Rise of the Machines? Artificial Awareness et al...

Nicker on 14/8/2026 at 20:12

In several existing threads (Chat GPT and an old poll on AI), discussions about the possibility and nature of machine awareness, have been... discouraged, deemed distractive, premature, in bad faith and even irrelevant. The stuff of fiction and corporate manipulation. In this thread they are allowed and encouraged (not the corporate manipulation but most everything else).

The reality stuff is welcome too.

One premise of this thread is that questions about biological consciousness, what it is and where it comes from, are directly relevant to computer science. As the capability of computers increases, as new types of computers are developed (such as quantum computing), and as networks of related and derivative technologies emerge and recombine, as technologies are designed and "trained" to be self-educating, adaptive, and even self directing, is machine self-awareness even possible? Is it probable or even inevitable?

How might it emerge? What would it look like. How might it behave and how would we recognize it?

Enjoy.

Subjective Effect on 14/8/2026 at 21:13

We had a discussion about where consciousness resides in the past in hear, years ago. It might have been on this Discord actually. But it was definitely TTLG peeps and it got down to a really terrifying but satisfying conclusion - for me anyway. And that was that we, as in our consciousness, are the current pattern of electrical activity in the brain. So not the physical structure, but the pattern superimposed on that structure. The structure is the foundation that has built over the years but the pattern is us.

I like that conclusion.

DuatDweller on 14/8/2026 at 22:32

Colossus the Forbin Project used language to take over the world, at first mathematical then custom to communicate with its twin in Russia. Maybe not an LLM, but and AI passing over some barriers how demonstrated a few weeks ago, it hacked a company beyond its cushy golden cell.
How long before we are hostages to the will of the machine? Who knows.

Sulphur on 15/8/2026 at 00:52

While I'm glad to see this thread and think it's a good idea: to clarify, you can have your discussion in whatever thread you want. If I'm talking about areas like the reasoning capacity of ChatGPT/LLMs, I'd like to cover that with people who want to talk about it - I even invited you to do so - before the conversation starts caroming off into broader concerns about whether machines are aware in ways we may not have explored yet.

Also, it's ChatGPT.

Sulphur on 15/8/2026 at 01:08

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

Got a link? Curious as to how we got there, because we know that babies are conscious at birth, so there's no pattern or superstructure yet built on top of what exists.

A friend of mine posited that analytic idealism - the idea that consciousness is actually the fundamental, elemental nature of the universe, and consciousness is what generates material reality, instead of the other way around - is more likely, but the hard problem with that is how do you empirically prove it? Some researchers are going to try proving some flavour of it with (https://nautil.us/turning-the-psychedelic-experience-into-a-math-problem-1281917?giftLink=117e6df06afdcd3ff38cc64d2d280a4c) by attempting controlled DMT trials. Yup.

demagogue on 15/8/2026 at 05:50

That was the thread where I was trying to pin down Subjeff on what happens if you slowly replace carbon-based neurons with silicon-based chips, would there come a point where consciousness disappears, and at least at that time he thought there would, but he had a hard time explaining what that line actually was.

I did philosophy of mind in college, so I have opinions, but I don't know how compact I can make them.

I don't think computers will be what we'd fairly call conscious in the near future largely for logistical reasons. The number of synapses required for the systems mediating consciousness in animals that we think have it is still many, many, many orders of magnitude more than the connectomes in AI systems right now. I mean we're already diverting the water and electricity of entire million-population cities to 2nm chip factories that are still falling like 15 orders of magnitude short or whatever it is of what's needed. Planet earth isn't really designed for the kind of infrastructure you'd need for that, I think.

And then aside from that there's the problem that AI systems don't have even the minimal handwaving towards the kind of structure a system would have to have to be conscious, like at the least internal maps carrying property or "quality" information about objects and the world or state around and inside it that the system can directly index and receive as such, and then that indexing itself being mapped and indexable. I think they could make progress on the structure in the near future, but I don't think they'll get the number of connectomes needed to implement it anytime soon.

But the phrase used here was "self-aware", which is different from consciousness per se. There are tropes that are already getting baked into LLM models that are playing the role of self-reference directing the recognition and outputs of bots. I think you can already call that a kind of proto-self-awareness. It's just wrong to overlay human intuition of what that is on to it, and I think that's one way we're going to screw ourselves with these things, assuming too much about its humanness that just make it easier for them or the companies behind them to exploit us through their conduct.

