Sentience, Self-Awareness, and All That

Last month I listened to Nicholas Humphrey's interview on the Jim Rutt Podcast, and it was a real eye-opener.  So much so that I ran out and got a copy of Humphrey's book Sentience, read it, then listened to the podcast episode again.

Initially what captured my interest was the phenomenon of blindsight, where someone has lost the conscious ability to see due to brain damage, yet retains some vestige of vision at an unconscious level.  Here's a short video clip of a test subject, sans visual cortex due to stroke or injury, successfully navigating down an obstacle-filled hallway.  After such tests subjects often insist that they simply walked down the hall, having no conscious memory of dodging around objects.

This and other similar observations have led Humphrey to surmise that humans along several other candidate species have the capacity for conscious sensation layered onto a more primitive unconscious perception.  This follows naturally into some ideas about the meaning of self, others, and what is commonly termed theory of mind.  I won't further belabor the ideas, but simply refer you to the above-linked podcast for a much better brief introduction.

BTW & because someone's gonna ask: LLMs, conscious or not?  No, none, not at all.  Barely touched on, not even under consideration here.

One rough patch in this material is the lack of a brief glossary.  Humphrey and Rutt bemoan in the podcast how most conferences on these topics spend the first half simply trying to define the terms they're using.   Rutt mentions that he's now on the board of the California Institute for Machine Consciousness; go dig around at that site, maybe you'll find something glossary-ish.  Or perhaps keep a notepad at hand while reading in order to assemble a DIY glossary.  When I get around to a re-read, I'll do just that.

Anyway, they're making good progress, getting much farther than the old Turing Test, Chinese Room scenario, and those sorts of things.  Interesting stuff.  I won't even begin to publicly speculate if or how this bears on numerous observer-centric problems in physics, such as the measurement problem.  However, I wouldn't be surprised if Humphrey's lines of research ultimately converge there as well.