There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
Except it’s not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it’s amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that’s the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn’t have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it’s purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy
It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
“If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.”
Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.
There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.
I don’t, though. I get where you’re coming from, because I too often point out other people’s hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I don’t subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.
that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.
I think it does. You aren’t going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how you’d simulate stock exchanges.
The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best — no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but that’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t work the same way, wouldn’t feel the same, and you definitely wouldn’t have “figured out consciousness” just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldn’t be sentient. That’s obvious to me.
There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
Yeah, and I’m really not arguing for a soul. I’m arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you haven’t achieved anything really remarkable — except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. That’s it.
If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. That’s not arguing for a soul. That’s saying, pinch yourself — you are awake and you are not a robot.
At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?
Never.
Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Meaning, the meatbag wrapped around our skeletal system really does matter. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.
You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. You’re still doing us a disservice if you call it human. It’s more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.
But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be “alive” is arguable. I’d just call it a neat toy.
I don’t understand why you think it’d be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldn’t we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
Think about hearing aides or other similar “enhancements” wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.
I would agree it wouldn’t be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if they’re not literally humans.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.
However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.
If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.
Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.
I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.
when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?
Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.
Yes, I think you have a point that for it to be an illusion “something” has to perceive it.
I also think your reflection on consciousness being a some sort of process is interesting. Is it a “machine” process where one input+state always results in the same output? Regardless of the answers implication on agency and choice, the mystery is still that I feel aware. I cannot speak for you, but I think you’d tell me the same, even if you cannot prove it to me.
Regarding the emergence I think one aspect could be scale, and said emergence might not be binary. I listened to a Lex Friedman(think what you will about him) podcast episode with Michael Levin from Dec 3 which talks about things along these lines. Not directly related perhaps, it might be more geared towards intelligence, but you might also find it interesting.
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
Let’s take this to it’s full conclusion to see why this is not a meaningful distinction. I am not even aware of every cell in my own body, you don’t even need to make reference to the outside world to argue we are not self aware. This line of reasoning makes self-awareness a rather meaningless word.
And stating why I think the simulation hypothesis is not adequate is not the same as disregarding, even if I didn’t fully explain the reasons.
There’s fundamentally not much difference between our brain and a fly’s, at the cellular level. We have fully simulated a fly’s brain already. When given a virtual body, it promptly started acting like a fly.
I don’t think LLMs are conscious or sentient. However, consciousness is likely just an internal illusion. There’s no obvious reason we can’t scale up from a fly to a human brain, other than difficulty. At that point you have a fully virtual brain that believes itself to be conscious, and can demonstrate sentience.
I’ll believe it when it happens. There’s a huge different between simulating 139,000 neurons and 50 billion neurons.
Besides, the authors looked at taste and touch sensory. That’s not exactly predicting the entire behavior of a fly, and the authors (of which there were many), admitted they don’t know if it can actually predict neural activity. Source
I’m not expecting anything any time soon either. Though I can see someone like musk pumping far too much money into it at some point.
My point was however that the difference is just one of scale. We don’t need to predict the firings, just run it and compare it to nature. From what I’ve read, it behaves like a fly, including walking and grooming itself. This means there is no magic mystical difference between a real fly’s brain and a virtualized one.
Projecting further, there is no difference, other than scale, between our brain and the fly. Implying there is nothing mystical about consciousness.
If a human brain can be conscious, then a virtualized human brain can be conscious. If a virtualized brain can be conscious, then so can the computer it runs on.
The question then becomes do we WANT consciousness in an AI, what would it look like, and how can we detect/measure it?
Except if this is the case, free will does not exist. If the world is purely deterministic, you’ve never made a choice. No one has. We are in the middle of a mathematical computation that has been predicted from the start of the universe.
That is pretty much my view on things. I don’t like it, but it’s what the evidence suggests. However, my internal thoughts still assume I have free will. It’s a useful lie.
Discworld’s Death put it quite well, in Hogfather.
All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Except it’s not what the evidence suggests. We have yet to find physical evidence of consciousness. We have yet to find a way to accurately simulate a neuron in any falsifiable way (seriously look into the detractors and counterarguments to the fly study, it’s amazing that 3d graphics can trick that many people). But even beyond neurons we cannot accurately link brain activity to behavior in anything but a superficial way. We have no insight into how decisions are made or what ultimately drives them.
More importantly, if the world is deterministic, all meaning in life is gone. Completely. And the second it is objectively proven most people will kill themselves. Any intelligent being would kill itself, since that’s the logical next step in the chain of thought and it wouldn’t have a choice.
