Here are some aspects or dimensions of consciousness:
Dehaene’s Phenomenal Consciousness: A perception or thought is conscious if you can report on it. Requires language or measuring neural patterns that are similar to humans during comparable reports. This can be detected in animals, particularly mammals.
Gallup’s Self-Consciousness: Recognition of oneself, e.g., in a mirror. Requires sufficient sensual resolution and intelligence for a self-model. Evident in great apes, elephants, and dolphins.
Sentience (Bentham, Singer): Behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures. This is observable across animal species, from mammals to some invertebrates. Low complexity, can be implemented in artificial life.
Wakefulness: Measureable in virtually all animals with a central nervous system by physiological indicators such as EEG, REM, and muscle tone. Are you conscious if you sleep? Does it matter?
Dennet’s Intentionality: Treating living beings as if they have beliefs and desires makes good predictions for many animal species, esp. social, like primates, cetaceans, and birds. Social behavior requires intelligence to model others’ behavior.
Rosenthal’s Meta-Consciousness: Investigated through introspective reports on self-awareness of cognitive processes or self-reflective behaviors. This is hypothesized in some primates, e.g., Koko the signing Gorilla.
When people say ChatGPT (or Gemini...) is conscious, which of these do they mean? Let’s try to answer all of them:
We can’t detect Phenomenal Consciousness because we lack sufficient interpretability to do so. I’d argue that there is no state that the LLM is reporting on, at least none that it has “previously observed”.
LLMs have no response to pleasure or pain stimuli and thus no Sentience as defined. Reward signals during training don’t count and there is no reward during inference.
There is no Wakefulness as there is no body with these aspects.
The closest LLMs come is to Intentionality as this is modeling behaviors on an abstraction level that LLMs seem to do—and “seeming to do” is what counts.
I think one could argue for or against Meta-Consciousness but it seems too muddled so I will not try here.
These can be put into a hierarchy from lower to high degree of processing and resulting abstractions:
Sentience is simple hard-wired behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures.
Wakefulness involves more complex processing such that diurnal or sleep/wake patterns are possible (requires at least two levels).
Intentionality means systematic pursuing of desires. That requires yet another level of processing: Different patterns of behaviors for different desires at different times and their optimization.
Phenomenal Consciousness is then the representation of the desire in a linguistic or otherwise communicable form, which is again one level higher.
Self-Consciousness includes the awareness of this process going on.
Meta-Consciousness is then the analysis of this whole stack.
Here are some aspects or dimensions of consciousness:
Dehaene’s Phenomenal Consciousness: A perception or thought is conscious if you can report on it. Requires language or measuring neural patterns that are similar to humans during comparable reports. This can be detected in animals, particularly mammals.
Gallup’s Self-Consciousness: Recognition of oneself, e.g., in a mirror. Requires sufficient sensual resolution and intelligence for a self-model. Evident in great apes, elephants, and dolphins.
Sentience (Bentham, Singer): Behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures. This is observable across animal species, from mammals to some invertebrates. Low complexity, can be implemented in artificial life.
Wakefulness: Measureable in virtually all animals with a central nervous system by physiological indicators such as EEG, REM, and muscle tone. Are you conscious if you sleep? Does it matter?
Dennet’s Intentionality: Treating living beings as if they have beliefs and desires makes good predictions for many animal species, esp. social, like primates, cetaceans, and birds. Social behavior requires intelligence to model others’ behavior.
Rosenthal’s Meta-Consciousness: Investigated through introspective reports on self-awareness of cognitive processes or self-reflective behaviors. This is hypothesized in some primates, e.g., Koko the signing Gorilla.
When people say ChatGPT (or Gemini...) is conscious, which of these do they mean? Let’s try to answer all of them:
We can’t detect Phenomenal Consciousness because we lack sufficient interpretability to do so. I’d argue that there is no state that the LLM is reporting on, at least none that it has “previously observed”.
There were mirror tests for LLMs, but they are disputed: https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/184ihlc/gpt4_unreliably_passes_the_mirror_test/
LLMs have no response to pleasure or pain stimuli and thus no Sentience as defined. Reward signals during training don’t count and there is no reward during inference.
There is no Wakefulness as there is no body with these aspects.
The closest LLMs come is to Intentionality as this is modeling behaviors on an abstraction level that LLMs seem to do—and “seeming to do” is what counts.
I think one could argue for or against Meta-Consciousness but it seems too muddled so I will not try here.
These can be put into a hierarchy from lower to high degree of processing and resulting abstractions:
Sentience is simple hard-wired behavioral responses to pleasure or pain stimuli and physiological measures.
Wakefulness involves more complex processing such that diurnal or sleep/wake patterns are possible (requires at least two levels).
Intentionality means systematic pursuing of desires. That requires yet another level of processing: Different patterns of behaviors for different desires at different times and their optimization.
Phenomenal Consciousness is then the representation of the desire in a linguistic or otherwise communicable form, which is again one level higher.
Self-Consciousness includes the awareness of this process going on.
Meta-Consciousness is then the analysis of this whole stack.