It’s quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
Because I have a subjective experience of it. The mindless and mechanical interactions of particles may give rise to the emergence of complex thought processes that seem to be experiencing the world, but actually seeing red, hearing music, not just input process output - that can’t emerge from physical interactions of particles. It’s a fundamentally different kind of thing. LLMs can say they’re conscious, but if they actually are, it’s not because of a bunch of 1s and 0s inside a computer.
Because an LLM is just a bunch on Matrix calculations, it’s not the hardware it runs on. The maths already exists in theoretical space. Likewise, the more complex maths for neural interactions exists in theoretical space. If maths can create subjective experience, it shouldn’t need the maths to be actually describing a physical object, it should be enough for the maths to exist. So if maths does create consciousness, then any possible state that could be described mathematically is conscious, not just brains that exist in the physical world. If maths can’t create subjective experience, then something else must be creating that, which I call consciousness, and that I don’t understand at all.
It’s quite likely that our personalities and memories disappear upon death, since they are stored in the brain. But my consciousness, the subjective qualia of existence cannot arise out of physical matter. So what happens to that when my brain dies is a mystery.
What is the reasoning that you believe that your consciousness can’t arise out of physical matter?
Because I have a subjective experience of it. The mindless and mechanical interactions of particles may give rise to the emergence of complex thought processes that seem to be experiencing the world, but actually seeing red, hearing music, not just input process output - that can’t emerge from physical interactions of particles. It’s a fundamentally different kind of thing. LLMs can say they’re conscious, but if they actually are, it’s not because of a bunch of 1s and 0s inside a computer.
Because an LLM is just a bunch on Matrix calculations, it’s not the hardware it runs on. The maths already exists in theoretical space. Likewise, the more complex maths for neural interactions exists in theoretical space. If maths can create subjective experience, it shouldn’t need the maths to be actually describing a physical object, it should be enough for the maths to exist. So if maths does create consciousness, then any possible state that could be described mathematically is conscious, not just brains that exist in the physical world. If maths can’t create subjective experience, then something else must be creating that, which I call consciousness, and that I don’t understand at all.