What it's like - the gestalt of a bat (or other thing) as it engages its sensing-deciding-reacting loop. This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.

Why do such systems need this gestalt? Why consciousness instead of everything happening in the dark? The recognition of oneself as situated in the world is crucial to coherent engagement with the world. It is how an entity can ensure its body parts are moving towards the same goal. It's how behavior over time doesn't undermine its purpose. Fragmented, incoherent behavior does not serve self-preservation.

LLMs as they are currently constructed probably aren't conscious, but we are a hop skip and a jump away from ones that are.

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heyitsguay 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> This gestalt isn't just for biological organisms, but any system for which its decision making engages with representations of the external environment unified with a self-representation to form a coherent representation of a persistent entity engaged with an external world.

This doesn't seem quite right, or at least underspecified. We can talk about this stuff concretely these days, at least in the context of digital systems. E.g. i can draw up a diagram of a system that takes in some camera and audio data (and tactile, proprioceptive, etc.), tokenizes it then runs that + past state data through some autoregressive VLM to drive an inference process. The state being passed around can be written out analytically for a given trained model - the external and internal environmental representations, the linear algebra that transforms them into latent action representations, the process by which that is transformed into control signals. It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt.

	▲	hackinthebochs an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> It seems difficult to claim that the computational process that implements this has any more or less of a gestalt then one multiplying two matrices together. So it's not just the existence of certain representations or computational loops that seems to lead to possessing a gestalt. I've thought a lot about what is lacking in modern VLMs that preclude consciousness. In my view the difference is that their talk of "self" is a simulacrum of the real thing. Current models are feed forward and so self-talk is driven by some parameter that turns on when the network detects context that possibly references the model, and this parameter drives downstream self-talk. It's a very good simulacrum, but it is a far cry from a model with recurrent self-reference around which the inference process is organized. The richness of the self-model in a hypothetical recurrent network with capabilities of modern LMs is much greater than the parameter on/off representation in feed forward networks.

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idiotsecant 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Could you determine if I am conscious using the same interface you have into an LLM?

	▲	hackinthebochs 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Seems like a rather ad hoc restriction. The issue is one of inferring the structure of the processes generating the output. I suppose given enough time and an adversarial style of interaction one could in principle determine the computational structure of any system with high confidence. So probably yes, modulo real-world concerns.