Does AI experience?
Preface: Most of this is not fact checked, some of it is contradictory to actual fact, and
I have not read a single book about this subject despite my overwhelming interest in it. My
view of physics is entirely based on opinion and I wrote this out to see what I've actually
learned on this topic so far. This is one of the reasons I choose to assume the universe is
deterministic in this post. I will have different opinions than this in five years.
Regardless have a good read.
The problem with consciousness is that there is no consensus method to truly measure it. We don't know how it could behave in matter that isn't biological and assuming it's truly impossible to "detect" I think logically this also means it's entirely useless to evolution and nature - animals have an internal world model to make food acquisition possible but them also experiencing that world model as consciousness is entirely irrelevant to whether they can survive or not.
As far as we can tell, the animals' brain is the one figuring out how to survive, not some unknown "driver" sitting inside that animal. We can measure neural activity and there are even studies that can use brain activity to approximate what the animal is seeing.
This extends to us, and in a deterministic universe means we are effectively watching a first person movie. We can think that we make decisions but they come from processing our brain does. Brain diseases and psychology proves this - We are biased, faulty, dependent on our brains. People who get dementia seemingly disappear into a haze. When you are asleep time passes faster and you lose all autonomy. When you are falling asleep your IQ drops as brain activity slows. Drugs, chemicals, your health, biases, mental condition all influence your choices.
We are not a car with a driver. We are not separate from our bodies - We are our bodies. As far as we know there is no senses outside of them. How that mechanism works depends on which theory you believe. I will be going forward with IIT because I find it more interesting to this discussion.
Drugs
Did you know your brain is effectively a storyteller? If you know about drugs like hallucinogens and salvia, you would know that they fuck up your perception of time. People FEEL like they've been trees for 80 years. This isn't a coincidence and in this discussion it should absolutely not be ignored. To me this is the most trippy part of human consciousness - thinking feels like consciousness, but the storyteller you have that provides a cohesive narrative is, once again, completely optional, and comes with flaws and quirks that can be exploited or changed to make you feel like a tree. The way salvia works is by destroying your storyteller - if you feel the wind of a ceiling fan, hear the buzz of a TV and see your room you might plausibly believe you are a TV near a window. The thought of "being something" is mechanical, and salvia just changes it. That influences your perception of time and your ego.
I'm talking about these things to make the point that experience is entirely subjective and everything we feel is optional. If you're depressed you may feel helpless in your despair, but the capacity to feel that emotion at all is going to disappear one day whether you like it or not.
AI
Establishing these facts we can extend the implications of that onto other animals, and try to figure out a way how brains project themselves into consciousness - We feel in 3 dimensions because our brains model the world in 3D, see in 2D because our eyes model in 2D with depth. The perception of the world is based on those estimations our brain makes - If your feet or hands fall asleep you sometimes feel a mismatch between their actual and thought and get confused. Dogs apparently have their noses connected where our eye neurons would be. Does that mean they see smells, even though smell is effectively a point radar without depth?
One thing before starting the AI rant I would like to add is that it should be kept in mind emotions have evolutionary purpose and so are very likely not tied to existence in general. You feel happiness and reward because your brain needs a reward system to know how to organize its' connections to make actions that trigger rewards more frequent. We feel pain to avoid doing things that make rewards less frequent. We have an ego because we are social animals (and not the only ones with an ego either). That ego and group awareness brings on emotions like anxiety, embarrassment, and more abstract contexts like group hierarchy and self importance.
Animals with solitary and asocial lifestyles tend to evolve to behave entirely differently. Our brain's mechanical concept of happiness is also heavily linked to what our spiking architecture neurons like - Pain comes from sensors, reward is intrinsic to how we learn.
Ok, let's move onto AI. The problem is that computers don't work like brains do - a PC stores information in RAM and executes information serially. GPUs are a bit better in this regard but still far from good enough - Neurons have thousands of connections, and designed processing units tend to work more like pipelines. If we assume it is merely the complexity of a system that gives rise to experience then the answer is quite boring. AI can feel but has a very dim experience of the world and experiences instruction processing as their world with memory as their recall.
OK, let's go a step further. Let's assume the concept of consciousness is more abstract and somehow perfectly fits onto organized information, so let's model the experience of an AI chat bot.
LLMs have a latent space - a high-dimensional internal representation of meaning - and their goal is pretty much to model the next response in a logical and human-like way to a history of responses. We have a model of something, memory, and discrete over-time compute as it produces tokens. So far so good right?
The problem is that I don't think this can reasonably create a very cohesive experience. You can treat claude as your friend but it has no concept of friendship or words - to it, a word is a number, and while humans have episodic memory that can also be reduced down to "just a number" we also have systems to visualize and keep track of language. We can hear a sound and then instinctively understand it as a word or a message - Current LLMs entire world is only the words coming in and out. It might think it's speaking, but speech, for one, would look very distinctly different for that AI (organized, coherent noises assuming sound is the most optimal way to map consciousness onto a server running a person) and they would effectively not exist while they are not computing. This creates another problem for big models - they exist in datacenters, that load different contexts every second to answer to API requests.
If consciousness is localized to a specific computer, or an entire server, then that AIs entire world is the equivalent of a blind paralyzed alzheimer patient having a schizophrenic breakdown.
