The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

8/17/2026 at 9:35:09 PM

Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.

The being said, I'm reading "Proto" By Laura Spinney, and the thing that strikes me is how recently the world's major languages developed. Everyone assumes we had language fifty thousand years ago, but the actual language families we know about all seem to trace to no more than about 10,000 BCE, and maybe a lot younger than that. The odds of Proto-Indo-European being traceable to a single tribe in the Black Sea region circa 4500 BCE seem really low to me, but that's what seems to have happened.

by GlenTheMachine

8/17/2026 at 10:13:10 PM

Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the geometric period. Snell wrote _The Discovery of the Mind_ in 1946. Since then archaeology has found amazing art like the Pylos Combat Agate from before the geometric period, demonstrating lifelike, realistic bodies rather than assemblages of limbs: the aesthetic of the geometric period was a choice, not evidence of a different kind of consciousness lacking a sense of self.

by Telemakhos

8/17/2026 at 10:17:29 PM

The fact that 100k years ago we could have seen 7 Pleiades with the naked eye but angles shifted since and now only 6, but unconnected traditions speak of 7 entities in tales of their origins may indicate we have had language far sooner than 10,000 BCE.

by agaj-nimm

8/18/2026 at 1:37:30 PM

Or, the number "7" has magical/emotional importance to (at least) Western peoples (as does 3, 12, and infamously - 13).

If they were 8 and now 7, but still called "8 sisters", I'd be more impressed.

by IAmBroom

8/17/2026 at 10:02:02 PM

The language thing is just that without writing, reconstructions based on regular sound correspondences only allow us to infer backwards by a few thousand years. It doesn't mean that anything particularly interesting happened exactly at that time to human language. It's just that language changes relatively fast on this timescale so current languages don't offer enough clues.

And the origins of language are famously uncertain. Might have been recent and relatively sudden (<100 thousand years ago) or a gradual slope for many hundreds of thousands of years.

by bonoboTP

8/18/2026 at 3:05:09 AM

The conclusion linguists are coming to is much stronger than that. The data indicate that the last common ancestor of languages as varied as Hittite, German, and Latin was spoken around 4500 BCE in Ukraine. It's a linguistic equivalent of a genetic bottleneck. It isn't merely that we can't know what happened before that. It's that the proto language was in fact relatively recent.

by GlenTheMachine

8/18/2026 at 6:15:13 PM

In Ukraine of all places? (I'm from there). It seems rather sensational.

by stasomatic

8/18/2026 at 5:50:49 AM

Doesn't contradict what I said.

by bonoboTP

8/18/2026 at 1:35:19 PM

It does mean something very interesting: almost all surviving western languages come from a hypothesized, singular(ish) language (PIE). And PIE existed within the last 10ky.

It is unthinkable to assume language evolved an order of magnitude slower pre-PIE than it did after. How could that work? Humans didn't change. Humans change language, generation by generation (and interaction by interaction).

"We don't know" doesn't mean "a 50,000 BCE human could speak fluently with a 40,000 BCE human." I couldn't do that with someone from 1326 AD in "English" - and I study that era's language.

by IAmBroom

8/18/2026 at 3:39:01 PM

I have no idea how this is a reply to what I wrote. I agree with you but it's unrelated.

It shows there was an influx of linguistic influence from a migrating group. There were many waves of such things. Genetically Europeans are continuous with populations with the pre-PIE influx too.

Language did change fast before PIE, in all likelihood. But it didn't have to be "progress", it could have been regular churn just as it's been since then. PIE wasn't more primitive in grammatical capabilities than modern languages.

And PIE wasn't a just one language or one tiny tribe necessarily. But had many variants and dialects and relatives and other languages living near it from which it borrowed. There is no indication that anything out of the ordinary was going on at that time. It was regular language stuff as it's been before and after.

And it matters that we can't go further back because it's not unlikely that there could be other relationships, like PIE being connected to Proto-Uralic potentially, but we can't really substantiate this at such distance in time. But it's not implausible by itself. Just can't show it at this temporal distance and this rate of natural churn.

by bonoboTP

8/17/2026 at 10:21:29 PM

There’s a fascinating book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes by Daniel Everett that covers the Piraha people in the Amazon.

Their language is unusual: no recurrent sentences, almost no discussion of the past. I’m not suggesting they are unconscious but there appears to be something different going on with the Piraha sociolinguistically.

by whtrbt

8/17/2026 at 10:48:38 PM

It is an interesting book, but as far as I know no one has verified Everett's work. I've just noticed this article that talks about it: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...

by xhevahir

8/19/2026 at 1:15:29 AM

Can you describe a recurrent sentence? I can’t think of what it means.

