IIT has always interested me, and after reading some of the detractors[1] I get that it has problems, but I still don't get the general lack of attention/interest or even awareness about it. It seems like a step in the right direction, establishing a viable middle ground somewhere between work in CS or neuroscience that measure and model but are far too reluctant to ever speculate or create a unifying theory, vs a more philosophical approach to theory of mind that always dives all the way into speculation.

[1] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799

The creator of IIT doesn't understand the universality of Turing machines. He thinks that because in CPUs the physical transistors don't have as many connections as neurons in the brain, that it's fundamentally limited and cannot be conscious.

He even goes as far as to say that you cannot simulate the brain on a CPU and make it conscious because it's still connection limited in the hardware. If you understand computer science you know this is absurd, Turing machines can compute any computable function.

He says "you're not worried you will fall into a simulated black hole are you?" but that is an entirely different kind of thing. The only difference we would get by building a machine with hundreds of thousands of connections per node is faster and more energy efficient. The computation would be the same.

> The computation would be the same.

Assuming of course that Penrose is cuckoo when it comes to consciousness (which I'm happy to assume).

This is a typical critique that sort of assumes you have to be right about everything to be right about anything. Maybe a useful point of comparison is aether theories in physics. Wrong, sure, but useless? People might argue whether it was always pure distraction or a useful building block, but I wonder what Maxwell or Einstein would say. If nothing else, one needs something to ground one's thinking and to argue against, which is why replacement theories usually need to acknowledge or address what came before. And typically we try to fix bad theories rather than simply discarding them, especially if there's no alternative available. What are the other available "grand unifying theories" of consciousness? To quote the end of Aaronson's rebutal:

> In my opinion, the fact that Integrated Information Theory is wrong—demonstrably wrong, for reasons that go to its core—puts it in something like the top 2% of all mathematical theories of consciousness ever proposed. Almost all competing theories of consciousness, it seems to me, have been so vague, fluffy, and malleable that they can only aspire to wrongness.

Of course, it's not on Aaronson to rescue the theory he's trying to disprove, but notice that he is out to disprove it and spends his time on that, rather than imagining what axioms might be added or replaced, etc. Proving that having a large Φ-value is not a sufficient condition for consciousness hardly seems devastating "to the core", because finding better descriptions of necessary conditions would still represent significant progress.

Similarly a critique like

> He thinks that because in CPUs the physical transistors don't have as many connections as neurons in the brain, that it's fundamentally limited and cannot be conscious.

seems a little bit narrow. I do agree it seems to misunderstand universality, but on the other hand, maybe it's just distracted by counting IO pins on chips, and what it should focus on more is counting nodes/edges in neural net layers, and whether connection-counting in hardware-vs-software might need to have a weighting-coeffecients, etc. HN loves to celebrate things like the bitter lesson, the rise of LLMs and ML, and the failure of classical logic and rule-based reasoning and NLP. Is all of that same stuff not soft-evidence for the relevance if not the completeness of IIT?

>This is a typical critique that sort of assumes you have to be right about everything to be right about anything.

If you don't understand the fundamentals and basics of the underlying science, then you can't really be right about anything at all. It should shock and disturb you to listen someone get it this wrong, this "not even wrong" level of nonsense. There's no insight to be found in such prattle.

Strange. My knowledge of the fundamentals and processes in humans still makes me jelous of the apparent ease others fare in social situations. Clearly there's more to it than it seems. I'd be wary of equating bottom-up and top-down as principally equivalent.

Maybe he doesn't think consciousness is a computation.

Dang, this is great stuff. You may enjoy this piece that tackles similar themes but focuses on what use evolution has for consciousness.

My reading of it is that the author suggests global workspace theory is a plausible reason for evolution to spend so much time and energy developing phenomenal consciousness.

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

Do you (or this paper) think consciousness exists in the humans out there who have no inner narrative?

That's a fair question. I don't know that the theory of mind mentioned here is the same as an internal monologue. I think one could model other people's minds without conducting an internal monologue, by visualizing it, for example. Maybe the anendophasiacs in the audience can enlighten us.

I can think words in conversations as if I am writing a story (actually thinking about it it's more like reading a script), but as far as I can tell I don't experience what most people describe as an internal monologue, I also have aphantasia which I understand is a frequent co-occurrence with a lack of an internal monologue.

