Cool post! I like the reason/belief/contradictions system for differentiating us from LLMs. I'll need to think more about that one. I think of consciousness as fundamentally a being-in-the-world thing - something that starts with experience and may or may not gradually gain in intelligence - so the idea of adding more and more intelligence until consciousness is achieved seems backwards to me. A mirage formed from our perpetual elevation of language & discursive thought over the messy, physical, "animal" parts of our being which are actually the soil our vaunted consciousness grew from.
The God question is interesting. I agree it's very, very rare to find a person who's got so much faith they've transcended all fear and doubt. But I also think there are many ways in which non-believers act as if they believe. People see this stark divide between theists and atheists, but when you go beyond what we say to how we feel and act it's probably more accurate to say 99% of us are half-believers.
Cool post! I like the reason/belief/contradictions system for differentiating us from LLMs. I'll need to think more about that one. I think of consciousness as fundamentally a being-in-the-world thing - something that starts with experience and may or may not gradually gain in intelligence - so the idea of adding more and more intelligence until consciousness is achieved seems backwards to me. A mirage formed from our perpetual elevation of language & discursive thought over the messy, physical, "animal" parts of our being which are actually the soil our vaunted consciousness grew from.
The God question is interesting. I agree it's very, very rare to find a person who's got so much faith they've transcended all fear and doubt. But I also think there are many ways in which non-believers act as if they believe. People see this stark divide between theists and atheists, but when you go beyond what we say to how we feel and act it's probably more accurate to say 99% of us are half-believers.