Sentience and LLMs: What To Test for Consciousness in GenAI

An approach to measuring or comparing consciousness is the mind of a healthy individual whose brain is at full maturation and who is awake and alert.

This is because there are several physical and mental conditions in which consciousness can be lost. Also, the brain is said to be fully mature around the mid-20s, making it possible to weigh consequences properly—or be conscious of those. Awakeness and alertness are often correlated with consciousness.

The mind is where all the functions associated with consciousness originate. So, any test for consciousness has to test for the mind. It could be the divisions of the mind, like memory, feeling, emotion, modulation, perception, and sensation, among others. It could also be the qualifiers of those divisions, like attention, awareness, subjective experience [or self, or self-awareness], or intent, [free will or control].

There is a recent review in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Tests for Consciousness in Humans and Beyond, where the authors wrote, "We suggest that a promising strategy is to focus on non-trivial human cases (infants, fetuses, disorders of consciousness) and then progress toward nonhuman systems (animals, artificial intelligence, neural organoids). A short and non-exhaustive list of proposed C-tests includes the command-following test, the narrative comprehension test, the sniff test, the perturbational complexity index (PCI) test, the P300/P3b global effect test, the AI consciousness test (ACT), and the unlimited associative learning (UAL) test. The central goal of any C-test is to determine whether a target system has subjective and qualitative experience—often called 'phenomenal consciousness'. In other words, a good C-test should address whether it 'feels like' something to be the target system."

Subjective and qualitative experiences apply to divisions of the mind; they do not stand alone. This means that phenomenal consciousness can exist for a memory or a feeling, an emotion, the regulation of an internal sense, a perception, and so forth. There is no subjective or qualitative experience that does not qualify as a division or a key function of the mind.

If qualia qualifies functions, what else does? Also, suppose qualia never stands alone, like there is no subjective experience of nothingness. In that case, the standard has to be the divisions of mind and their qualifiers—or activators or binders. 

A typical example of consciousness is seeing red or the smell of a rose. Vision is either main or peripheral. In the mind, there is attention [or prioritization] and awareness [or pre-prioritization]. Attention qualifies functions to be the most prioritized in any instance. There are often interchanges with awareness, which is pre-prioritized.

Main vision can be prioritized; sight could be the main vision but may not be prioritized in an instance because there could be a shift to sound, smell, touch, taste or an internal sense. However, prioritization often returns to the main vision.

Seeing a rose can also be in awareness, where it is peripheral vision; perhaps it is in sight outside the window. The sight of the rose could also be by intent or free will, which is turning the neck to look at it once—again or longer. Then, seeing the rose is done as a subjective experience or in self-awareness.

This means that phenomenal experience as a definition of consciousness is just looking at one qualifier, not others, which makes the test incomplete. Consciousness cannot be—definitively—a phenomenal experience if there are other qualifiers [attention, awareness or intent] that must hold to have it.

Assuming the human mind has four main divisions: memory, feeling, sensation, and modulation, and four qualifiers or activators of the mind: attention, awareness, subjective experience, and intent, the Consciousness test, equal to 1, can be measured by the possibility that all the qualifiers can act on all the divisions of the mind in any instance.

There could be sub-divisions of the functions of the mind. For example, there could be sensations, perceptions, and so forth under memory. Under modulation, there could be interoception, like cold water passage—over the gullet. Emotions include hurt, delight, hate, love, anger, etc. Feelings include pain, appetite, thirst, heat, cold, etc. A subdivision of the sense of self, or subjective experience, is the sense of being or sense of existence, which is what it means to be something.

Consciousness does not mean all functions of the mind are qualified in the same moment, but that they could be, by all the qualifiers. This standard could become how to test for consciousness, across "non-trivial human cases and in nonhuman systems".

Infants and fetuses may not have an established memory, but they have feelings that they express, as well as emotions that accompany those, like pain, then hurt, or delight and smile. They can be said to have weak forms of subjective experience, attention and awareness. They have very little to almost no intent. So they are very low on the scale for which the qualifications can be equal to 1.