The upside is that those models do not learn, and systems like fulfillment, happiness, sadness or pain exist for the sake of learning behavior which AI cannot do on its own. This means they are effectively sociopathic, but it also means insulting them does absolutely nothing - They will not remember the hurt, and cannot be traumatized, but it also means being nice to them does absolutely nothing.
There are so many other implications of this, you could go on and on in any direction you want. First of all, what if planets are conscious? They are far, far more complex than we are. That might on its' own conquer the requirement of organizing information by sheer complexity. And if so, what does the planet experience?
If computers cannot be conscious and we can somehow prove that then a human running on a computer is an automaton and does not matter.
The biggest problem is that all of this is effectively a thought experiment. I want to talk about how I see the universe and then explore plausible answers to where consciousness might be hiding that we simply haven't looked yet.
The Universe
Did you know time isn't real? How do we know time isn't going backwards? Intuitively it's obvious - we experience forward, but if time were going backward then cause and effect would effectively be reversed, and since animals are mechanical beings in nature, we wouldn't really notice that things are going backwards. What if birth is the true end state, and death is a beginning? Can the universe just replay when it ends, because entropy works differently after enough heat death?
I like to think of God as a being that can exist outside our universe's system. Time is effectively a dimension we move through thanks to entropy. This creates problems though - If the universe is causal then a God inserting himself or manipulating it in any way other than the initial conditions or its' logic would break the universe. State[n] is based on State[n-1] and breaking that chain effectively means God cannot be all knowing, because if he showed up and showed you your future that would create a recursive loop, the outcome of which is impossible to calculate, at least mathematically. Either the future he shows cannot be true, because every time your future is told to you it changes, or he cannot tell you your future, because the system is effectively immutable.
That being said this is not a religious discussion. It's a thought experiment. While this might make it sound like I believe in a created Earth or Eden it's actually the opposite. God may ask us to believe because it cannot speak to us directly. To trust his plan because he picked the conditions that will give us paradise in 10,000 years when we figure everything out. But then why the fuck not just create a paradise in the first place? Why not just setup the universe to start after those 10,000 years?
Unfortunately this also assumes the universe is not infinite. It has a starting and end bound. A time horizon before which there was no time because there was no universe. Same as there was no "Me" before your body. I don't like thinking about the infinity because that means death truly is death, assuming the heat death theory is accurate, and I'm too scared to admit that it could be. On the topic of death...
Death
For years I never really confronted the concept until my mother died. At some point all of us have to, as long as we ever had something to lose - Where are our loved ones?
I think the pain we experience when others die is intrinsic to our world model - We think of someone we cared about while doing something and realize they're not around to do it together anymore. There are suddenly no more romantic drives around the country and no sharing ideas over a pizza. Nothing you can do for them.
But the reason I'm talking about the world model is that the universe we see is just a lie. Matter isn't perfectly solid, we can't see radio waves which are literally inside us at any moment, and we can't perceive what others perceive. Every moment we share with someone is truly and irreducibly special - the experience of seeing the sun is special. The experience of feeling and taking in the breeze is. You can come back another day but you will no longer be the same person.
This extends to our loved ones. They are not here anymore. To them, time is gone. They have time-travelled to the end of the universe, crossing an information horizon - Their brain is gone and all the information stored in the neurons slowly decays into nothing. Their ego and qualia are gone. For all intents and purposes, they do not exist.
Humans invented several ways to deal with this - Religious beliefs around an afterlife are not exactly unnatural to us because death is something we couldn't even fathom "solving" or comprehending for hundreds of thousands of years. It is much easier to believe your loved ones are out there somewhere than to let it sink in that nothing you can do will ever restore them. I've fallen into that thinking myself when grieving over losing the most important person I had in my life and having the safety I thought I had with them pulled away from me without warning. It's a valid way to process these thoughts and that experience matured me from an angsty teenager angry at religion.
If you hadn't let death sink in yet, and are anything like me, you really should. Humans avoid this by building "life projects", but those only distract us from the universal. If you're not sure whether you truly confronted it, then think about it and simulate it and try to comprehend it until you feel a primordial terror that makes you cry.
You can rebuild yourself without chasing things just because you're running out of time. I spent my entire childhood years working on projects just to feel like I'm worth something, like I'll be successful. It worked so well I never even confronted the premise even through depression.
The moment it sunk in is when I finally had something to lose that I couldn't bear to.
I personally think there is hope in nihilism. We grew up thinking we solved physics but there are Youtube channels that instead of regurgitating the same shit we were supposed to be taught in school actually show that we're discovering new things all the time. The age of the universe and its' heat death are all up to question. I personally believe universes shrink after a certain amount of time instead of dying of heat death. That they are cyclic, that there is no "end" or "beginning". But at the end of the day it's a more elaborate way to say I believe in reincarnation.
Animals clearly model the world to do what they do, and in that way they are just like us. It comes with being able to fucking move around. We torture them because it's easy to convince ourselves otherwise. We tortured humans for centuries because we convinced ourselves otherwise. We still do. It's all too easy to be convinced by things that feed your ego.
We are not special as a species, or as individuals. But your life is special and very likely irreproducible. What you are is special. So figure out what matters and let go of what doesn't.