Meaning the universe is flawed if the point of it is to create life, and if there is no point to the universe and it’s purely deterministic, we are in a worse hell than has ever been imagined in the totality of human expression. Arguably the worst possible hell there could ever be.
Nonexistence would be the infinitely better option.
The difference of scale is in the grey area of the difference of scale of quantum and classical mechanics, though. Conciousness very much could be something that depends on the emergent properties of quantum mechanics and doesn’t reach classical mechanics.
That’s not true. You might simulate fly intelligence, but you aren’t simulating a fly. Flys are an entity driven by their phenomenological experience of the world (as all us nervous systems are). It would be a rather strange thing to say that a fly is only the pattern of behavior you recognize as a fly’s behavior.
Note that flies also have this capacity to self-evolve over generations. There is no single fly that you can point to and say, “that’s the right one. Copy It.” So, your “fly simulations” are always at best a behavioral approximation. Given enough time, say a decade or century, this ought be obvious by the fact that your simulation no longer accurately resembles the most modern flies.
That’s just not true. Consider “What The Frog Eye Tells The Frog Brain.” Put briefly, the eye encodes and transmits semantic information — as opposed to the more common belief that it transmits raw visual information. That said, there a trillions of differences between how that might work in a human versus in a frog, let alone a fly.
I think you’ve discovered “neurons work similarly across species,” which is like saying “thing does same thing when used in other location.” This doesn’t tell you how neurons work to drive that behavior, it doesn’t tell you what it’s like to experience your neurons firing that way, it doesn’t tell you why the neurons were developed that way topologically over time… At best, it helps you develop a timebound understanding of fly automata to neural architecture. That’s without any understanding of phenomenology to neural architecture, and likely without being able to decompose the neural system into any semblance of semantic information processing.
A human is much more complex than a fly. I can’t believe for a second that this approach would work scale to a human’s brain. If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.
“If you captured and simulated every neuron in the human brain, you’d be left with a feedforward process simulating a particular neural state of a particular person. No feeling, no reflection, no introspection, no semantic meaning. Just a neat toy.”
Seems to me you think there’s something special about humans, I don’t believe there’s any proof to that.
Yes its orders of magnitude more complex then a fly brain, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to simulate.
There’s no proof to a soul, our whole existence is our meat which evolved naturally over extreme timescales via random forces and natural selection, I see no reason to believe we could not do the same with our intelligence in a much shorter period of time comparatively.
I don’t, though. I get where you’re coming from, because I too often point out other people’s hidden assumptions about things like a soul or magic sauce to consciousness. I don’t subscribe. I follow something closer to a procedural understanding of consciousness.
I think it does. You aren’t going to simulate human consciousness if human consciousness is a procedure. At least, not how you’d simulate stock exchanges.
The difference is simulation versus synthesis. Your simulation would be a feed forward process and humans are not feed forward processes. Humans are phenomenologically driven entities. Your simulation would be a behaviorally consistent model at best — no phenomenology. Sorry to say, but that’s just not the same thing. It wouldn’t work the same way, wouldn’t feel the same, and you definitely wouldn’t have “figured out consciousness” just by building such a simulation. It would be a neat toy, like LLMs, but it wouldn’t be sentient. That’s obvious to me.
Yeah, and I’m really not arguing for a soul. I’m arguing that simulation is subpar to recreation. If you simulated every neuron, you haven’t achieved anything really remarkable — except an awesome benchmark for computer power and a place in the history book. That’s it.
If you want a grand unifying theory of consciousness, you need to understand that phenomenology (the thing science ignores) is pretty damn central to the whole thing. That’s not arguing for a soul. That’s saying, pinch yourself — you are awake and you are not a robot.
At what point to you would it move from simulation to essentially the same configuration just in a different container?
I still think you’re conflating the aspect of life we experience as somehow separate from the procedure our brain takes to present that to you.
Never.
Intelligence is substrate independent, and does not depend on consciousness or phenomenology. Phenomenology is probably substrate dependent, though. Meaning, the meatbag wrapped around our skeletal system really does matter. Phenomenology is also what makes us feel anything at all.
You can make all the intelligence you want, bootstrapping it off our neural architecture. You’re still doing us a disservice if you call it human. It’s more like a new species, with much more intelligence and virtually no phenomenological experience.
But calling it a new species is also arguable, because whether or not it would be “alive” is arguable. I’d just call it a neat toy.
I don’t understand why you think it’d be out of the question for it to have phenomoligcal experiences, why couldn’t we build a way for it to smell if it has the same pathways to be able to interpret that? How would that be meaningfully different?
