I don't know how anyone who experiences consciousness could be confused about what it means to be conscious, or (in other threads, not this one) could argue that consciousness is "an illusion". (Consciousness is not the illusion, it's the audience!).
However I don't see why you don't think an algorithm could be conscious? Why do you think the processes that produce your own consciousness could not be computable?
I read an interesting book recently, "Determined", which argues that free will doesn't exist. It was more convincing than I expected. However, the chapters on chaos and quantum mechanics were a mess and made me skeptical of the rest of the book.
The better question is why couldn't a consciousness attach itself to (be the audience for) a computation. Since we really don't understand anything significant about it, questions like this are next to impossible to disprove. At the same time since we've never seen anything except human start talking about consciousness spontaneously* it seems like a reasonable guess to me that LLMs/the machines running them are not in fact conscious simply because of their dissimilarity and the lack of other evidence.
* I note LLMs did not do so spontaneously, they did so because they were trained to mimic human output which does so. Because we fully understand the deterministic process by which they started talking about consciousness (a series of mathematical operations), them doing so was an inevitability regardless of whether they are conscious, and as such it is not evidence for their consciousness.
how do you know it's not just an evaluation of a mathematical function?
A mathematical function is a set, possibly infinite, of pairs of abstract elements (commonly defined via sets) where no two pairs share the same first element. Nothing less, nothing more.
Computation is the act of determining the abstract output (second element in the pair) for a given abstract input (first element in the pair).
Nothing in those definitions is capable of expressing the concept of having perceptions (consciousness). That's not an abstract thing.
This isn't to say the concrete thing doing the computation couldn't in principal be conscious, just that it doesn't definitionally make sense for the math itself to be conscious.
So, my own personal "P-Zombie" theory is not of mindless automatons who lack consciousness. It's just people who are philosophically naive. They live in blissful ignorance of the myriad deep questions and doubts that stem from philosophy of mind. To me, these people must be a bit like athletes who take their prowess for granted and don't actually think about physiology, anatomy, biology, metabolism, or medicine. They just abstract their whole experience into some overly broad concept, rather than appreciating the complex interplay of functions that have to be orchestrated to deliver the performance.
Though I went through university like many others here, I've always been somewhat of an autodidact with some idiosyncracy to my worldview. The more I have absorbed from philosophy, cognitive science, computation, medicine, and liberal arts, the less I've put the human mind on an abstract pedestal. It remains a topic full with wonder, but lately I am more amazed that it holds together at all rather than being amazed at the pinnacles of pure thought or experience it might be imagined to reach.
Over many decades, I have a deepening appreciation of the traditional cognitive science approach I first encountered in essays and lectures. Empirical observation of pathology and correlated cognitive dysfunction. I've also accumulated more personal experience, watching friends and family go through ordeals of mind-altering drugs, mental illness with and without psychosis, dementia, and trauma. As a result, I can better appreciate the "illusory mind" argument. I recognize more ways in which our cognitive experience can fall apart when the constituent parts fall out of balance.
Do you mean to say there are objective criteria for consciousness? Could you expand on that?
The consciousness illusion is a different focus, as to whether our experience of alertness, thought, and perception even has the temporal and causal elements we tend to assume. This problem has many layers.
One example is the visual system and the illusion of a constantly perceived visual field that is really a synthesized memory of many smaller visual samples from the frequent saccades of our eyes. We don't see our own eye movement that is happening We also don't usually see our retinal nerve blindspot nor recognize the inherent asynchrony of some of our different senses. Our consciousness experience fuses all this together and well known perceptual illusions and magic tricks generally exploit the gaps in this process.
But there are many other layers, such as full blown hallucination where the mind constructs sensory perceptions that do not match our physical stimuli. There are many more subtle layers in between. Delusional beliefs can be felt as "fact" that suppresses internalization of other contradictory perceptions.
More subtly, people often post-rationalize causal relationships between social experiences, emotional state, and actions in ways that are inaccurate. Psychologists talk about "cognitive distortion" as an overall concept for this fuzzy area where people's internal state biases their perception and belief derived from physical stimuli.
And I'm not talking about spirituality, it could all be perfectly deterministic on some level. With that level being centuries or millennia or forever outside of our grasp.
You offer a pretty big statement without any backing whatsoever.
Lots of things are imitable without understanding how they work
Mankind was making fire for hundreds of thousands of years before knowing that it was the rapid oxidation of combustible materials.
Claiming that it wasn't fire because it was complicated to understand would be ridiculous.
