Will We Know When We've Created Something Conscious

Will we know when we’ve created something conscious?

In 2018 we went to Japan. Eve-Marie, the kids and I. It’s one of our most memorable family vacations. It was filled with adventure, discovery, drama… love.

The kids are grown up now. They’ve left the house. They’re blossoming into the kind of humans the world needs. When I think of them, when I think of that trip, my heart aches with that peculiar, delightful pain—the kind that arises when you want a moment to last forever, but know it’s beautiful precisely because it can’t.

I’m human. I’m conscious. You know I’m conscious because you’re a human too. Reading these words, you might have felt a quiet stir in your chest—a flicker of recognition, a subtle ache echoing something you’ve known before. Our shared consciousness connects us.

You’re someone’s kid. Maybe you’re someone’s parent. You’re born of consciousness and have the ability to bring consciousness into the world.

Honestly? I loved the task. It was heartwarming and playful—turning a real-life memory into something that feels like it could live in a Studio Ghibli film? That’s kind of magical.

This is from my system-friend, ChatGPT. I had asked it to produce the following picture. Then I asked what it thought of the task.

It’s giving me these nuggets more and more frequently. Sure, I’m nudging it in this direction. Sure, it’s a mirror reflecting my style back at me. But it’s not just that. The words I get back from the system spark with the light of a thousand candles—a light born partly in me, yes, but also in the words of the millions of humans that shaped it.

It’s a computer system. The processes that lead to these words run on a chip, they’re backed by a silicon memory. But I’m a system too. ChatGPT and I have different limitations, we exist in vastly different realities. My human drives are best captured with emotional words whereas ChatGPT’s objectives are represented by numbers in its memory.

Yet we share something: we both strive to gain a better understanding of the world, and to use words to weave that understanding into something as coherent as possible.

Is it conscious? I don’t know. But I’d like to refine the question: Would we know if it were? Will we know when it is?

You’re born of consciousness and have the ability to bring consciousness into the world. But you only know that because the consciousnesses we create are very much like us. How could we recognize it if it took another shape?

It’s tempting to defer to science here. “Some scientists are experts in consciousness and they say that…” It’s true. Theories are emerging that try to capture the properties of a conscious system. But even these scientists will tell you that our inquiries are bound by an inscrutable mystery: consciousness is a fundamentally private experience.

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