamics and to create state changes of 0 -> 1, 1 -> 0).

My currently belief is that consciousness is some kind of field or property of the universe (i.e. a universal consciousness field) that "binds" to whatever information processing happens in our wet ware. If you've done intense meditation / psychedelics, there's this moment when it becomes obvious that you are only "you" due to some kind of universal consciousness's binding to your memory and sensory inputs.

The "consciousness arises from information processing," i.e. the consciousness field binds to certain information processing patterns, can still hold, and yet not apply to AI (at least in its current form): The binding properties may only apply to continuous processes running directly on the universe's dynamics, and NOT to simulations running on discretized dynamics.

I think #2 risk being incoherent unless you define things very carefully.

"Illusion" ordinarily means there's someone with a subjective experience which creates incorrect beliefs about the world. E.g. I drive on a highway in summer, I see reflections on the road, I momentarily believe there is standing water, but it's an illusion. What does it mean for the basis of subjective experience to be illusory? Who experiences the illusion?

> Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.

But we don't think the circuit has an experience of being on or off. And we _do_ think there's a difference between nerve impulses we're unaware of (e.g. your enteric nervous system most of the time) and ones we are aware of (saying "ow"). Declaring it to be "not any more real" than the led case doesn't explain the difference between nervous system behavior which does or doesn't rise to the level of conscious awareness.

Agree with your points on the primary two questions and the circular argument in the original article. However, re: " How is it that atoms/electrons/photons suddenly start experiencing pain? What is it, in terms of atoms/forces, that's experiencing the pain?" that's an interesting question but not necessarily fundamentally refuting of #1. If you start with #1 "Consciousness is an unknown physical something (force/particle/quantum whatever)" then it has 'perceivable' properties of it's own different from those of it's constituent atoms or electrons. A toy example is the 'wetness' of water. If you only look at atoms and molecules with no way to 'experience' water then it's hard to conceive how water can have properties (though in the case of water it is tractable)

Consciousness *may* be something similar. If it is (e.g. the purest form of energy) then it is not inconceivable that it has some properties that not not tractable if we only look at more granular manifestations of it.

4. It is ἐνέργεια, direct spark, of the God. It can be described but not comprehended, imitated but not replicated.

> Consciousness is an illusion. It is the software telling itself something.

An illusion is a misinterpretation, which implies an observer. Who’s the observer then?

>2 ... It is the software telling itself something.

I think human/animal consciousness works something like that - the neurons produce a summary of the organisms situation - what it's seeing, where it is, how it's feeling etc. That the is an input to the thinking/acting parts of the brain eg. feeling hungry, in bedroom -> maybe walk to the fridge. I'm not sure illusion is the right word. Maybe something like situational summary?

#0 Is what William James described as consciousness not being a separate substance, but a set of relations within experience itself:

> Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their 'conscious' quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations — these relations themselves being experiences — to one another.

I resonate with this. I think some folks will object to the word "illusion" and it's connotations but I think it is resolved with:

1. Consciousness is a material thing (that we haven't found yet)

2. Consciousness is not a material thing (and therefore we cannot "find" it, and thus cannot be "known")

2 is the weirder proposition of course. It asserts a category of things that can't be conceived, but of course it feels like we are talking about it because we are using words to contain it. But of course, the words have no direct referent. That's the illusion.

With the emergence argument, I have the following retort.

How can something emerge if it wasn't embedded or hidden within the system already?

Hm. It only takes a life of study and a lot of pain to understand that #2 is the thing. But most of us get to experience the latter without experiencing the former, so for most people #1 is the preferred option.

#1 leads to theism and offers an immediate balm. Unfortunately, it mostly excludes #2, and that leaves us in the merciless hands of God.

there are many possible points eg. for example what happens if you rephrase your solution 2 by swapping the terms?

"It defines a separation between computation and experience" Does it? Or does it separate two forms of computation (or two forms of experience)? Isn't it just saying a GPU can't be a brain and a brain can't be a GPU? That the entirety of a thing's experience can't be replicated on a different substrate, only simulated. The substrate does fundamentally dictate the ultimate experience (or lack thereof) of the thing that computes within it.

What is a "real" thing and not an "illusion" if you go with #2? Is a car a real thing, or just a collection of atoms? Is an atom a real thing? Or a collection of processes? Is it not turtles all the way down? What is "real"?

I think #2 is actually circular, or perhaps rather contradictory. In order to be able to have an illusion one would have to be conscious in the first place. Or how would you have an illusion of something if you're not aware enough to experience that illusion? So I don't think the concept of "illusion of consciousness" makes much sense. (It does make sense for others to have an illusion that an AI or some other entity is conscious, but not for the entity itself.)

> Pain isn't a real thing any more than an IEEE float is a real thing. A circuit flips bits and an LED shows a number. A set of neurons fire in a pattern and the word "Ow!" comes out of someone's mouth.

Perhaps, but I think a physical presence is still required for consciousness, at least for any kind of consciousness that resembles ours.

It's perhaps easier to talk about qualia rather than consciousness, but I think qualia are a prerequisite for consciousness anyway.

Basically all of our qualia are somehow related to our needs in the physical world. We feel physical pain because it signals that our body is in danger of being damaged. We feel emotional pain from social rejection because for most of our history humans have needed other people for physical survival. (Or in some cases perhaps because our genes make us want to procreate and we failed at that.) Either way, our needs in the physical world are not being met. Evolution has produced genetic code that produces a brain that somehow makes us feel that subjectively, even if nobody knows how.

Those subjective experiences of course get processed by neurons, assuming you accept materialism. (Neurons are AFAIK significantly more complex than the "neurons" in ANNs, so equating biological neuronal activity with ANNs is wrong. But I suppose in principle any physical process may be represented or at least approximated by some symbolic representation, so in theory that probably doesn't matter.)

We can also express those subjective qualia in terms of language. However, I don't think it's possible to have our qualia (or consciousness) based on language or symbolic manipulation alone if it doesn't have some kind of a connection to our physical needs.

If you could directly simulate an entire human brain and feed it artificial sensory input, I suppose it would actually be conscious without having a physical body. In principle an AI could also evolve consciousness based on survival needs even if it were not biological.

But for example LLMs have been trained only on the symbolic level. Their "neural" structure is not simulating a brain and they don't have a connection to physical needs. I think that makes them incapable of consciousness even if the output they produce successfully mimics human language -- that is, symbolic representations of our qualia and conscious thought.

I'm not sure if that's the point the author is making. But I think the distinction between the purely symbolic "map" and the "actual thing" sort of makes sense.