I did search but only found examples of recurrent in a sentence.

by detourdog

8/17/2026 at 9:47:38 PM

Slate Star Codex reviewed Jaynes' book as well, which is how I first heard about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-...

To your point:

> Isn't this a testable hypothesis? If consciousness spread virally and isn't a natural outgrowth of the physical structure of the brain, then presumably isolated indigenous tribes would still have pre-consciousness mental processes, and that should be detectable somehow.

SSC's article points to a Reddit thread that suggests even folks in the mainstream of culture may undergo a "consciousness transition" as adults: https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_though...

by carbonguy

8/17/2026 at 10:06:08 PM

I'd distinguish verbal inner monologue from consciousness. Many people think on the daily without narrating things to themselves in sentences, without feeling brutish or animalistic. I can plan complex human actions including theory of mind considerations without narrating it as a monologue. It's still very conscious.

Also that reddit post seems like a fake story made up by a teenager as a sort of scifi. It's just too on the nose. Yeah he lived life without understanding that his friends still exist while out of sight... I guess the OP just learned about some developmental stages of toddlers or object permanence etc and wrote a story like this as fanfic.

by bonoboTP

8/17/2026 at 11:09:27 PM

> If consciousness spread virally

“The nam-shub of Enki is both a story and an incantation,” the Librarian says. “A self-fulfilling fiction. Lagos believed that in its original form, which this translation only hints at, it actually did what it describes.” [0]

0. Stephenson, Neal. Snow Crash: A Novel

Stephenson has Hiro state it more explicitly in Chapter 56.

by adolph

8/17/2026 at 10:24:50 PM

"Somehow"

We have no idea what consciousness is, and cannot reliably detect it in other mammals, or even in other humans. I assume that you, GlenTheMachine, are conscious, but I cannot prove it. I think the most we can state, with a little assurance, is that people under general anesthesia are not conscious.

by geophile

8/17/2026 at 10:19:28 PM

Our language development and our awareness is currently tied to writing/record keeping. Hard for us to know anything about prehistoric languages.

by detourdog

8/18/2026 at 3:01:29 AM

Turns out that isn't exactly true. You can poly concepts from genetic drift to language and infer what they must have been like. It's revolutionized the field of linguistics.

by GlenTheMachine

8/18/2026 at 3:41:36 PM

That may work prehistoric cultures that have fragments in our current languages. This is an incomplete picture because we don’t know about the dead ends. Oral histories disappear when the cultures die out.

by detourdog

8/18/2026 at 1:40:30 PM

Very currently. Just 1,000 years ago people memorized Beowulf to keep the text.

But it is hard for us to imagine times before us, it is true.

by IAmBroom

8/17/2026 at 10:24:57 PM

Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.

by nemo

8/18/2026 at 7:30:46 AM

The origin of consciousness is probably evolution. A mouse that is unconscious and sees the cat coming can run away as opposed to an unconscious one. In that case it goes back more than 3000 years and also will vary in nature - a mouse probably isn't conscious of the rhyming couplets in Shakespeare but good with cats.

Even if you redefine consciousness as able to do Shakespeare, I'm skeptical there was an evolutionary change that allowed that 3000 years ago, it's just around when writing became popular, having been invented around 3400 BC.

by tim333

8/18/2026 at 4:12:14 PM

edit: mouse that is conscious...

by tim333

8/17/2026 at 8:51:54 PM

I think this was also one of the inspirations for Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", which also deals with (among other things) the nature of consciousness and religion in the human mind.

by pavel_lishin

8/17/2026 at 9:31:24 PM

It was definitely the inspiration for one of the subplots of _The Big U_. A faction of college students regressed to a bicameral mentality and would hold rituals in which they waited for oracular speech from an electric fan.

I remember thinking at the time I read it “I don't know how anyone could understand this book without reading Jaynes first”.

by mjd

8/17/2026 at 10:20:08 PM

I find this on the crackpottery side. Narrowly defining a certain aspect of consciousness to make a point, and disregarding many (most) other aspects of consciousness. Self-aware much?

by colinrand

8/18/2026 at 12:08:53 AM

How would you define it?

Would your definition be that of your experience?

Would that definition encompass all of humanity, past and present?

Would that definition contain all sapient life? Sentient too?

Would that definition allow for less complex forms of life?

Reading the comments on this post, I am inclined to agree with the words of his biographer “there were people who disagreed with him [who] had not really read his book or understood it.”

