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.