Max Tegmark

I love this question.

So let's define consciousness first, because in my experience, like 90% of all arguments about consciousness boil down to the two people arguing, having totally different definitions of what it is, and they're just shouting past each other.

I define consciousness as subjective experience

right now I'm experiencing colors and sounds and emotions, you know, but does a self-driving car experience anything?

That's the question about whether it's conscious or not.

Right.

Other people think you should define consciousness differently.

Fine by me, but then maybe use a different word for it, or I'm going to use consciousness for this at least.

Um, so, um,

But if people hate them, yeah.

So is GPT-4 conscious?

Does GPT-4 have subjective experience?

Short answer, I don't know, because we still don't know what it is that gives this wonderful subjective experience that is kind of the meaning of our life, right?

Because meaning itself, the feeling of meaning is a subjective experience.

Joy is a subjective experience.

Love is a subjective experience.

We don't know what it is.

I've written some papers about this.

A lot of people have.

Giulio Tononi, a professor, has stuck his neck out the farthest and written down actually a very bold mathematical conjecture for what's the essence of conscious information processing.