Obviously I'm conscious (but a zombie would say that too). I can certainly consider the mental states of others. Sometimes embarrassingly so, there are a few boardgames where you have to anticipate the actions of others, where the other players are making choices based upon what they think others might do rather than a strictly analytical 'best' move. I'm quite good at those. I am not a poker player but I imagine that professional players have that ability at a much higher level than I do.

So yeah, My brain doesn't talk to me, but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.

Does it bother anyone else that those simulations of others that you run in your mind might, in themselves, be conscious? If so, do we kill them when we stop thinking about them? If we start thinking about them again do we resurrect them or make a new one?

The key to your difficulty is "my brain doesn't talk to me"... the solution is to realize that there is no "me" that's separate from your brain for it to talk to. You are the sum of the processes occurring in your brain and when it simulates others inside your mind, that's nothing but narrative. A simulation is a narrative. You may not perceive this narrative as sequence of words, a monologue, but it certainly is the result of different parts of your brain communicating with each other, passing information back and forth to model a plausible sequence of events.

So yes, you're conscious. So is my dog, but my dog can't post his thoughts about this on Hacker news, so you are more conscious than my dog.

> Obviously I'm conscious

I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know? What does consciousness mean to you? Do you experience "qualia"? When you notice something, say "the toast is burning", what goes on in your mind?

> but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.

Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something? What sort of reactions can they exhibit in your mind?

Sorry if these questions are invasive, but you're as close to an alien intelligence as I'll ever meet unless LLMs go full Prime Intellect on us.

>I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know?

That was kinda what my point about zombies was about. It's much easier to assert you have consciousness than to actually have it.

More specifically I think in pragmatic terms most things asserting consciousness are asserting what they have whatever consciousness means to them with a subset of things asserting consciousness by dictate of a conscious entity for whatever consciousness means to that entity. For example 10 print "I am conscious" is most probably an instruction that originated from a conscious. This isn't much different from any non candid answer though. It could just be a lie. You can assert anything regardless of its truth.

I'm kind of with Dennett when it comes to qualia, that the distinction between the specialness of qualia and the behaviour that it describes evaporates from any area you look at in detail. I find the thought experiment compelling about what is the difference between having all your memories of red an blue swapped compared to having all your nerve signals for red and blue swapped. In both instances you end up with red and blue being different from how you previously experienced them. Qualia would suggest you would know which would have happened which would mean you could express it and therefore there must be a functional difference in behaviour.

By analogy,

5 + 3 = 8

3 + 5 = 8

This --> 8 <-- here is a copy of one of those two above. Use your Qualia to see which.

>Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something?

Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", When thinking about what people will do I am better amongst those who I play games with in knowing which decision they will make. When I play games with my partner we use Scissers, Paper, Stone to pick the starting player, but I always play a subgame of how many draws I can manage, It takes longer but more randomly picks the starting player.

It's all very iocane powder. I guess when I think about it I don't process a simulation to conclusion but just know what their reactions will be given their mental state, which feels very clear to me. I'm not sure how to distinguish the feeling of thinking something will happen and imagining it happening and observing the result. Both are processing information to generate the same answer. Is it the same distinction as the Qualia thing? I'm not sure.

Thank you for sharing this!

> Yeah, of the sort of "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action",

That is the internal monologue.

An internal monologue is when that sentence is expressed via words as if you are hearing it said by yourself inside your head. Someone without an internal monologue can still arrive at that conclusion without the sentence being “heard” in their mind.

How?

I can’t say as I have an internal monologue and every word I’m typing echos here in my mind as I type it. But as someone with aphantasia who’s regularly bewildered by questions like “how do you spell” or “how do you get to the grocery store” I understand that people’s modes of cognition vary immensely. To think that you’d need to, or even be able to, visualize a word to spell it is as foreign a concept to me as not having an internal monologue.

At the core it seems to me there’s a strong difference between abstract thinking and any particular verbalizing or visualizing implementation of it. I’d even venture to say that visualizing and verbalizing are slower, less precise methods to approximate the optimal thinking strategy of “knowing the answer already”, as compared to the non-visual/verbal methods that aphantastics/anendophanstatics are forced to use (and if others use it to some extent, it must be without realizing it based on their inability to comprehend aphan/anendo minds).

