I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).

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mjd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

	▲	bonoboTP 4 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious. Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts. Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient. I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.
	▲	TheHardProblem 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field. It might be right. My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is. Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything

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TheHardProblem an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong.

Rather, how much of it is just language.

We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.

I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.

It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.

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txrx0000 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.

	▲	TheHardProblem 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Burden of Proof mainly. If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM). We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.” But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience. I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation. I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.