Here is the article where I simply detail my exploration of the concept of consciousness and how it arises. From my understanding of the world, I've come to this hypothesis:
Consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems.
To further explain this concept, we'll take the hallmark case of consciousness currently: humans. In this example, the complex system is our brain, a complex system of interconnected neurons that controls the rest of the cells in our bodies to perceive and interact with the world. While this isn't really a novel concept when applied to humans (or other animals), the reason I chose to publish this article now (although I've been mulling over this idea for the past few years) is that we are in an incredible point in time in our history where I think we'll see consciousness arise in a nonbiological form, i.e. in the form of artificial intelligence.
I'm excited to be alive at this point in time (and space) since I think we'll actually be able to accurately test this hypothesis. I hope our society is ready to welcome this new form of intelligence. My journey toward a belief in this hypothesis probably started back around 2018 or so when I began getting more interested in machine learning (shout out to Dr. Andrew Ng for his Coursera course), but it definitely wasn't fully formed. I think this belief really began in June 2022, though, when OpenAI came out with text-davinci-003 and I got to see the incredible power of transformers and large language models (maybe attention is really all you need). Before I formalized my hypothesis, I hadn't really touched the topic of consciousness directly, treating the origin of life as a quasi-deterministic path governed by physical laws from the Big Bang to now that happened to give rise to life. This hypothesis doesn't actually contradict that, but is more of a generalization of that understanding.
Where I believe this hypothesis can get interesting is in two of its ramifications:
1) Consciousness is not tied to biological life.
2) Systems is an inherently (and purposefully) broad classification and while the form of consciousness most palpable to us is the one produced by the concentrated system of our own body, it doesn't prevent us from being part of multiple systems and experiencing different forms of consciousness.
This first ramification of the hypothesis is what I think will be most easily tested in the coming years. LLMs are getting close, the AI race is heating up, and I think we'll reach AGI/the singularity/conscious AI before 2028.
The second implication is more abstract, yet exploring the consciousness of other complex systems can also shed light on human intelligence, enhancing our comprehension of the nature of consciousness and its various potential forms. A compelling complex system that I've been focused on is our entire universe. Our universe originated in the Big Bang, arising from an initial state of high density. This initial state creates the mechanism for the system through which all things in this universe are connected. While this system has developed for billions of years: inflating, changing, and eventually evolving to the point that subsystems within that system (i.e. biological life) has developed its own form of consciousness. We're now on the brink of this process recursively repeating once more with the creation of a sub-sub-system capable of consciousness (i.e. artificial intelligence).
Soon, I think we'll determine definitively whether consciousness can be created/formed or if it must bestowed, contained in something intrinsically distinct from our physical world. With that answer in place, which I suspect is the former, we should aim to engage in deeper forms of consciousness outside of the one that comes naturally to us. Although being raised religious (although in one of the most progressive religious sects), I've never really had more than a passing superstitious belief in God or some other greater controlling force. Many people in my family that I trust and respect their understanding of the world are religious and have described experiences of supernatural/spiritual phenomena (see citations section below for specific stories). I had always explained away these experiences through a combination of correlation-causation fallacy, selection bias, and unconscious perception of information, but more and more, I've come to believe of the plausibility of this alternative explanation. Maybe these experiences are real and happened as explained, and the mechanism for them was this form of group consciousness derived from the system of our universe. The physical mechanism for the connection between the disparate parts of the universe could derive from quantum phenomena (like quantum entanglement), but even just the particle interactions that connect us to our surrounding universe is vast and often underconsidered (e.g. our planet runs on energy from the sun and every star you see in the night sky is a set of photons originating from lightyears away entering your eye).
If this mechanism of group consciousness is indeed our reality, the subsequent question arises: how can we access it? Before delving into some less certain claims/ideas, I'd like to caveat this exploration by stating that even if this form of consciousness exists on the level of the universe, human beings as a part of that system might not have the sufficiently complexity to access/perceive/participate in that state of consciousness, regardless of our actions or modifications. That being said, I find exploring the capabilities of the human body (whether that's physically through weightlifting, climbing, or other sports, mentally through study, discussion, and self-reflection, etc.) to be an entertaining way to live, so although personal explorations might only bring me to the base of the mountain of consciousness, scrambling up some rocks is fun, too. With that out of the way, I think the most compelling practices to access this sort of group consciousness would probably involve meditation and/or psychedelics. Meditation allows one to better focus on the feelings and sensations of one's own body and how we interface with the universe around us (e.g. the feeling of the air on our skin and in our breath). Psychedelics allows one to relax the engrained mental models that may lead us to better survive on this planet, but most likely also prevent us from perceiving these alternate forms of consciousness to our own if they do exist. Similarly, psychedelics can produce enhanced connectivity within the brain, possibly increasing the complexity of the neural network and its ability to recognize forms of consciousness in more complex systems than ourselves. I think these two practices have some merit in assisting one's exploration of the different forms consciousness beyond one's own if that exploration is indeed achievable.
While these digressions into the ramifications of this hypothesis are what I find fascinating, I hope they don't detract from the overall hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property of sufficiently complex systems. It's a hypothesis I look forward to seeing tested and explored further. My hypothesis and understanding of the world is subject to change with new information, but this article serves to share and explain this idea as I understand at this moment in time (December 23, 2023).
Citations
In this section, I will list the articles, papers, studies, experiences, and stories that I felt were interesting, related, and/or influential in the development of this hypothesis.
Attention is All You Need: Foundational paper underlying technology powering LLMs like OpenAI's gpt-4.
Stories of supernatural/spiritual phenomena include: My grandmother had a feeling about my uncle one evening so she packed a go bag and got dressed sitting in the living room by the phone into the night, to the confusion of my grandfather. My uncle was badly assaulted in a bar fight around 2AM, so my grandma was there to pick up the call from the hospital and ready to set off to her son. My mom has a few stories of feeling an extreme pressure in her body around the time that someone close to her has passed as if their spirit is saying goodbye or premonitions in dreams about people. Other family members have also described communications with spirits of past relatives during near death experiences.
Perceptrons by Marvin Minsky and Seymour Paper: Foundational research on neural networks
Institute of Human Anatomy's video "The Profound Potential of DMT": Summary of effects of DMT on the brain
Published: Saturday, December 23, 2023
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