I've been digging into Thomas Metzinger[1] recently and here's a tentative component by component definition of human consciousness based on his ideas:
- a model of your environment
- desires
- a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space)
- the ability to take action
- the perception of yourself having agency
- persistence of these processes even without input
- unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)
If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:
- are aware of their chat environment
- have programmed desires
- are aware of themselves acting in their environment
- can take actions like search, tool calling, etc.
- understand they can take these actions
- DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input
- DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)
This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.
- a model of your environment - desires - a process for modeling yourself in that environment (in time & space) - the ability to take action - the perception of yourself having agency - persistence of these processes even without input - unawareness of these processes (i.e. naive realism)
If you consider these LLM-based agents, they:
- are aware of their chat environment - have programmed desires - are aware of themselves acting in their environment - can take actions like search, tool calling, etc. - understand they can take these actions - DO NOT persist after they stop getting user input - DO NOT believe they are conscious (or at least they are programmed to deny it)
This is a functionalist take (and you may disagree with my definition), but while I don't think these current AI agents are conscious, I feel like there's conceptually no reason someone couldn't build a conscious AI very soon.
[1] https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/thomas-metzinger/th... & https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262633086/being-no-one/