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. -
-