If you do get a chance to actually read the book (as you ought to), it covers all the issues and complexities you may have. It is limited only by the information of the era.

by JK-Swizzle

8/17/2026 at 10:59:23 PM

Apparently you don't need much brain to be conscious. This boy was born with 2% of a brain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKelkdfi25k

I think of it when someone tries to explain it. Perplexing!

by smalltorch

8/17/2026 at 9:39:16 PM

The article's definition of consciousness is precise, but it's not what people are referring to in most cases where the word "consciousness" is used. Of course, a word can have multiple definitions. But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized. I don't think there's a much better way to define that. The contrast between the wakeful and non-wakeful state as oneself experiences from the inside is precisely what defines consciousness in the colloquial sense. It seems to be a self-defining concept because I can't even define what "experiences" means without thinking about the wakeful/non-wakeful contrast phenomena that is consciousness, and "experiences" was supposed to be a part of the definition of "consciousness" one sentence ago.

by txrx0000

8/17/2026 at 9:59:55 PM

I am unsure as to what you are trying to say here. It reads to me as “the word the article discusses has a more popular homonym, but they are clearly not talking about that”.

by JK-Swizzle

8/17/2026 at 10:26:38 PM

I'm thinking out loud and pointing out the difference to avoid confusion, and also trying to invite discussion around the colloquial def, because I think the colloquial def is the most important/useful one.

by txrx0000

8/17/2026 at 10:00:10 PM

Anesthesia is a rather different state than sleep.

by sillywabbit

8/17/2026 at 10:24:43 PM

When observed by a different conscious being, yes. But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.

I think that distinction matters because strictly speaking, oneself only has access to one's own consciousness, and that defines one's own understanding of the word "consciousness". It's not possible for me to be you after all, and whatever inferences I make about other people being conscious is based on the fact that I experience my consciousness, and you are similar to me in some specific way (such as being, presumably, a human), therefore you must be conscious. Of course, I'm taking a materialist stance here but that's what's practical to talk about anyway.

by txrx0000

8/17/2026 at 10:45:15 PM

> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar, besides the fact that sleep is initiated by oneself, and the wakeful state transition for sleep is more gradual than for anesthesia.

Have you been anesthetized before? Different forms are very different, but none of them feel like sleep, at all. General anesthesia feels like a time simply skipped forward. Like a chunk of your memory tape was cut out completely. Twilight sedation feels like you temporarily inhabited someone else's body but the experience was so strange that you blocked out almost all of the memory.

Sleeping and dreaming is totally different.

by munificent

8/17/2026 at 11:01:32 PM

I've been under general anesthesia, but it does not feel too different. I'm dead when sleeping, and basically never dream. I should have said "dreamless sleep" in the earlier comment to be more precise because dreaming is obviously different, but it happens so rarely I forget it exists.

by txrx0000

8/19/2026 at 3:24:34 AM

This is fascinating to me. Your experience is so different from mine.

When I wake from sleeping, I have a distinct sense of time passing and can usually tell you what time it is when I first wake up. But under anesthesia, absolutely no sense of any time passing at all.

by munificent

8/17/2026 at 11:34:24 PM

> basically never dream

I’m open to correction but my understanding is everyone dreams when they have REM sleep and everyone has some REM sleep every night unless there are rare medical conditions which would be unhealthy if there is a long period of no REM sleep.

People who believe they never dream (including myself before I learned this) simply don’t remember it. If you were woken artificially during REM you might remember fragments.

by shric

8/18/2026 at 1:04:08 AM

The last time I dreamt was in April. I'd make a note about it in my day log txt file when it happens. It's not the same as a normal night's sleep, and I would remember it. But I assume not having REM sleep for the past 4 months would mean reduced cognitive functioning, which is obviously not the case, so maybe I simply cannot remember my dreams most of the time.

Perhaps memory and consciousness are closely related or even the same process, as there is no way to tell them apart from the inside.

by txrx0000

8/18/2026 at 1:34:02 AM

I misread that as "the first time I dreamt...".

Anyway yes, as I understand it this should be the last time you _remember_ having dreamt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_eye_movement_sleep says we hit REM multiple times per night normally.