Evidence for the claim? When HN user Lerc describes gameplay analysis: "They want to do this, but they feel like doing that directly will give away too much information, but they also know that playing the move they want to play might be interpreted as an attempt to disguise another action", it’s very clear that this sort of long winded verbalization of a thought process is not the ideal mental exercise, my impression is that Lerc’s mind is able to do that entire exercise much more quickly and simply know the answer, and know that it could be verbally justified if needed, without wasting the time to verbalize that a priori. This is that indescribable thinking approach.

Similarly, I personally am aphantastic and things like navigation come very easy to me, a surprise to many. (I’ll admit i’m not a great speller, but neither is my dad who has a very visual mind). Moreover, I’m a moderately talented hobbies woodworker and it’s very easy for me to think through the full construction details of most any project, going down to any level of detail required and coming up with solutions to any relevant corner/edge cases, all internally without any words or visualization. I don’t have many people to compare this act to as it’s a fairly solo endeavor, but I do know that one person I made a project for has a very visual mind and is able to do that full “solid works in my head” visualization process. However, when we talked through a project she wanted together I pointed out several conflicts and ambiguities that she did not understand until I drew up the plans on paper.

Also, it’s worth bringing up the classic “bicycle test” as evidence the standard “visualization” method is woefully inaccurate: nearly everyone has seen a bike at some point in their life, but when asked to draw it provide absolute nonsense. Aphantastics, in my experience, never fail to sketch out a fully mechanically sound contraption. Pointing again to the idea that we somehow are closer to that platonic idea though process of knowing the answer than typically visualizers.

> my impression is that Lerc’s mind is able to do that entire exercise much more quickly and simply know the answer, and know that it could be verbally justified if needed

My impression, is that the process is never complete without verbalization. So far, that I believe it is impossible to function as a human being without it - those that claim to have no inner monologue simply are either less aware of it, or expect it to be an actual audible hallucination. Whenever questioned to introspect and explain how they navigate tasks that require planning, it either comes out that indeed there was some inner verbalization, or evasives.

But you also have the quick thinking which can reach to correct answers faster than inner monologue could. Or otherwise what you might think is intuition. Frequently the verbalization or monologue part is just to explain to others or verify to yourself.

I think you're very close.

To provide perspective on that, as part of an employment thing I was given an an assessment in my abilities, this wasn't a simple questionnaire but a multi hour one-on-one with a professor (who did it as a side gig to fund his research)

My abstract reasoning scored beyond the measuring ability to test. At the time I did not know that aphantasia was even a thing, the term may not have even been coined yet I can't remember the exact year it was, but he recorded his results on a palm pilot.

Interestingly I answered some questions not exactly incorrectly but differently, due to perceiving a question as asking for a different class of information than how most people interpret it.

Examples were I considered building a house or a garage to be the same use for a brick (as opposed to as a weapon or as paving) which was deemed unusual. I also learned that it is normal to say the sun rises "in the east", and not "at the horizon". Not usual, but also not wrong.

When it comes to drawing I can do a decent snowy the dog, but I can't picture it I'm my head. I just know things like the eyes are black ovals stretched vertically and there are two lines in the ears that do not connect to the outline.

I could easily draw a diagram of a bike, but not one coming towards me, I believe that is a particular skill of artists to draw things as they appear instead of how they are.

I don't think that as words. I'm just aware of the facts simultaneously. It's rather hard to type my awareness without converting it to words though.

I'm interested in this "simultaneous awareness of facts".

How simultaneous is it really? A 100% as in, the whole chain of thoughts is condensed into one "symbol"? Or simply less elements or "atoms"? Or is it equally long but just connects faster than words? Or something else entirely?

And a second question, how do you expect the inner monologue to be like? An audible hallucination? A different person talking in your head? Something else?

Not necessarily.

I have an inner monologue that's my own actual voice*. But I also have a part of my mind which can generate complete ideas.

I know these are two separate things, because at one point I started to notice that I already had a complete idea before the words expressing the idea had been voiced by the inner voice. Indeed, a few times I tried to skip the wasted time/effort of letting the [inner] "voice" do the vocal equivalent of "imagine" those words, only to find that my overall subjective emotional response was annoyance, because apparently that bit of my brain getting annoyed can be felt by the rest of my brain.

