Consciousness is an emergent property of categories. As a sufficient number of categories can be represented in a system, selfhood arises and, with it, consciousness.
The two can not be separated. You can’t have a sufficient repertoire of categories and not get consciousness. It’s not as if there is some special something sprinkled on top that magically turns it into consciousness.
From I Am a Strange Loop.
See also:
- It might be useful to think of AI advancements like large language models as inert mathematical functions and weights, but the repertoire of categories is precisely the building material for selfhood
- Human intelligence is a special case of artificial intelligence
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There are many theories put forth to explain human consciousness and experiments are running to test them. With all the discussion around AGI, it’s timely to keep an eye on them.