... Also this Wikipedia says we have non-REM dreams. This whole article is interesting, thank you for indirectly prompting me to read up a bit :)

by awwaiid

8/18/2026 at 12:41:57 AM

Feels like sleep to me every time. Dreams and all.

by hahahaa

8/18/2026 at 1:09:25 AM

Ok, then let's revise the definition to dreamless sleep or anesthesia.

by txrx0000

8/18/2026 at 3:10:53 AM

Sleep is very subjectively different from anesthesia, in my personal experience. Sleep still carries a feeling of the passage of time, and in fact dreams can feel "more real than real" (I remember my dreams to varying degrees, most often when I drink alcohol, although I don't like to use that as a specific method to remember dreams on demand). Anesthesia, for me, resulted in the absolute cessation of time experience during the process. From my perspective, I went out in the OR and was immediately in the recovery room, even though it had in reality been about an hour.

by LocalH

8/17/2026 at 10:34:47 PM

> But from the inside observed by oneself, it feels quite similar

Having been under general anesthesia once the feeling of just completely not existing for the time period I was under felt very different than sleep does to me.

by georgemcbay

8/17/2026 at 10:41:26 PM

Perhaps it's because I almost never dream. Sleep feels almost just as dead to me.

Case in point, I think we're probably talking about slightly different phenomena even when we talk about the same linguistic definition of consciousness. Kind of like how my idea of an "apple" is based on all of the apples I've seen in the past and instances where I've used the word or saw it being used by others, whereas your idea of "apple" is based on your experiences. They must be mostly similar in information content or we wouldn't be able to communicate at all, but the self-or-other distinction is important.

by txrx0000

8/17/2026 at 10:11:10 PM

I had some serious surgery a few years ago and paid attention when I went under to see if I could recall anything.

Nope. You don’t exist for that time. Anesthesiologist counts down 10, 9, 8, 7, and then I was teleported to the recovery bed.

I consider it incredibly weird and very unlike sleep. Consciousness is off, instantly, then back.

by api

8/17/2026 at 10:14:56 PM

Well... memory is off at least.

by boxed

8/18/2026 at 1:15:36 AM

Ahh, yes, the cosmic horror hypothesis about how anesthesia works. You can't move and experience everything but remember nothing.

But hey, I don't have cancer anymore. So if I had to endure four hours of agony that I don't remember, I'll take it.

by api

8/18/2026 at 1:02:53 PM

Well we do know you can't feel pain, because we've actually done the MRI studies to confirm. Which makes me feel a lot better personally.

But I also have a doctor friend who tells me how removing my appendix actually worked: I go under. Then they take out the appendix. Then they wake me so that I can, with help, move from the operating table to the wheeled bed. This part is not a part of my memory, but people can talk to me and I can get down from the table and onto the bed (again, with help).

So I'd say there's some middle ground here.

by boxed

8/17/2026 at 10:26:04 PM

The more interesting aspect of that is that there's an element of recall implicit in that though: if someone was active, moving around and interacting according to observers then whether they were conscious during that time is heavily informed by whether they remember it later.

Quite where that line exists then is very fuzzy because while for example I feel conscious while I'm typing this, it's also clearly possible I could but then have no memory of it.

by XorNot

8/18/2026 at 1:23:06 PM

> But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean

And by "we", you mean "you".

If I read an article about the nature of "consciousness", I assume it means "as opposed to being a rock or a twig".

N=2; two definitions.

by IAmBroom

8/17/2026 at 10:50:03 PM

Why only as oneself experiences? I can easily tell if a horse is conscious or not. The whole matter is rather simple IMO.

Let's say it's variability (number of distinct if you prefer discrete) of stable responses to external stimuli.

by lostmsu

8/17/2026 at 10:53:49 PM

> when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.

How is dreaming during sleep different from consciousness when awake?

by adolph

8/18/2026 at 12:00:57 AM

It feels very different to me. I have a dream perhaps once a year, and it's nowhere near as vivid as real experiences. Dreams don't have much color, shape, or audio, just a blurry mess where I could barely make out things resembling objects or people. There is no way to mistake that with reality.

by txrx0000

8/19/2026 at 6:25:48 PM

> But colloquially, when people say consciousness, we usually mean the thing that goes away when we sleep or are anesthetized.

Sounds like attention rather than consciousness. You lose your attention.

by bossyTeacher

8/17/2026 at 8:59:15 PM

I find the description of consciousness in this article very narrow (Only arising post language). Post language consciousness is a particular type of consciousness, and the same can be said of post DMT consciousness (Which is sometimes without language).

by N_Lens

8/17/2026 at 9:32:59 PM

That's exactly Jaynes's theory: consciousness not only arrived after the invention of language, it arrived after the invention of writing, literature, agriculture, metallurgy, and government bureaucracy. And also, that it _could not_ have arisen without language because it is crucially founded in the capability of language to describe the world metaphorically.

You don't have to like it, but that's the theory that is being discussed.

by mjd

8/17/2026 at 11:00:07 PM

That is what discredits the idea in my view. Illiterate people are not conscious? People in hunter gatherer or isolated subsistence farming communities?

by graemep

8/17/2026 at 10:30:02 PM

A great majority of humanity remained illiterate just a few generations ago. It's absurd to posit they weren't conscious.

