From 2afed6c88b7cac52ce17db1e515bb0e249ce7cb4 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: multipleof4 Date: Thu, 4 Dec 2025 07:16:29 -0800 Subject: [PATCH] Blog: Consciousness as Compression Artifact --- blog/compression-qualia.html | 121 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 121 insertions(+) create mode 100644 blog/compression-qualia.html diff --git a/blog/compression-qualia.html b/blog/compression-qualia.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..25963bf --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/compression-qualia.html @@ -0,0 +1,121 @@ + + + + + Consciousness is a Compression Artifact – Lynchmark + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +
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Unpopular Opinion
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Consciousness is a Compression Artifact

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+ Why the "hard problem" of consciousness is actually a bug in our lossy compression algorithm. +

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The Signal Error

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+ 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? +

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Raw Reality

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Compressed

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Artifacts (Qualia)

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Compression introduces visible artifacts at semantic boundaries

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Why Suffering Feels Like Anything

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+ 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. +

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+ Thought experiment: A perfect lossless compressor would experience nothing. Only lossy systems have qualia. +

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The AI Blind Spot

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What We Build

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+ 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. +

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What We Miss

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+ 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. +

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Implication

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+ 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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