The Mythology of Conscious AI(noemamag.com)
noemamag.com
The Mythology of Conscious AI
https://www.noemamag.com/the-mythology-of-conscious-ai/
2 comments
I broadly agree with the caution against naive "conscious AI" narratives, but I think this essay underestimates a key idea from Hofstadter’s GEB.
Hofstadter's claim was not that consciousness is "just computation" in a trivial sense, but that within the space of computable processes, certain self-referential, symbol-manipulating systems can give rise to something structurally indistinguishable from consciousness — a "strange loop."
In that framing, consciousness is not a magical biological add-on, nor merely subjective illusion, but an emergent property of sufficiently rich, recursive models that represent themselves and the world simultaneously.
Biology may be one implementation of such loops, but it’s not obvious that it's the only possible one. Dismissing computation wholesale risks conflating "today's AI architectures" with "the entire space of computable systems."
The real open question, I think, isn't whether computation can support consciousness-like phenomena, but what class of computations is required — and whether our current systems even approximate it.
Hofstadter's claim was not that consciousness is "just computation" in a trivial sense, but that within the space of computable processes, certain self-referential, symbol-manipulating systems can give rise to something structurally indistinguishable from consciousness — a "strange loop."
In that framing, consciousness is not a magical biological add-on, nor merely subjective illusion, but an emergent property of sufficiently rich, recursive models that represent themselves and the world simultaneously.
Biology may be one implementation of such loops, but it’s not obvious that it's the only possible one. Dismissing computation wholesale risks conflating "today's AI architectures" with "the entire space of computable systems."
The real open question, I think, isn't whether computation can support consciousness-like phenomena, but what class of computations is required — and whether our current systems even approximate it.
Firstly, conventionalists are insisting they are talking about “awareness” when they are referring to consciousness, and that is a self deception.
Awareness, even being “awake” aka “conscious” is only a small part of consciousness.
Consciousness is the inflection upon the potential of existential being. I know you don’t want to hear it, it is the vibrational purturbation of quantum potentials in the lattis of our minds which founds the “holographic reflection” that is the self rendering of awareness (call that qualia.)
This self rendering of “awareness” is the biotechnology stack sitting ON TOP IF CONSCIOUSNESS, not the other way around.
Life is a technology of consciousness, and awareness the temporal feedback loop offered by our neurological technology.
This said, quantum computing is closer to “consciousness” than LLM, yet not actually by a long shot.
I am suggesting the very purturbation of the quantum domain is technically a hyperdimensional vibration as consciousness. Consciousness relies upon a holographic aspect of the quantum domain we have not yet fully explored or explained.
By this measure, it is that our very biology uses the analog feedback echo chamber for “potential resolving”. The computational shortcut of our minds. However the wonder of our conscious is that the biology, neurology, and behavioral layers will all self adjust using this feedback loop, rather than a static array of isolated nodes.
If the operating kernel was fully rendered holographically upon the register matrix, and through such feedback self optimized, one might finally call our prodigal technology of “consciousness”.
In the meanwhile, dream of quantum holography which will make all future “computation” the interference within a quantum holographic sieve.