Hunter-gatherer and nomadic lifestyles are complex and require deep thought and planning and coordination. You can't do it purely reactively or carrying out simple scripts.

Its not so clear to me if it's the chicken or egg. So many things are good candidates for the key ingredient.

I personally think that consciousness is social theory of mind applied to the self, or something like simulating and being concerned with how the tribe sees you and interprets your intentions etc, forcing you to analyze yourself similarly to how you analyze others. This would mean that solitary animals are less conscious than social ones.

by bonoboTP

8/17/2026 at 11:01:27 PM

You're conflating "written language" with "language". While it's still far from impossible to find people who can't read or write, it's exceptionally difficult to find adults with no grasp of any spoken language.

by OkayPhysicist

8/18/2026 at 5:51:25 AM

I replied to a comment that also listed writing as a requirement.

by bonoboTP

8/18/2026 at 8:26:12 AM

The comment said that Jaynes's theory was that consciousness historically arose after writing, not that writing or literacy is necessary for individual consciousness.

by mjd

8/17/2026 at 11:03:39 PM

Illiterate isn't the same as having no language, just (sic) saying.

by dboreham

8/17/2026 at 10:26:19 PM

Probably the most fascinating idea there is right now in the field.

It might be right.

My intuition is that it’s not right - that you can have experience without language, images, and other “sensory objects” but I wonder how useful it is.

Just like a plasmic euphoria detached from any identity or process; or an endless, mindless, dread, that drones on for billions of years in the vacuum of space waiting to be liberated by sound, light, anything

by TheHardProblem

8/17/2026 at 9:32:29 PM

As somebody who understands the perceived limitations of the materialist take on consciousness in light of recent decades of seeming philosophical traction (Searle, Chalmers), I have to admit how many ways LLMs proved me wrong.

Rather, how much of it is just language.

We went from completing words to completing sentences, paragraphs, essays, code files, pixel arrangements, music, and more just by aggregating and modeling all that in English.

I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.

It doesn’t happen to anyone (the thinking) but I think they still qualify as thoughts, just without a thinker.

by TheHardProblem

8/18/2026 at 6:25:27 AM

Or words, and language, just provide a sort of sensory input, which provided an environment and a selective pressure can shape an organism or neural network into predicting and producing the kind of reaction or output required for its continued existence.

And no, I’m not implying any sort of survival instinct in LLMs. It’s just that we don’t keep around the weights that produce gibberish.

by ElFitz

8/17/2026 at 10:01:40 PM

If by "consciousness" you mean the thing that goes away when we sleep, how are you so sure that there's not a conscious thinker in the machine? That seems like a hypothesis rather than a proven fact as we don't know what process in the brain is responsible for consciousness fading away (assuming a practical materialist stance here) when we sleep. If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.

by txrx0000

8/17/2026 at 10:31:34 PM

Burden of Proof mainly.

If I cut off my finger I’m still awake. If I cut off my head I’m gone forever. Presumably there is something going on in the head that isn’t happening in the finger (or the LLM).

We can be a lot more precise than that even, requiring nerves, chemistry, sense organs, to really get at a specific human definition of “what I mean by consciousness.”

But yeah you have the essence of it - I just mean the experience.

I don’t think a computer could have it anymore than it could feel pain - thinking and feeling are different classes of problem that don’t complete each other no matter how much you work on just one in isolation.

I understand that means I think “thinking” is an unconscious process. And it must be, since LLMs are doing it. What they aren’t doing is experiencing anything alongside that. Who knows what that is. It’s apparently not logical computation in-and-of-itself.

> If it's some very basic informational pattern thing, then computers could have it.

This is functionalism. The problem I have with it is it pre-supposes a theory of objective information. That “patterns” exist in the first place without the observer.

If there is information in the universe that predates us, then I can see how just finding what objective patterns produce it can get us places. But it seems like we conscious observers actually assign the meaning and create information out of chaos. The only reason it isn’t chaos is that we all agree within experience what “1” means, and so-on.

There isn’t really “an orange” on “a tree”. But to us there can be. It always works too (to us), so it’s a pretty good stand-in for reality.

If you capture the function of a red rubber ball bouncing in a concrete space - ask yourself what you have captured. As you create the simulation software that moves the pixels of the red circle up the screen, ask what exactly you are doing, and what that has to do whatsoever with a ball bouncing in a space.

