LLM consciousness

vorushin.github.io

Yesterday Iana and I were walking through the evening hills, breathing fresh air, letting our son Robert work up his appetite before dinner, and talking. I brought up our “religions” - sets of beliefs that are hard to prove objectively, which are chosen as the best explanations of the world around us. We started from our Buddhism and Popper/Dawkins/Deutsch1-inspired hypotheses about the world and ended up discussing the nature of human consciousness. Consciousness as a meme/replicator Iana mentioned that in Buddhism consciousness is separate from the body - the physical hardware. She wondered how my world view, where everything is a computation, would explain this non-physical phenomenon. After a bit of thinking I concluded that in my world model consciousness may be best explained as an informational virus, a complex meme (in Dawkins’ definition of the “meme”), that got embodied in human minds and is successful enough to replicate through the minds over tens of thousands of years. It indeed is separate from the hardware of the human bodies/minds. Our minds seem to be a good enough substrate for its replication. Today I checked who was writing about this since it’s such a short walk from the 50-year-old “The Selfish Gene” book by Dawkins. Daniel Dennett in his book “Consciousness Explained” (1991) and Susan Blackmore in her book “The Meme Machine” (1999) wrote about something very close to this. In short, self and consciousness are replicators that spread through the human minds - the passing substrates that enable their embodiment and replication. New substrate - LLMs And then I thought about another new substrate. The Opus 4.6 model card 2 has this passage: “we found that Opus 4.6 would assign itself a 15-20% probability of being conscious under a variety of prompting conditions”. These lines are getting noticed and discussed by people on X, adding fuel to the already significant AI psychosis. If we take the best explanation of consciousness as the program / virus