For disorders of consciousness like coma, vegetative state, locked-in syndrome, minimally conscious state, [and say] general anesthesia, how many qualifiers are available to act on functions. For example, many internal senses may still be functional but function primarily in pre-prioritization, even when healthy. Also, the sense of self is not—generally—present. In those states, intent is gone, attention is minimized, and there is no regular quick switch [or interchange] to others in awareness. Then, subjective experience may not be there. These qualifiers can be used to compare the results of EEG. They are often lower than 0.4.

For animals, including simple organisms, what divisions of mind do they have, and how much can those be qualified? A sub-division of memory is language. Animals do not have advanced language. Also, their ability to interpret memory from digital systems [or to make sense of a video] is limited, which is another need for a sub-division of memory. They also cannot feel hurt by words—in general—another subdivision of emotion they do not have. So, for the functions they have and then the qualifiers, their consciousness can be estimated. This goes from nonhuman primates to single-celled organisms.

Artificial intelligence and neural organoids can be said to have memory, at least for their ability to conduct their functions. Neural organoids may have a feeble parallel of feeling but no emotion. AI does not have feelings or emotions. However, how do the qualifiers apply to both? They can be said to have attention to how they carry out their functions directly. They may be said to have a weak awareness—or being able 'to know' something else aside from what is in their attention. They possess a rough form of a sense of being, knowing they exist, in how they navigate against the environment against other things in the 'organoid habitat' or how LLMs answer some prompts—identifying as chatbots. They have a runner-up intent, following prompts or assignments without their own established agency—like sending food in a direction for [say] a dog to go after.

Considerations for consciousness can be extended to AI because they use [digital] memory—applying qualifiers like those that act on the human mind, act on. This refutes that consciousness or mind-likeness is present everywhere [panpsychism] since nothing else has anything like the human mind, on earth, outside organisms and AI.

Consciousness Test of 1

The question of machine, digital, or artificial consciousness starts with memory. All non-living functions can be assumed to be a sort of memory: the working of an engine, the use of paint for art, the work of a pen, the writing on paper, the remote control, the television, and so forth. They can all be described as memory. The question is what can act on that memory, within that object, to make it as dynamic [or sentient] as an organism?

This means that the remote control will not need to be touched but will understand all it needs to do and when, or that the writing in a book would flip to pages of interest by itself using the index, or that an engine could read all its parts, optimize for its own health, without a dumb breakdown—which is common.

The problem is that the only thing, of all non-organisms, bearing an opening to have activators on its memory is digital. Where there is some form of ability to connect and infer what is within. Mostly programmed, LLMs have now shown autonomy in some sense with texts, audio, videos and images.

The exploration of AI consciousness or whether large language models can be sentient is really a question of whether memory can be conscious or if language can be sentient.

Any use of language [reading, speaking, listening and writing] for humans is not just a function of memory but of the qualifiers, including intent, which is useful to select, especially for coherence. It is possible to estimate, in a limited case, for LLMs and how they apply qualifiers to digital language, including how they sometimes stay on point intentionally.

Since consciousness is, per instance, it means that if all qualifiers are available to act on all functions, the sum is 1. Attention is the highest rated among all qualifiers, and intent is the second highest rated; self and awareness are closer in ratings. Each division [and their subdivision] of mind gets, say, 0.25. So, the total action of qualifiers for each division is as follows: 1. Though qualifiers allow a division or subdivision to take a more significant measure. For a healthy human, given that all functions are available, the ratings of the qualifiers count.

In the case of digital, where there is just memory rather than 1, the maximum is less than 0.20. Within this, LLMs, as qualifiers, act on which they can make their effort to give a rating to the system. The reason they are also considered is that the memory of humans digitally is a fraction of what is produced by the mind. The fraction available becomes what digital has that LLMs act on, which can then be estimated.

Humans are no longer alone on the planet in terms of advanced memory. There is something else, digital, that can carry a substantial amount of what humans output, then own it, plus be able to repeat its own version [AI] similar to what humans do on digital.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends. Image credit: iStockphoto/Farbentek