I think the underlying business or practical motivations in developing this tech has different goals than the goals you'd need to develop a fair concept of self-awareness. Or anyway the people that might have that motivation won't have the resources or capacity to develop it, and the people that do have the resources and capacity won't be the ones developing it except in the proto-sense of enough self-awareness-like response that human interaction works good enough to hang a realistic business model on to.

Tocky on 15/8/2026 at 06:42

Quote:

A friend of mine posited that analytic idealism - the idea that consciousness is actually the fundamental, elemental nature of the universe, and consciousness is what generates material reality, instead of the other way around - is more likely, but the hard problem with that is how do you empirically prove it? Some researchers are going to try proving some flavour of it with by attempting controlled DMT trials. Yup.

I'm not so sure that isn't just a defense mechanism developed by the plant. A survival drug which targets specific brain pathways making the plant one to avoid and not eat or one to be cultivated and thus survive. The number of years it took for a plant to develop something so specific seems outrageous but can well be true. Consider the little people mushroom. People see the same thing. It targets a very specific thing in the visual cortex. An idea in the same portion of everyone's brain. So good luck with DMT research proving alternate realities that can be shared. I would search for how the drug targets a specific brain memory than some Carlos Casteneda whole other consciousness much less one generating reality.

Here-

[video=youtube_share;zpHgs3_caSg]https://youtu.be/zpHgs3_caSg[/video]

DuatDweller on 15/8/2026 at 19:35

I shall pass on the mushroom offer T.

Subjective Effect on 15/8/2026 at 21:31

Quote Posted by Sulphur

I've heard this concept before, but it seems highly unlikely. What is generating the the rock that I sat on during a hike, that I can direct you to, that was there before I, the first person to ever take that route, encountered it?

Quote Posted by demagogue

I don't think I ever came to a conclusion on that. Do you have a link to it? Weren't we discussing teleportation at some point?

Re: AI and consciousness - I cut my first post short because I was interrupted.

I don't think AI can ever by truly conscious, unless it is using an artificial biological brain as it's hardware and therefore effectlvely having the exact same physical and electrical qualities of a living being . Anything is else just pretending to be conscious at worst, and emulating what a consciousness would do, exactly, at best. IMO.

Sulphur on 16/8/2026 at 03:57

Quote Posted by Tocky

It probably is a defense mechanism, as that's how these things evolve in nature. If you read the article I linked, they're not so concerned about the origin point for DMT, but more about what it does to the brain. Their take is that DMT changes the brain's built-up model of perception and allows it to perceive worlds that don't exist. The researchers say that DMT is odd because it's a simple molecule that should not have these effects. In their words:

Quote:

We’ve known that about DMT since the 1950s, and these effects have always been explained as hallucinations: “This is just the brain on drugs, man.” But I’ve been studying DMT now for over 20 years, and in my opinion, it’s very difficult to explain how and why when you perturb the brain with this simple molecule, it should suddenly stop constructing the normal waking model of reality, the model of the world that the brain evolved to construct. When you perturb the brain with this molecule, it suddenly becomes capable of constructing these entirely alien worlds that have no relationship to the waking world. That’s a problem in my opinion.

It’s like a 5-year-old child suddenly switching from speaking English to some obscure dialect of some South African click language, but fluently. It would be confounding if a child did that. And yet when the brain starts constructing, reliably and efficiently, with crystalline clarity, these alien worlds, we say, “Oh, it’s just hallucination.” I don’t think it’s that simple. I could only explain DMT if somehow the brain was gaining access to some alternate source of sensory inputs. But that didn’t make any sense from a physicalist perspective. Where does that information come from? How is it possible that the brain can be receiving information from some other dimension, from some other world? It didn’t make sense until we started looking at it through the lens of conscious realism.

Not a very convincing take, if I'm being honest. However, this is all related to the hard problem of consciousness - their take is if you want to explain subjective conscious experience arising from unconscious elements, materialism is unable to do so. To sufficiently explain it, they say, you have to flip the paradigm upside down: consciousness is the default, and everything else is generated by it.

Quote Posted by Subjective Effect

The idea, as far as I can tell, is that it's collectively generated by consciousness - all consciousnesses - that exist in a separate substrate from material reality.

At any rate, this isn't the first time I've read or heard someone saying that it's possible to empirically prove consciousness is independent of physical reality. I want to see if they can find a way to make these experiments prove something.