* as I perceive it subjectively, not the impression other people get and which I only experience via microphones and playback.

I’ve thought about this a bit as my wife substantially has anendophasia and aphantasia, though not total. Even having a rich inner voice myself, I realise that it’s not absolute.

Many, in fact probably most experiences and thoughts I have are actually not expressed in inner speech. When I look at a scene I see and am aware of the sky, trees, a path, grass, a wall, tennis courts, etc bout none of those words come to mind unless I think to make them, and then only a few I pay attention to.

I think most our interpretation of experience exists at a conceptual, pre-linguistic level. Converting experiences into words before we could act on them would be unbelievably slow and inefficient. I think it’s just that those of us with a rich inner monologue find it’s so easy to do this for things we pay attention to that we imagine we do it for everything, when in fact that is very, very far from the truth.

Considering how I reason about the thought processes, intentions and expected behaviour of others, I don’t think I routinely verbalise that at all. In fact I don’t think the idea that we actually think in words makes any sense. Can people that don’t know how to express a situation linguistically not reason about and respond to that situation? That seems absurd.

I also lack an internal monologue and have strong aphantasia, so the idea that I might not be conscious made me a bit uneasy—it just felt wrong, somehow. For now, the best I can say is that my worldview, which includes self-consciousness, is abstract. I can put it into words, but most of the time, it doesn’t feel necessary.

Don’t get too worried, the evidence seems to point to our thought mechanisms being superior, at least in some ways. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44283084

I’m not sure you are conscious

Maybe all humans (and indeed other intelligent mammals) have an inner narrative, but it doesn't necessarily involve language. A mime or a silent film can tell a story without words, and the inner narrative can take likewise be in visual or other sensory form.

Do humans without inner narrative really exist? It could be just a misunderstanding about what "inner narrative" is, or the degree of perception.

In some systems the interruption of the inner dialog, that leads to a inner silence, opens a door to expansion of perception to other realms.

Considering how I observe my inner monologue it is hard for me to believe that someone wouldn't notice they had it if in fact they did have it.

I find it easier to believe than not having an inner monologue.

I just don't know how someone who has inner monologue wouldn't have inner monologue also spelling it out for them that it exists.

yes. I can "summon one up" at times where it's useful, but normally no. Might have something to do with the aphantasia, or maybe not.

Where dooes a human under anaesthesia fit in?

Unconscious, in my experience.

But not aconscious.

Is there a definition of unconscious distinct from and more useful than "temporarily aconscious with most memory intact"?

> 4 : Second Order Selves (e.g. cat). Where access consciousness begins. Theory of mind. Self-awareness. Inner narrative. Anticipating the reactions of predator or prey, or navigating a social hierarchy.

Cats and dogs most definitely anticipate actions of other animals and navigate (and establish) social hierarchy. Is this even a trait of consciousness?

I’ve spent much time thinking of qualitative differences between human and close animals. I do think ”narrative” is probably one such construct. Narratives come early (seemingly before language). This lays the foundation of sequential step-by-step thinking. Basically it lets you have intermediate virtual (in-mind) steps supporting next steps, whether that’s through writing, oral communication or episodic memory.

An animal can 100% recall and associate memories, such as mentioning the name of a playmate to a dog (=tail wagging). However, it seems like they can neither remember nor project ”what happens next” and continue to build on it. Is it a degree of ability or a fundamental qualitative difference? Not sure.

In either case, we should be careful overfitting human traits into definition of consciousness, particularly language. Besides, many humans have non-verbal thoughts and we are no less conscious during those times.

There is this popular video of a crow repeatedly riding down a snow covered roof on a piece of plastic, basically snowboarding. Seemingly just for fun/play.

For me, it's hard to imagine how such behavior could be expressed without the pure conscious experience of abstract joy and anticipation thereof. It's not the sort of play, which may prepare a young animal for the specific challenges of their species (e.g. hunting, or fighting). I don't think you could snowboard on a piece of bark or something. Maybe ice, but not repeatedly by dragging it up the hill again. It's an activity greatly inspired by man-made, light and smooth materials, novelties considering evolutionary timescales. May even be inspired by observing humans...

