Can AI Have a Self?

Consciousness is a strange phenomenon. We do not know a lot about it. Like, do you think your cat is conscious? Cogito ergo sum - „I think, therefore I am“ is a very famous quote of the french philosopher René Descartes. But does this really help in the case of AI? I mean reasoning models seem to be thinking and self-aware as they understand their own existance?

But of course this does not really mean consciousness, like living beings are like you and me. It is almost a philosophical or religious question. Still, let’s explore how we might find an answer.

Large Language models are built on an architecture called a Transformer. At their core, they perform mathematical operations on matrices, trained on backpropagation. I don’t know whether that means they are incapable of experiencing consciousness, but I suspect they are not able to.

But this opens the question: what would be the missing ingredients. What is the Key for them so that they would? And what moral questions would come out of it?

Will they need some sort of internal world models? Recurrent neurons? Simply a larger Scale? Or a generally different design, maybe even with an chemical/biological foundation like humans have?

I want to look at this question from a different point of view: What if we cloned a person by copying every atom exactly? Would that create a living being? Most likely yes in my opinion.

What if we could replace part of someone’s brain like a single neuron with an artifical brain cell? And then keep replacing it piece by piece till the whole brain is artificial? At what point would that person feel no longer conscious? Would they? And even if they did say they feel conciousness, how could we know they weren’t simply saying the words, just like an LLM or parrot could do?

What would happen if we build strong enough computers to simulate someones brain and put them into some artifical sleep like the movie Matrix show us?

These are questions we don’t know the answers to yet. Maybe one day we will, we simply do not know and maybe already live in some sort of simulation?

So take care in the game of life and I hope you enjoyed this thought experiment. Feel free to follow me on the social platforms :)