Epistemological status: At least a fun journey. I wanted to post this on April Fool's Day but failed to deliver on time. Although April Fool's Day would have been lovely just for the meme, this is my best guess after thinking about this problem for seven years.

I invite you to dive deep into the consciousness iceberg with me. The story will be presented chapter by chapter, presenting you with the circulating ideas I've absorbed, building ideas in your brain to deconstruct them better until I present you with my current position. Theoretically, this should be easy to follow; this post has already been beta-tested.

We'll go through a pre-awakening phase, during which I was unfamiliar with the theory of mind literature, then an awakening to the problem of consciousness, followed by a presentation of some essential elements of the scientific literature on consciousness, and finally [...]

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Outline:

(01:42) Chapter 1: Pre-awakening, before stumbling upon the hard problem

(04:16) Chapter 2: Awakening to the problem

(10:16) Chapter 3: Let's try the scientific method!

(10:47) Global Workspace Theory

(14:51) Integrated Information Theory

(17:36) The list of criteria method

(18:31) Chapter 4: I’m lost

(25:49) Chapter 5: Moral Helpnesness

(28:09) Chapter 6: Doubts

(33:34) Chapter 7: Eureka!

(34:01) The Meta problem

(37:36) Clustering is hard

(41:07) Interpretability

(43:33) The ghost argument

(45:52) Chapter 8: Digital Sentience

(47:34) Further Exploration

(49:13) Addendum: AI Safety and Situational Awareness

(52:13) Addendum: From Pain to Meta-Ethics

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.