I think it's all there, but the question about degree of ability vs. qualitative difference may be moot. I mean, trivially there is a continuous evolutionary lineage of "feature progression", unless we would expect our extend of consciousness being down to "a single gene". But it's also moot, because evolutionary specialization may as well be as fundamental a difference as the existence of a whole new organ. E.g. the energy economics of a bird are restricted by gravity. We wouldn't see central nervous systems without the evolutionary legacy of predation -> movement -> directionality -> sensory concentration at the front. And we simply cannot relate to solitary animals (who just don't care about love and friendship)... Abilities are somewhat locked-in by niche and physics constraints.

I think the fundamental difference between humans and animals, is the degree of freedom we progressively gained over the environment, life, death and reproduction. Of course we are governed by the wider idea of evolution like all matter, but in the sense of classical theory we don't really have a specific niche, except "doing whatever with our big, expensive brain". I mean, we're at a point where we play meta-evolution in the laboratory. This freedom may have brought extended universality into cognition. Energy economics, omnivorous diet, bipedal walking, hands with freely movable thumbs, language, useful lifespan, ... I think the sum of all these make the difference. In some way, I think we are like we are, exactly because we are like that. Getting here wasn't guided by plans and abstractions.

If it's a concert of all the things in our past and present, we may never find a simpler line between us and the crow, yet we are fundamentally different.

> Is this even a trait of consciousness?

There's 40 or so different definitions of the word, so it depends which one you're using when you ask the question.

For me, and not just when it comes to machine minds, the meaning I find most interesting is qualia — unfortunately, I have no particular reason to think this hierarchy helps with that, because there might be a good evolutionary reason for us to have a subjective experience rather than mere unfeeling circuits of impulse and response, it's (1) not clear why this may have been selected for, and evolution does do things at random and only select for/against when they actually matter, and (2) it's not clear when in our evolution this may have happened, and (3) it's not clear how to test for it.

These stages are part of a spectrum. There is no hard boundaries.

I've never gotten the impression an animal was aware it could change me. Sure it'd make its wants clear until it got what it wanted or got bored, but that's a very primitive form of conduct. The cat clearly knows I can get it more foods between meals. The communication is limited, but I've never seen him come up with a better argument than that he really really wants more food. Dogs are stranger and clearly has a concept of social structure that cats don't. Both from their background as pack animals and deliberate domestication for assisting humans in work.

> An animal can 100% recall and associate memories, such as mentioning the name of a playmate to a dog (=tail wagging). However, it seems like they can neither remember nor project ”what happens next” and continue to build on it.

There are videos of dogs stopping kids from falling in the water. They definitely can project 'what happens next'. I.e. what kid is doing, why, and what's going to happen. More over dog brings the toy kid wanted from the water. In other words animals are not as primitive and stupid as some want them to be to fit in their theories. BTW, parrots often are really talking, not just reproducing random words.

Well shit I wonder what level 6 looks like

Some kind of multi-tier 5 hivemind perhaps.

I had the same question.

There's this video by an unfortunately rude Youtuber that's actually quite interesting. I find his tribalism off-putting (and ironic), but he's clearly thought about it a lot. https://youtu.be/kse87ocS0Uo?si=Gi5f6uQFeJCrm_hF

> phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible

That's interesting, but I think that only applies if the consciousness is actually consistent in some wide set of situations? Like you can dump a few decent answers into a database and it answers correctly if asked the exact right questions, a la Eliza or Chinese room, does that mean SQL's SELECT is conscious?

With LLMs it's not entirely clear if we've expanded that database to near infinity with lossy compression or if they are a simplistic barely functional actual consciousness. Sometimes it feels like it's both at the same time.

I'm wary of any classification that puts humans in a special category of their own, as the crown jewel of the tree of life (many such cases).

> The ability to model the internal dialogues of others.

It feels like someone spent a lot of time searching for something only humans can do, and landed on something related to language (ignoring animals that communicate with sounds too). How is this ability any different than the "Theory of mind"? And why is it so important that it requires a new category of its own?

Fair points. However I don't put humans in a special category, so much as I say I know at least humans are this conscious. I then cite some research on Australian magpies which suggests they may be so conscious too.