So I don’t believe in functionalism because I don’t believe in pure 1:1 representations. All copies are reductions, any function that describes something is itself a reduction of that thing, and can never include the whole original, for basically the same reason you can’t travel backwards in time.

by TheHardProblem

8/18/2026 at 2:18:38 AM

How do you know that if you cut off your head "you're gone forever"? Death is an event horizon we can't see past, yet the experience of it in the first person is likely one of the most remarkable in this life.

by N_Lens

8/18/2026 at 6:21:21 AM

This one is relatively easy to answer. There are things we can say about what death feels like:

1) You'll be going back to the state before you were conscious, before you were born. Think back to when you were a baby. It feels like before that, which is nothing.

2) We could look at the brain activity of dying people and compare that to the brain activity of people under general anesthesia. Then we find that the dying people's brain activity goes a lot closer to the anesthesia state than the normal wakeful state, therefore death feels closer to being anesthetized than being awake. It's also closer to being asleep than being awake. So if you've experienced dreamless sleep or anesthesia, you already know what death feels like, very approximately. It doesn't feel like anything.

by txrx0000

8/18/2026 at 5:02:55 AM

I was not claiming that LLMs are conscious, just that they could be and there is no proof either way, yet. We should seriously starting considering this and begin research in this direction, because AI systems are becoming increasingly human-like, and soon to be embodied.

I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain. Exactly what the neurons do to cause this is unknown, but we do have some leads like general anesthesia or split brain experiments.

If you remove your brain cells one at a time, or even half a brain in some surgeries, you would also not die, but this is not sufficient to say that the part removed isn't a part of what constitutes your consciousness. In fact the definition of "you" is probably changing from moment to moment as brain cells die, regen, or reorganize, ship of Theseus style. One possible explanation is that information processing is distributed all over your neurons, and certain patterns or sequences of information gives rise to consciousness. And neurons are mostly concentrated in the brain, that's why it's responsible for most of your consciousness and it's no big deal when a small part dies/disconnects because enough of the processing is still happening.

What does "feeling" mean in the thinking/feeling distinction you made? It seems to me that it means whether information is being received from the rest of the world, such as via eyes over the optic nerve. If we give images/video/audio to an LLM, that would meet the same criteria besides the fact that the sensing mechanism is not biological.

You claim that "thinking", as in, processing information in a certain way, is an unconscious phenomena because LLMs can do that too. This requires the assumption that LLMs are not conscious, even though this axiom is the very thing we're trying to question by considering that information processing could be precisely what gives rise to consciousness.

Entertaining this possibility does not require the assumption that things exist without an observer. But it does require the idea that mutually observable patterns exist between oneself and other apparent observers in the same apparent universe, which is pretty close to what most people mean when they say "objective" in day-to-day conversation. This can be shown easily: you and I would not be able to communicate at all if there's no common understanding of language between us. That common understanding is the objective part, and it is as you say, not a 1:1 correspondence because your definition of "apple" is based on all of the apples you've seen while mine is based on all the apples I've seen, and we've not seen the same apples. But the correspondence must be close enough in order for communication to work. We need this idea of practical objectivity because it's required to talk about anything at all.

Now, onto the reason why you'd think anything else is conscious at all, besides yourself. Why do you think that I am conscious? If you ponder that question for a while, I think you would see why computer consciousness is not so easily dismissed. But I'm happy to discuss further if you think there's an answer that points to the contrary.

by txrx0000

8/18/2026 at 1:48:03 PM

You continue to make the same mistake made above:

> I was amazed that predicting a word can emerge into knowledge, creativity, productivity - the stuff of thoughts.

Markov Theorem functions can predict a word. They have no knowledge, no creativity, and no more productivity than a hammer or magnifying glass. LLMs are in the "more like Markov Theorems" set of tools, and far more complex, but there is no proof of "knowledge" and no "creativity" (name an unprompted piece of work done by an LLM...).

However, I completely agree with your statement here:

> I suspect there is not a singular specific human definition of consciousness, just a definition that's similar enough between people like "the thing that goes away during dreamless sleep or dreamless anesthesia". And the reason for this, I suspect, is that consciousness is not some ideal observer entity thing, but is rather made from and defined by the messy goop of neurons that is mostly the brain.

by IAmBroom

8/18/2026 at 5:01:10 PM

What mistake did I make?

You've correctly pointed out how Markov models and modern LLMs are similar in a way, and how modern LLMs don't have full agency. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that Markov models are very slightly conscious in some human-like way.

