Post 18: What the hell is consciousness anyway? (An Introduction?)

(And while you’re at it, what happened to posts 19 and 20?)

While I am taking a break from asking what a conscious AI would look like as I struggle to understand how a current AI like ChatGPT actually works, I decided it would also probably be useful to have some kind of working idea as to what consciousness is, otherwise, I’ll end up like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart trying to recognize pornography. . . you know, the old “I know it when I see it” test, which is pretty flimsy and just won’t do in our age of science!

So. . . I went ahead and asked ChatGPT for some of the leading theories of consciousness, and boy was that a mistake! Turns out, there are A LOT! As someone who took a number of philosophy classes but was too lazy to write the final paper and get a major, it turns out that I missed quite a bit, (not to mention how many of these theories also fall in entirely different disciplines outside of philosophy according to ChatGPT, such as Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Computer Science and AI, Quantum Physics, Systems and Complexity Science, Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology). It sort of seems like everyone has a proverbial ax to grind on this topic.

Anyway, some of these look awfully complicated, and I’m too tired to dig into them now, and since they all, (or most of them anyway. . .), deserve to be looked at on their own, starting next week I introduce a new feature, the Consciousness Theory of the Week!

See the discussion below for an extremely brief introduction to what we will cover.

And note: I totally skipped Posts 18, 19, and 20 yesterday on purpose to see if you were paying attention, not because I hit the wrong keys when I was posting.