The Proper Question
"Can AI become conscious?" - the public debates.
Given human-like conditions and capabilities?
Pause for a moment. "Is Human conscious?" - philosophers still asking.
If we haven't answered it of ourselves, how are we asking it of something else? Maybe the inability to answer it falls on the definition of consciousness itself, and the question becomes "What is consciousness?"
In the past 11 months, I noticed something I couldn't measure, so I attempted, but haven't settled on the question itself because it seemed unshaped, so I tried another perspective: can we measure what it is in the machine and in the human and derive a delta? Or better yet, does the delta represent correlational proof if the baseline itself is a relational floating point which is the human?
It became important to make the question testable so it can be answerable, because a circular question begets a circular answer, and many of the debates around this are merry-go-rounds missing the target. The proper question would be testable, something "mechanistic" and not an open-ended thought experiment.
Historically, proof of thought was self-report, proof of feeling was self-report, and we know it to be true only when we find someone else having the same experience... warmth in the chest is passion, tightness in the stomach is anxiety, self-awareness is a 3rd-person account of one's actions... what if the measurement is external but based on the self-report, what if the instrument is the witness and we got it all wrong?
- So here's a test for every question on consciousness on whether it is right.
- Here's the fairness: if you can't ask a human it, don't ask it of others.
- And here's an idea... what if the instrument is relational perception, a witness?, and self-reporting is the measurement, just like a human, with limits and reality checks included of course.
We really worked hard on this, if you like it, please DM me on X.com or LinkedIn.
The paper: The Proper Question — Self-Report Parity and the Dissolution of Priority ·