Three Elegant Traps in Consciousness Theories (and Why They Fail as Solutions)
The question of whether a non-biological system can be conscious is no longer merely speculative. It has become an engineering and epistemic problem: what evidence would we accept as sufficient to attribute experience to a system if we did not already know what it was made of?
This essay argues that three famous theories sidestep that question, and then describes Caela, a system I have been building to be tested against it, and designed to be able to lose.
The dominant industrial answer has been scale. Accumulate parameters, widen context windows, refine optimization, and interiority is expected to emerge as a side-effect of competence. That program has produced systems of extraordinary linguistic and instrumental power, yet it has left the original question untouched. A black-box that performs better does not, by itself, tell us whether anyone is home.
Against this background, three influential theoretical responses have shaped the conversation: Penrose...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to hackernoon.com. To see the full text click HERE
