We are nothing like ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the result of top-down design, whereas consciousness is a product of millions of years of evolution, of living things struggling to stay alive long enough to reproduce. Filter feeders do not need to make decisions. Yes, what to spit out. But let's not split hairs. When you go up the chain of animal life (let's leave plants out of it), animals such as lizards have to decide whether to eat this grasshopper now or hide from the shadow that just appeared. It helps if they can take it farther and make a quick determination whether or not they can get away with snatching the grasshopper THEN hiding. To do this it helps if they have a mental image of what happened last time. OK the grasshopper is farther away than it was that time when the big thing came way too close for comfort, so fuck it! Or vice-versa. We may be past lizards by now, but the point is that living things at the level of mammals can do this. If it can contain, or better, maintain, within its brain a mental map of its surroundings along with a lot of heuristics (no time for latency here!) about what worked all the better. As far as what didn't work, that genetic line is over. That is, unless the critter can learn from the mistakes of others of its kind. To do that it will need to be able to place its own kind within its mental map, and to do that it needs to place ITSELF within that mental map, for purposes of comparison. Once ITSELF is part of the mental map, it has a self, that is, it is conscious. Because of the way it evolved, consciousness must always be OF something, otherwise what is the point? No survival value in thinking about nothing! Note that this is all evolution, that is, nature taking her course, and she doesn't give a shit if any of it makes sense to us now. It is simply a brute fact of human existence, unless you are one of those who tries to maintain the idea that consciousness is an illusion. Personality, I can't think of any position more weird than that.
This is not meant to be an exhaustive step by step of how evolution gave rise to consciousness; we will probably never know exactly how mother nature did it. It is more to point out that consciousness has survival value and therefore can be selected for. In our species this reached the point of social structures which made it possible for us to adapt to changing environments without having to wait for biological evolution. That is our superpower. Other animals can do it but not to the extent we can. We went from clothing to secure dwellings to central heating to air conditioning etc etc in the blink of an evolutionary eye.
This is not original with me. The best exposition of it l know of can be found in The Evolution of Agency by Michael Tomasello. He also starts with lizards.
