Lots of great ideas. I like the approach of systematically listing out properties that consciousness might have, especially for studying LLMs.
But here’s my issue: most of the properties you listed don’t go any way towards explaining “why we think we are conscious”. You could argue perhaps self-perception and theory of mind do that, but form how you later fill in the boxes for e.g. “countries”, I don’t think those are the properties we need. It would be quite weird if our theory of consciousness didn’t explain why we even came up with the concept. Or at the very least what consciousness does, its causal impact. Michael Graziano calls this the Arrow B problem.
You could refine your set of properties to tackle that, but then I’m not sure the boxes for “country” or “Wildfire in LA” can be filled!
Obviously you could say maybe consciousness doesn’t do anything, has no causal impact: it’s an epiphenomenon. But it clearly has at least one impact: it’s making us talk about it right now. Or maybe it’s not an epiphenomenon in some entities (e.g. humans), but it is an epiphenomenon in other entities. I’ll have to think about that but it feels like you would need a very principled reason to believe this combination of things.
Lots of great ideas. I like the approach of systematically listing out properties that consciousness might have, especially for studying LLMs.
But here’s my issue: most of the properties you listed don’t go any way towards explaining “why we think we are conscious”. You could argue perhaps self-perception and theory of mind do that, but form how you later fill in the boxes for e.g. “countries”, I don’t think those are the properties we need. It would be quite weird if our theory of consciousness didn’t explain why we even came up with the concept. Or at the very least what consciousness does, its causal impact. Michael Graziano calls this the Arrow B problem.
You could refine your set of properties to tackle that, but then I’m not sure the boxes for “country” or “Wildfire in LA” can be filled!
Obviously you could say maybe consciousness doesn’t do anything, has no causal impact: it’s an epiphenomenon. But it clearly has at least one impact: it’s making us talk about it right now. Or maybe it’s not an epiphenomenon in some entities (e.g. humans), but it is an epiphenomenon in other entities. I’ll have to think about that but it feels like you would need a very principled reason to believe this combination of things.