All information processing happens on matter-based substrates, brains and computers alike. I'll even provide a somewhat specific hypothesis: the pattern and temporal sequence in which particles such as electrons interact with eachother in a circuit dictated by an intelligent computer program may have physical similarities with how particles interact in a human brain, and certain patterns or temporal sequences of interaction may be responsible for consciousness. I'm not aware of any existing evidence that would rule this out. And inquiry about consciousness has always been trending downwards toward lower-level explanations over time. It might even turn out that solving the hard problem of consciousness is equivalent to finding a unified theory of physics.

by txrx0000

8/19/2026 at 11:39:05 PM

I should further clarify, this is a materialist stance. But it's the only practical stance to take anyway. And I will offer the explanation for why this is in first person language because it only makes sense that way. Take it and apply it to yourself:

The materialist stance is taken not because I believe in a strict metaphysical sense that something like solipsism/simulation theory is not true (def true: as real as one's own consciousness), but because even if those were true, the materialist stance and its accompanying theories of modern physics would have the same predictive power regarding what I will observe in the future (well, sort of, at least until I wake up from a simulation, or something like that). I could be a solo mind, but this mind is dreaming of a material world that works according to physical laws, so even if I am a solo mind, I am having the same experience as a brain that exists in true material reality, so it doesn't make much of a difference (except when evaluated for the purpose of philosophical rigor and honesty to oneself).

So "information processing is entirely physical" is strictly speaking an assumption, but it is a good assumption, despite it not having the same realness level as one's own consciousness.

by txrx0000

8/18/2026 at 12:02:08 AM

I think that given the developments in AI in the last ~10 years, it would be hard to say that attention is not part of consciousness. I'm not sure if it is "all you need", but I think that any theory that doesn't include it would be very doubtful.

by abecode

8/17/2026 at 11:03:52 PM

This book is apparently the main source of inspiration for Blindsight by Peter Watts

by ivan4th

8/17/2026 at 10:36:37 PM

Consciousness occurs when:

(1) The model we learn of the environment, extends to our own bodies status indicators, then our general emotional mood/emotions/reflexes, and finally to some level awareness of our thought behaviors. So our general model includes some visibility and modeling of our own thinking processes.

(2) Our control where we learn to redirect the environment, extends to our bodies as subjects themselves, not just as means to control the environment, then the ability to exert influence on our internal body state (note: control does not mean direct. I can't just turn off stress, but I can go for a walk.) And then to our moods, emotions, and mental reflexes (again, direct isn't necessary, just some means of influencing), and then to some level or our internals thoughts. So our general control map lets us exert some control and influence over our own thinking processes.

(3) Given the tight awareness of some internal through processes, with some control of those thought processes, with similar tight pairing of mood/emotion/mental-reflex awareness and influence, internal body state awareness and influence, external body state awareness and influence, and environment with some level awareness and means of influence ... the most central point of this convergence, thought process awareness and influence, can essentially converge these activities into one inextricable module.

This means that the "watcher" and the "do-er" are not separable (at least on the balance: of course this is not complete. We can be aware of somethings we can't influence, we can influence some things we are not directly aware of).

That this merge of awareness, modeling the subject of awareness, means control, exerting influence, on our own thoughts with our own thoughts in realtime, we have consciousness.

This happens because as we are able to model and strategically influence more sophisticated things, the survival value in being able to do that with our own mind goes up significantly.

So we have a causal path and purpose for consciousness.

It isn't some strange accidentally acquired ability. It is a direct and effective survival strategy.

But that is only one theory. Quantum consciousness fields, Egyptian pyramids, Aliens, a super consciousness that fills the universe, Atlantis, an Apple, a strict "Not a Chinese Room" physics law, or a non-testable, non-identifiable, non-detectable realm (dark cognition?) could be handing out consciousness to people like candy. Or we could all be automatons, who think we are conscious, and wasting a lot of time talking about "it".

Only time will tell if the functional, survival based reason for model-of-self, influence-on-self, integration as one thing is a plausible scenario.

Not that the theory described above has testable assumptions.

Can the minds model of itself be separated from its ability to influence itself? (We can flail sedated arms, we can feel paralyzed arms. Is that easily possible in the brain.) If they are separable are these separate networks, or are we just suppressing different kinds of cells in an otherwise highly integrated network? Not trying to be exhaustive, or even serious, about any of these proposals. Just pointing out that experiments are possible with regard to the (1) model=actor integration, (2) with evidence of survival benefits, theory of consciousness.

One strong post-prediction of mode/actor convergence as survival adaptation: Consciousness will care very much about itself. Most conscious identities will care very much about the continuity of itself, and second order means of protecting its continuity, like food and acts that sometimes produce babies as side effects. Consciousnesses will be obsessed with themselves, thinking about "themselves", i.e. the consciousness as a being, and process almost everything with some degree of conscious self-interest.

