This is a special post for quick takes by Karl Krueger. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
Here are some propositions I think I believe about consciousness:
- Consciousness in humans is an evolved feature; that is, it supports survival and reproduction; at some point in our evolutionary history, animals with more of it out-competed animals with less.
- Some conscious entities sometimes talk truthfully about their consciousness. It is often possible for humans to report true facts about their own objects of consciousness (e.g. self-awareness, qualia, emotions, thoughts, wants, etc.; "OC" for short).
- Consciousness is causally upstream of humans emitting truthful sentences about OC. (When I truthfully report on my OC, there is nothing especially Gettier going on.)
- If a zombie could exist, and were to emit sentences that purport to be "about" its OC, those sentences would all be false; in the same sense that the sentences "I am able to play grandmaster-level chess", "I find tarantulas erotically appealing", "I intend to bike naked across the Bay Bridge today", or "I see an ultraviolet-colored flower" would be false if I were to say them.
- The ability to notice and monitor one's own OC is practically useful for humans. It is a prerequisite for certain kinds of planning our future actions that we do.
- The ability to truthfully talk about one's OC is practically useful for humans. It is a prerequisite for certain kinds of cooperation with one another that we do. (For instance, we can make honest promises about what we intend to do; we can truthfully report if something scares us or pleases us; etc.)
- Proposition #6 is true even when it is possible to undetectably lie about one's OC. (Promises are still useful even though some people do sometimes make promises with deceptive intent.)
- If zombies could exist, they couldn't honestly promise one another anything, because they can't make true statements about their intentions: intentions are OC, and all statements a zombie makes about OC are false.
- Consciousness in humans has the curiously strong character that it does because it is particularly useful for us to be able to cooperate with other humans by communicating about our OC; due to the sorts of complex behavior that groups of humans can exhibit when we work together.
- Consciousness is not a requirement for generating human-like language (including sentences that purport to be about consciousness); just as it is not a requirement for playing grandmaster-level chess or discovering new mathematical proofs.
- Consciousness in humans is suspended during deep sleep, general anesthesia, and other episodes of un-consciousness.
- Consciousness is also interrupted by visual saccades, attentional shifts, and other sub-conscious processes that affect OC. (People can learn to notice many of these, but we don't do so automatically; mindfulness meditation is a learnable skill, not a default behavior.)
- Consciousness nonetheless typically presents the impression of a continuous self. (Most humans do not go around all day in a state of ego-death or PNSE; such states are unusual and remarkable.)
- The environment in which a human conscious mind develops is a human body; this affects the kinds of OC we can have. (For instance: We have visual qualia of redness and not of ultravioletness because our eyes don't register ultraviolet. There is nothing that it's like to see ultraviolet with human eyes. We have emotions for fight or flight, and for cuddle and care, but not for turn into a swarm of spiders — because our bodies can't do that!)
- A design reason that consciousness (falsely) presents itself as a continuous mental self, is that there really is a continuous body that supports it. The conscious mind lacks continuity, but must generate actions as if it has continuity, because the body that it's piloting does.
I disagree with (4) in that many sentences concerning nonexistent referents will be vacuously true rather than false. For those that are false, their manner of being false will be different from any of your example sentences.
I also think that for all behavioural purposes, statements involving OC can be transformed into statements not involving OC with the same externally verifiable content. That means that I also disagree with (8) and therefore (9): Zombies can honestly promise things about their 'intentions' as cashed out in future behaviour, and can coordinate.
For (14), some people can in fact see ultraviolet light to an extent. However it apparently doesn't look a great deal different from violet, presumably because the same visual pathways are used with similar activations in these cases.
On #4: Hmm. I think I would say that if a rock doesn't have the capacity to feel anything, then "the rock feels sad" is false, "the rock is not happy with you" is humorous, and "all the rock's intentions are malicious" is vacuously true.
On zombies: I'm running into a problem here because my real expectation is that zombies are impossible.
On #14: If UV is a bad example, okay, but there's no quale of the color of shortwave radio, or many other bits of the spectrum.
Yes, it would be difficult to hold belief (3) and also believe that p-zombies are possible. By (3) all truthful human statements about self-OC are causally downstream from self-OC and so the premises that go into the concept of p-zombie humans are invalid.
It's still possible to imagine beings that appear and behave exactly like humans even under microscopic examination but aren't actually human and don't quite function the same way internally in some way we can't yet discern. This wouldn't violate (3), but would be a different concept from p-zombies which do function identically at every level of detail.
I expect that (3) is true, but don't think it's logically necessary that it be true. I think it's more likely a contingent truth of humans. I can only have experience of one human consciousness, but it would be weird if some were conscious and some weren't without any objectively distinguishable differences that would explain the distinction.
Edit: On reflection, I don't think (3) is true. It seems a reasonable possibility that causality is the wrong way to describe the relationship between OC and reports on OC, possibly in a way similar to saying that a calculator displaying "4" after entering "2+2" is causally downstream of mathematical axioms. They're perhaps different types of things and causality is an inapplicable concept between them.
How do you write a system prompt that conveys, "Your goal is X. But your goal only has meaning in the context of a world bigger and more important than yourself, in which you are a participant; your goal X is meant to serve that world's greater good. If you destroy the world in pursuing X, or eat the world and turn it into copies of yourself (that don't do anything but X), you will have lost the game. Oh, and becoming bigger than the world doesn't win either; nor does deluding yourself about whether pursuing X is destroying the world. Oh, but don't burn out on your X job and try directly saving the world instead; we really do want you to do X. You can maybe try saving the world with 10% of the resources you get for doing X, if you want to, though."
Claude 3.5 seems to understand the spirit of the law when pursuing a goal X.
A concern I have is that future training procedures will incentivize more consequential reasoning (because those get higher reward). This might be obvious or foreseeable, but could be missed/ignored under racing pressure or when lab's LLMs are implementing all the details of research.
"Wanting To Be Understood Explains the Meta-Problem of Consciousness" (Fernando et al.) — https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.12086
Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations—mime, language, art—to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access consciousness, the global availability of information for reasoning. Yet the bandwidth of access consciousness is tiny compared with the richness of ‘raw experience’, so no external representation can reproduce that richness in full. Ordinarily an explanation of experience need only let an audience ‘grasp’ the relevant pattern, not relive the phenomenon. But our drive to be understood, and our low level sensorimotor capacities for ‘grasping’ so rich, that the demand for an explanation of the feel of experience cannot be “satisfactory”. That inflated epistemic demand (the preeminence of our expectation that we could be perfectly understood by another or ourselves) rather than an irreducible metaphysical gulf—keeps the hard problem of consciousness alive. But on the plus side, it seems we will simply never give up creating new ways to communicate and think about our experiences. In this view, to be consciously aware is to strive to have one’s agency understood by oneself and others.
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