How Does "I" Happen?

Ok, so "I think therefore I am" (René Descartes). But how the heck does "I" happen? I'm surprised to have arrived at a personally satisfying, intuitive response to this question.

My starting point is based on organic perceptual mechanisms like visual and audio perception, that do feature detection based on pattern matching. Pattern recognition is taken to be instrumental in many cognitive processes, including low and medium level visual and auditory processing, language processing, facial recognition, and much more. Given facilities for storing perceptions – memory – and for comparing new perceptions with prior perceptions, we arrive at foundational facilities for modeling activity of the world – for making "maps" of our situation that can be related to incoming perceptions and prior and anticipated experience.

I start with pattern matching as a part of cognition so I can ask: what happens when our ability to do pattern matching perceives its own activity? The map it builds includes an unusual entity - the perceiver. Noticing oneself to some degree includes noticing the act of noticing oneself, and so on. In the processes of perception, self-referentiality reverberates. It is recursive, like what you see in the repeating regress of mutually facing mirrors or the display of a camera viewing its display.

Recognizing that the mind maintains maps of our experience, this reverberating dynamic is distinctive. It is a fundamental difference between the experience of self – “I am” – and the sense of everything else – “it is”.

I gather that we occur in this dynamic. I don't know if it resonates for anyone else, but it fits my experience of self.

Someone noticed that this framing of self sounds similar to that of illusion. In that there's a subtle distinction to be found. An illusion is something you notice that does not exist except in its being noticed. Sensing, however, involves a receiver of the sensation – sensation registers in the nervous system, the brain. In this way, the observer is somewhere between illusion (being noticed) and the noticer (the physical perceptual system). Perhaps this is why the word "being" is both a verb and a noun. "I notice that I am noticing, therefore I notice that I am."

That's the gist of it. It settles for me some of the questions that arise from an essay on this site that I wrote long ago, Real Faith, while leaving open many other curiosities which continue to fascinate me, particularly concerning the relationship between our inevitably approximate perceptions and what is being perceived (including the self).

In addition to satisfying my personal curiosity I find this notion useful when considering questions about what qualifies as consciousness. For instance:

• What does this perspective on being say about the initial crop of Large Language Model artificial intelligence products? Is there consciousness to be found?
• I don't expect that the current (2023, 2024) systems have an experience of self as you and I do because their processing is not organized to be self-reflective. They don't have feedback loops in which their training is immediately informed by their evaluations. (I don't know whether neural network backpropagation qualifies.) I expect efforts to implement continuously incremental training, including incorporation of the results and ramifications of interactions. I would expect that to result in self-awareness.
  
  What about expressions of self-awareness that people encounter in interactions with current LLMs? I consider that an expression of the self-awareness which informs the efforts of those who contributed to the corpus on which the LLMs were trained, as well as the self-awareness inherent in the queries. (The subject and character of the queries necessarily informs the character of the responses. Why in the world have people been surprised by creepy responses to creepy queries?)
  
  Until their own activity is included as an immediate subject of what they're evaluating I would not expect that LLMs are "experiencing".

• Can a group be said to be conscious?
• Of all that we perceive in the world, we seem particularly prone to recognize and resonate with self-awareness in others. Experiencing others experiencing you can have some of the resonant dynamic of interior self-awareness. It can happen in the experience of being part of a team or a conversation, a game, a dance – any substantial collaboration. In this way the experience of being with can be like the experience of being. (Communication is Intelligence.) I suppose that there is a kind of consciousness in an interconnected group, and am curious about the various ways you can look at communicating with a group as an entity.