Two things to this. First, I flunked on footnotes here – left the ones from the original Substack link. Therefore you might have missed an important footnote regarding the scientific falsifiability:
8: There is a caveat though. If we take literally the interpretation that our reality is actually “the universe playing hide-and-seek with itself,” then it might actively prevent us from generating evidence that unequivocally proves the true nature of reality. Under QFC, this could be done simply by the highest “universal” consciousness making all quantum phenomena random if they are observed/recorded in a scientific experiment.
So yeah, if the universe was intended to be “Maya” then there might not be any evidence of “tampering” for us to ever find. But generally, I think the evidence so far goes both ways. The “global consciousness project” is stupid in design so I don’t take that seriously. But there’s a lot of interesting research proving non-local effects regarding consciousness, and while I won’t claim none of it is without error/issues, there definitely are a lot of positive results. I’ll be posting in future articles.
Second thing – how does Rusellian monism solve anything about consciousness? I don’t see any explanatory power there, you’d need to specify a lot more.
Thanks for this article, while I have a different conception of the underlying reasoning, I’ve lately been converging onto LLM introspection and self-reported preferences as the most promising direction available for us to make some progress on AI consciousness.
I’m thinking, if there’s more information created as systems become conscious, can we get the system to describe the shape and or content of this new information in some way that would not be possible without consciousness. I think training LLMs without mentions of consciousness reports is a valuable neglected path. But I bet there are other things. Anyone has more specific promising techniques, evals, etc. around introspection/self-reported preferences? 🙏🏼