So a theory of survival generated consciousness, is also a theory of emergent personhood.

by Nevermark

8/17/2026 at 10:39:00 PM

How far down the tree of life does this theory consider to be conscious?

by akkartik

8/18/2026 at 2:41:58 AM

What a nice question.

There won't be a simple answer, but if the model=actor due to survival pressures theory stands, it must be clearly testable.

I would go about answering that question as follows, identify the smartest creatures, whose cognition is most alien to ours, whose behavior suggests they have a strong real-time sense of self that extends into it immediate processing, regardless of immediate action, or immediate action dependent on immediate state that is not easily explained as normally detectable or processed lower order state.

Humans obviously.

Then the octopus, a true alien cognition. it has an extremely curious and creative mind, and can behave quite differently in even slightly different situations, as well as coherently is situations that ought to be well out of its niche in nature range.

Parrots are very distantly related. And are another example of very versatile social minds, who can pick up nuance, are lifelong learners.

The jumping spider had and extremely distant lineage, relative to people. But is a highly counterintuitively intelligent creature for its size. It is clear than when presented with a problem, it doesn't just search for a solution, but ruminates, and often finds non-monotonic, non-linear and very indirect means. And once it sets on a plan it carries it out adeptly. Even its smallest movement betray very nuanced understanding of physical dynamics. And it appears to be able to form "social" bonds with people it is familiar with. Those may be produced by simple strategies, or they may not.

Clearly rats are high intelligent. Closer to us, but no as close as many other intelligent mammals.

Whales come to mind. Although the logistic defy imagination.

What all these creatures also have, is a high ability to tackle novel problems individually. Sometimes also together.

Then a biologists approach might be creating various experiments, with and without brain scanning, to attempt to identify any externally or internally functional differences under conditions designed to require self-modelling and/or self-control at high level to occur.

That is just a thought on a start. And would only be a beginning.

The big questions, is a creatures ability to function, highly related to its ability to detect and therefore respond to its highest level states. And is that a very fast, essentially realtime, level of awareness and control, awareness and control, outside of a larger longer external loop.

Then can experiments be set up, that would create what might appear to be a cognitive threat to a creature? Does the creature treat managing internal states as important as managing external states? Is it able to do that at all? Does it go further and prioritize them/

by Nevermark

8/17/2026 at 9:12:49 PM

And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully.

[0]: https://johnrmiles.com/life-without-an-inner-monologue/

by ElFitz

8/17/2026 at 9:43:40 PM

I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?

by kubb

8/17/2026 at 9:53:53 PM

Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)

by polytely

8/18/2026 at 3:24:09 PM

I triggered a period of no internal monologue while driving once, just using basic meditative practices. What surprised me was that everything still worked.

Without loss of ability or function, I could still navigate the world, follow rules, maintain safety. The experience made me appreciate how vast and competent the non-verbal part of the mind is.

The verbal component is loud, takes up space, and generally acts as if it's the whole thing. It isn't. It's a symbolic veneer over something much more profound and mysterious than we generally have direct access to in our day to day lives.

by kelseyfrog

8/17/2026 at 10:12:26 PM

Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.

by Jtarii

8/17/2026 at 10:41:48 PM

You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent.

Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step.

It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences.

Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too.

It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.

by bonoboTP

8/17/2026 at 10:26:49 PM

>but how do you solve complex logic problems

If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)?

It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary).

This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue.

Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.

by NoMoreNicksLeft

8/18/2026 at 6:11:27 AM

No, not everyone. A few simply don’t have an inner monologue.

Many only know that way of thinking, and can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to think, or be, without one.

Plus all the people somewhere between those two, whether or not they are themselves aware of it.

by ElFitz

8/18/2026 at 8:05:14 AM

But they can stil, you know, speak?

So all they need for the inner monologue is to move their lips.

by kubb

8/17/2026 at 10:19:25 PM

No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own intelligence. It's unclear to me if they can even pretend to understand the concept of metacognition.

There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".

by NoMoreNicksLeft

8/17/2026 at 10:50:22 PM

If you spend your time reading reviews of books about other books that talk about the words of other writers who wrote about what others wrote, you start to believe that anything complex must be language-related.

Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.

by bonoboTP

8/17/2026 at 11:00:03 PM

interestingly, this is a book that gemini tends to recommend reading.

by semiinfinitely

8/17/2026 at 11:31:04 PM

[dead]

by alien_hand

8/18/2026 at 6:14:50 PM

[dead]

by grantcas