Comment by bjourne

You know you're conscious, but you can't prove the consciousness of anybody around you, nor can you prove your own consciousness to others.

To an external observer, another human's brain and body is nothing more than a complex electrical/chemical circuit. They could easily be a P-Zombie [0], a human body with no consciousness inside, but the circuits are running and producing the appearance of consciousness via reactions to stimuli that mimic a conscious human.

Theoretically, with sufficient technology, you could take a snapshot of the state of someone's brain and use it to predict exactly how they would react to any given stimulus.

Just think about how medications can change the way people behave and the decisions they make. We're all just meat and free will is an illusion.

But getting back on topic...my instinct wants to say that a computer cannot become conscious, but it may merely produce an output that resembles consciousness. A computer is merely a rock that we've shaped to do math. I want to say you can't give consciousness to a rock, but then how did we become conscious? My understanding that life began as primordial soup that resulted in self-replicating molecules that formed protein chains, which over millions of years evolved into single-celled life, which then evolved into multi-celled life, and eventually the complex organisms we have today...how did consciousness happen?

Somehow, consciousness can arise from non-conscious matter. With that knowledge, I do not think it is impossible for a computer to gain consciousness.

But I don't think it'll happen from an LLM.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

If you can define consciousness in a way that is independently verifiable, you should definitely do so. World-wide fame and riches await you.

To paraphrase Jean Luc Picard: Am I conscious? Why? Can you prove that I am conscious?