It is not different from theory of mind; theory of mind is an important part of it, just not the whole picture. I argue access consciousness and theory of mind go hand in hand, which is a significant departure from how access consciousness is traditionally understood.

> making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.

Would, or does, the author then argue that ChatGPT must be conscious?

Not sure why this is getting downvoted. According to the above definition, LLMs are level 5 consciousness, since they have a theory of self and others.

I wonder if 6 would be understanding own thinking. Currently humans don't understand this. Thoughts just pop in to our heads and we try to explain what caused them.

7. Full scalability. Can operate organizations of large size without confusion.

One can dream. Seeing how people already start to get confused when a logical negation is in play, I'm not optimistic.

I'm more optimistic but cynical. Everybody has the capacity, but can't be bothered for your sake specifically. A highly intelligent person can casually entertain several theoretical notions. A lesser can too, but it requires more effort. Effort that might be better spent elsewhere, or effort that makes social interaction awkward.

Higher consciousness does not imply cooperation, even though we idealize it to do so. Cooperation is another dimension - it is easy to imagine a being that has a higher form of consciousness but is not interested in cooperation or does not engage in it unless it can take advantage of others.

Not sure what you mean. It seems like thoughts must necessarily pop into our head, how would we know our thoughts before we think them?

One of the most insightful things I learned about myself. Sam Harris has a fascinating 2hr podcast on the subject of free will. The idea that we don’t choose what we think is fascinating and so obvious after it’s explained. But I don’t know that I’d ever have realized.

The step from 1 to 2, rock to hard coding (protozoan) assumes life. There's no way I would describe hard coding as life.

Does it assume life, or are the qualities that makes an organism act in spite of us, and agency, one and the same?

> The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.

This doesn't really address the hard problem, it just asserts that the hard problem doesn't exist. The meat of the problem is that subjective experience exists at all, even though in principle there's no clear reason why it should need to.

Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.

For example, we can imagine a hypothetical robot that could remove its hand from a stove if it's sensors determine that the surface is too hot. We don't need subjective experience to explain how a system like that could be designed, so why do we need it for an organism?

A claim is not an assertion. I don’t see any assertion the hard problem doesn’t exist here, just expression of a belief it may be solvable and an outline of maybe how.

> Simply declaring it as functional is begging the question.

Nobody is ‘declaring’ any such thing. I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting, declaring something, just for having the temerity to offer a proposed explanation you happen to disagree with.

What your last paragraph is saying is that stage 1 isn’t conscious therefore stage 5 isn’t. To argue against stage 5 you need to actually address stage 5, against which there are plenty of legitimate lines of criticism.

> Nobody is ‘declaring’ any such thing

Yes, they are.

> The claim is that phenomenal consciousness is fundamentally functional, making the existence of philosophical zombies (entities that behave like conscious beings but lack subjective experience) impossible.

They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.

> I loathe this kind of lazy pejorative attack accusing someone of asserting

Take it easy. Nothing I wrote here is a "pejorative attack", I'm directly addressing what was written by the OP.

>They're explicitly defining the hard problem out of existence.

A claim is just an opinion, it's not a 'definition' or 'declaration'. That's absurd hyperbole. If I say personally I don't think the hard problem is an obstacle for physicalism, I'm not defining anything.

Let's see what the author says in his introduction to the paper. "Take this with a grain of salt". Hardly the definitive declaration you're railing against.

First of all, how is 5 different from 4? Modelling the internal monologue of someone else is Theory of Mind, isn't it?

Next, we gotta ask ourselves, could you have substrate independence? A thing that isn't biological, but can model other level-5 creatures?

My guess is yes. There's all sort of other substrate independence.

My stab:

2: implicit world. Reacts to but not modeled. 3: explicit world and your separation from it. 4: Model that includes other intelligences of level 3 that you have to take into consideration. World resources can be shared or competes for. 5: Language. Model of others as yourself, their model include yours too. Mutual recursion. Information can be transmitted mind-to mind.

Looks a lot like the game theory concept of the "level" of a player. (how many levels of metacognition in others can it practically take into account)

I am usually not a fan of fanboying (pun intended) but getting an award with the presenter being Joscha Bach is so cool!