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 response to this question that feels significant to me.

My starting point is based on organic pattern matching mechanisms by which we detect perceptual features, such as visual edge detection, auditory spatial discernment, and so on. Pattern recognition is taken to be instrumental in many cognitive processes, including low and medium level visual and auditory processing and more generally, language processing, facial recognition, and much more. Together with mechanisms for storing perceptions – memory – and for comparing new perceptions with prior perceptions we can begin to describe our cognitive facilities for modeling activity in the world, and thus for making "maps" of our involvement that relates incoming perceptions to prior and anticipated ones.

I start with the basis of pattern matching to then ask: what happens when our pattern matching ability "notices" its own activity as part of the pattern? When our evaluations of the patterns perceive the perceiver? This is different than the rest of the stuff we notice in that oneself to some degree includes noticing the act of noticing oneself, and so on. Self-referentiality makes for a reverberating pattern. It is recursive, like what you see in the repeating regress of mutually facing mirrors or a camera taking in its display. In this sketch of the pattern-recognizing mind maintaining maps of our experience, this reverberating dynamic is distinctive. There is a fundamental difference between the experience of self – “I am” – and the sense of everything else – “it is”.

I suggest that we ("I") occur in this "noticing" reverberation. All the observations inherent include myself as part of many observations, and so my model includes this distinguished element: "I" am experiencing. "I notice that I am noticing, therefore I notice that I am."

For me this makes visceral sense of being consciousness.

Further, to the degree that I am empathic I can notice resonance with this process in others. It is in this dynamic occurrence of self that I intuitively, viscerally identify a fellow being be-ing.

Besides satisfying my curiosity about a fundamental aspect of my existence, I find this generally useful when considering questions of consciousness. For instance...

According to this model, the current crop of LLMs are not conscious

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 (early 2023, and still in mid 2026) products have an experience of self as you and I do because they don't have feedback loops by which they change through immediate observation and evaluation of their own evaluation process. (I don't believe that neural network backpropagation qualifies because of that process' narrow scope.) I would not be surprised if there are efforts to incorporate immediate self-feedback, and I would not be surprised if they eventually result in what really is self-awareness.

What about expressions of self-awareness that people encounter in current LLM product interactions? I consider that to be an expression of the consciousness of the people that created the corpus of information on which the LLMs were trained. In a real sense, a conversation with an LLM is a conversation with the collective intelligence of the the people that produced the information. However, the consciousness conveyed is external to the LLM, and is not internal until the LLMs are able to essentially change through their observations. When that becomes the case, then it is an experiencing being.

What about a group of people? Can it 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 any group to the degree to which it interacts/communicates. I am curious about the various ways you can look at communicating with a group as an entity, and feel that LLMs actually provide that opportunity, albeit limited by the lack of essential change that the LLM can undergo through the interaction. The LLM behaves as the collective intelligence would but does not essentially change through the process. (The maintenance of context across threads of conversation begins to implement that change, but it is very limited. In particular, it does not inform the LLMs interactions with other people or LLMs.)