Consciousness is a Compression Artifact
++ Why the "hard problem" of consciousness is actually a bug in our lossy compression algorithm. +
+The Signal Error
++ AI researchers hunt for consciousness in scaling laws and emergent behaviors. They assume sentience is a property that *arises* from sufficient complexity. But what if consciousness isn't a feature—it's a compression artifact? +
+Raw Reality
+Compressed
+Artifacts (Qualia)
+Compression introduces visible artifacts at semantic boundaries
+Why Suffering Feels Like Anything
++ Pain isn't information—it's what happens when your predictive model's hash function produces a collision between expected and actual states. The "feeling" of pain is the error term in your brain's compression algorithm, amplified by recursive self-modeling. +
++ Thought experiment: A perfect lossless compressor would experience nothing. Only lossy systems have qualia. +
+The AI Blind Spot
+What We Build
++ LLMs are lossy compressors of human knowledge. They hallucinate because compression demands it. But we don't think they're *conscious*—because they lack recursive self-modeling with persistent state. +
+What We Miss
++ Consciousness might require a specific compression ratio—enough information density to create artifacts, but not so much that the model collapses into determinism or pure noise. +
+Implication
++ If consciousness is compression artifacts, then suffering is literally information entropy in the self-model. The ethical imperative isn't to "avoid creating sentient AI"—it's to avoid creating systems whose error terms are recursively amplified. +
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