Recently I’ve been thinking more about the nature of consciousness and what I as an individual can know about it.
I previously posted some thoughts about specifically whether we can exclude the possibility that AI in its current form is conscious.
The more I think about this, the more I believe that the amount of continuous consciousness I can confidently say exists is vanishingly small.
What do I mean by continuous consciousness? Subjective experience which persists and is tied to a specific individual. The idea that there’s a “me” inside me and that this “me” experiences subjective sensations, and that this same “me” continues to exist and experience these sensations over some period of time, whether that be minutes, weeks, or an entire lifetime.
The typical story I hear around this type of consciousness is that I as an individual can confirm that this type of consciousness exists at least in me, since I can introspect on that experience directly. Whereas I have no way to confirm whether anyone else has this experience since in theory they could be machines which are simply acting as if they have subjective experience but in reality do not. Such an entity is referred to as a “philosophical zombie.”
CGP Grey has a video called “Teleportation Would Kill You” which ends up connecting to this idea. Say you have a Star Trek-style teleporter. It moves you from one location to another by deconstructing your body into its molecules. It then puts you back together again somewhere else, in the exact same configuration as previous to the teleportation. The person at the destination feels that it is you. It has all your memories. It remembers walking into the teleporter as well as walking back out at the destination. But a strong argument can be made that it is not you. It is a new person, and the original person is dead.
Grey then points out that, even though we don’t have teleporters, we do have similar breaks in consciousness. When you go to sleep each night, setting aside REM sleep, your consciousness ceases. There’s no way to prove that the consciousness you had the previous day is the same conscious “me” you wake up with in the morning. Perhaps every conscious “me” only gets one day, then dies never to experience again, only to be replaced by a new conscious “me” the next day with all the memories of all the previous “me’s” that have existed for this individual.
What’s had me thinking lately, though, is that there doesn’t seem to me to be any good reason to stop there.
There’s a concept in neuroscience called “the subjective present,” that period of time which feels to you to be “now.” Here are a few papers which I have neither read nor skimmed but are linked here in case you’re less lazy than I am:
- Time Slices: What Is the Duration of a Percept?
- The Specious Present: Further Issues
- The three-second “subjective present”: A critical review and a new proposal
It seems to me that if I accept the idea that subjective experience can only be confidently confirmed by introspection, then the length of that subjective experience which can be confirmed is that of the subjective present, since by definition this is the duration of consciousness accessible for direct introspection. And this duration may be as short as only two or three seconds.
And if that’s the case, then there’s no way to rule out that the subjective “me” may have a lifetime not of a single day, but rather of two or three seconds.
I now think that for a being to have a subjectively-irrefutable experience of long, continuous consciousness does not require that being to actually have long, continuous consciousness. It only requires that the being has the experience of a subjective presence, however short, and the memory of many previous experiences of similar subjective presences.
That’s it.
Perhaps Clive Wearing, the man with no short-term memory, experiencing every moment of every day as an awakening from nothingness, has a more accurate experience of reality than anyone else, each fleeting “me” fully aware of its birth into conscious existence.
Other than out of morbid fascination there isn’t really much of a reason to take these possibilities too seriously. They’re unfalsifiable. However, the fact that there is so little of even my own conscious experience that I can confidently claim makes me even more inclined to humility when considering the nature or existence of consciousness in other entities, biological or not.