Think about hearing aides or other similar “enhancements” wherein were simply adjusting the input in a way and the brain is still able to process it.
I would agree it wouldn’t be the same as a literal human, thinking like Fallout 4 style synths, I consider them people (in universe of course lol) even if they’re not literally humans.
An illusion is a phenomenological experience, for which you must be conscious. Consciousness can not be an illusion. You must be conscious to experience an illusion at all.
It’s a case of running out of terms. I was using it here as apparent, but not a “real” thing.
It’s a bit like a lot of visual illusions, we can often all see them consistently, but they don’t exist in the image itself.
In this case, consciousness is likely related to keeping our own mind functioning coherently. Providing a common virtual ground for the various parts of our brain to interact. There is no seat of consciousness, it’s akin to the operating system on a computer. Not required, but makes a lot of tasks massively easier.
If that’s the case, by calling in an illusion, aren’t you just stating that it’s a misunderstood process?
Consciousness absolutely is something. That might be a procedural “thing,” and I think you’re saying that the notion of an ontological consciousness is a misconception. An Enlightenment Era misconception, if I’m allowed to add that in there…
To call it an illusion comes across as though you’re asserting what it is. I think you’re really just pointing out that it isnt what a lot of people consider it to be (often implicitly).
Is that fair?
I read it as consciousness being more of a “side effect”, rather than the thing a controls actions and “making choices”. So consciousness would then be more of a passive effect than driving change.
In that sense the illusion would be that consciousness has any agency, when it is instead a passive experience, a perception of control.
There is some evidence that will is preceded by action, not the other way around. Good point.
However, if the illusion is of agency—then it’s not really an illusion of consciousness. It’s more of a free will problem.
If the argument is that consciousness is only the misconception within an object that it has agency, then you’re still doing some magic handwaving. How did the object become capable of misconceiving anything? That would mean it was already conscious.
Edit: if the idea is that consciousness is only a behavioral pattern displayed by lifeforms with an internal self model, I’d need to think on that a bit. That’s pretty interesting.
I assume the claim would be that the experience of consciousness is one where a physically stateful information-processing system models itself, e.g., as a means to control its body or its behavior.
Right, like a blob of cells modeling its holistic self as one—assuming the identity of the model. Then believing, as the model, that they are in control of the model. Is that it?
Hmm. There’d still be quite a bit of explaining to do… like how a set of cells, none of which with the ability to model, identify, or believe suddenly contain these abilities en mass. That’s called emergence, which I think typically just means we misunderstand how something works.
Yes, I think you have a point that for it to be an illusion “something” has to perceive it.
I also think your reflection on consciousness being a some sort of process is interesting. Is it a “machine” process where one input+state always results in the same output? Regardless of the answers implication on agency and choice, the mystery is still that I feel aware. I cannot speak for you, but I think you’d tell me the same, even if you cannot prove it to me.
Regarding the emergence I think one aspect could be scale, and said emergence might not be binary. I listened to a Lex Friedman(think what you will about him) podcast episode with Michael Levin from Dec 3 which talks about things along these lines. Not directly related perhaps, it might be more geared towards intelligence, but you might also find it interesting.
Buddy, I barely think humans are sentient
Whenever people talk about human sentience, I always think back to the opening scene of Shaun of the Dead…
A simulation that isn’t aware that it is a simulation is not self-aware, which is a qualitative difference from what is being simulated. Consciousness isn’t like some rom you can emulate.
You say that with some confidence. What makes being aware of being a simulation a binary criteria for self awareness? You may just as well be in a simulation and probably see yourself as fairly self aware.
Sure, and how do you know your thoughts are your own? Like if you have to defend your position by questioning the nature of reality then you got bigger problems.
You made some absolute statements about consciousness that I don’t think you can back up. But I can’t fault you on not having proof, but at least be open to some thought experiments to challenge the concept.
Being self aware of myself and my surroundings but not aware of the entire world does not make me not self aware.
Same as an entity in a simulation could potentially be self aware but not aware of being in a simulation.
But you disregard the possibility that consciousness could be emulated. But get a sense that it comes from a “gut feeling” or some sort of “common sense” perspective. What nature of reality are you referring to, that I am ignoring?
Let’s take this to it’s full conclusion to see why this is not a meaningful distinction. I am not even aware of every cell in my own body, you don’t even need to make reference to the outside world to argue we are not self aware. This line of reasoning makes self-awareness a rather meaningless word.
And stating why I think the simulation hypothesis is not adequate is not the same as disregarding, even if I didn’t fully explain the reasons.