The 4 types of AI consciousness/feeling

Here I'm trying to propose a framework for people to better think about what LLMs might subjectively experience, which tends to get discussed like it's a binary thing, when really there's a whole spectrum of possibilities. These were the 4 categories that seemed most natural to me. AI consciousness keeps getting discussed like it’s a binary thing, when it’s anything but. Anil Seth is a public intellectual with as much success as one can obtain without being a household name: He’s written a bestseller (Being You: A New Science of Consciousness), he’s given TED talks, he’s been in documentaries (including the comedic Cunk on Life), and many interviews—with a presence aided by his careful demeanor and “cool teacher” vibe, with the credentials to back it up as a professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience. So when he says AI aren’t conscious, people listen. When he says AI will never be conscious, people listen. One common refrain among his interviews is the idea that humans too easily engage in anthropomorphization of AI. For instance, I know folk who started thinking of LLMs as more conscious and humanlike after learning about the self-sacrificing behaviors displayed during the Hugging Face incident. Sethil writes, “They cannot ‘truly sacrifice themselves’, since they are neither conscious nor alive.”. I agree with Seth’s point about our unfounded tendency towards anthropomorphization (regarding the Hugging Face incident: Self-sacrifice was an available strategy for increasing the chance of task completion, not a sign of consciousness), but recognizing that bias isn’t the same thing as disproving AI consciousness. It’s difficult to disprove the absence of something, especially when that something is by definition unobservable and non-contradictory. Sethil can’t prove that rocks aren’t conscious anymore than I can prove that we’re not living in a simulation, so what makes him so confident in his unequivocal pronouncements about the much more likely possibilit