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