[HN Gopher] Brains are not required to think or solve problems -...
___________________________________________________________________
Brains are not required to think or solve problems - simple cells
can do it
Author : anjel
Score : 408 points
Date : 2024-01-25 07:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| yamrzou wrote:
| https://archive.is/SxCaF
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Michael Levin is a rare example of a scientist who really thinks
| outside the box and goes wherever few have gone before.
| teekert wrote:
| I've been listening a lot to Sean Caroll's mindscape podcast [0].
| In it they have this notion of complex-to-intelligent systems.
| Their loose definition is that such systems can hold an internal
| state that represents the world around them. A sort of model to
| interact with and to extrapolate future events from (time
| travel!). In this light consciousness also makes more sense to
| me, although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our
| (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our
| minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced. One can imagine,
| somehow in the feedback loops (I think, that she thinks, that I
| think, that she thinks, ...), something like consciousness
| (awareness [a model?] of the self in the world?) evolved.
|
| Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world and
| maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated events.
|
| I'm just a cocktail philosopher, but aren't we all.
|
| [0] https://podverse.fm/podcast/e42yV38oN
| bcherny wrote:
| This is one of Hofstadter's big ideas that he explored in his
| main work: GEB, Mind's I, and I am a Strange Loop. The latter
| is a good intro to his work.
| jebarker wrote:
| I'm also a cocktail philosopher, but isn't consciousness
| different to just having a model of the world and self within
| it? Consciousness is the lived experience. The world model and
| feeling of self appear in consciousness. I think a complex
| system could plausibly be conscious without having a belief of
| a self within it. Not sure if consciousness is possible without
| any world model though.
|
| My impressions about this were strongly influenced by Sam
| Harris's Waking Up book and app.
| teekert wrote:
| I agree that "consciousness is different to just having a
| model of the world and self within it" indeed. I'm just
| saying it feels like that modelling ability (which has clear
| and major evolutionary advantages) is a step towards
| consciousness, indeed something in the now (as we experience
| it). A (near) real-time model perhaps that constantly
| projects and adjusts. I guess this still doesn't require
| consciousness, but maybe consciousness results from this?
| Does it require a sense of "now" and identity relative to the
| world model?
|
| I feel like the matrix is about the eject me btw.
|
| Thanx, I'm looking for Harris' books right now.
| krzat wrote:
| Mixing consciousness with cognition is a mistake, Imagine a
| conscious experience of constant redness and nothing else,
| is there any intelligence needed for this?
| teekert wrote:
| I think all these term are too loaded and deep to answer
| your question, almost all words in the sentences we
| exchange are subject to subtle interpretation and
| definition differences.
|
| I still enjoy the process though, which perhaps also
| doesn't require consciousness, yet here I am.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think it's arguable that this "conscious experience of
| nothing but constant redness" might not be actually
| possible. We can imagine it, of course, but we can also
| imagine many things that can't actually exist in the
| world. It's similar to the idea about p-zombies: just
| because a concept exists doesn't mean it's physically
| realizable.
|
| It's very much possible that what we would call
| consciousness can only exist in certain types of minds
| that have a particular level of intelligence, but also a
| particular structure.
|
| Of course, it's also possible that you're right and the
| two are entirely separate, and that consciousness doesn't
| require intelligence (and possibly vice-versa).
| krzat wrote:
| Perhaps, that's the question. What is required for the
| simplest possible consciousness?
| pegasus wrote:
| Good question, being investigated in the field of
| consciousness studies. Like Thomas Metzinger's minimal
| phenomenal selfhood: https://youtu.be/8f4ykI9har8
| quonn wrote:
| The reason why this is likely not possible is because
| consciousness appears to require a notion of time passing
| by and having a constant experience means that there is
| no time.
|
| For time to exist some sort of motion is needed,
| including either internal motion like the perception of
| breathing or a heartbeat or a train of thought or
| external ones like a clock or a change of color from red
| to blue.
| vidarh wrote:
| We have no way of knowing whether there is any time even
| with the "notion of time passing", as that notion depends
| on a notion of memory of a past, and we have no way of
| knowing if that is real, including whether or not there
| is a train of thought or any change.
| quonn wrote:
| You are misunderstanding what I wrote.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't think so. The point being that we can't tell
| whether we're having a "constant experience" or not, and
| we can't tell from that whether or not there's any time
| or no time, or punctuated time, nor can we for that
| matter tell whether consciousness requires any notion of
| time.
|
| It's all pure speculation because we have no way of
| assessing it outside of our own frame of reference. E.g.
| I see you in another answer saying that "the fact is that
| all kinds of state changes happen", but we don't know if
| _any_ state changes _ever_ happen.
|
| We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from a
| static one where we're all just suspended in a single
| unchanging moment.
|
| We can choose to handwave a lot of this away ordinarily
| because as long as the experience is reasonably
| _consistent_ it makes sense to assume it is objectively
| real, because we have nothing better. It doesn 't matter
| if the world didn't exist a second ago when e.g.
| considering whether gravity work, because it appears as
| if it did.
|
| But when trying to determine the nature of consciousness
| we run headlong into the fact our observation of
| consciousness is direct only in the case of ourself, and
| even then heavily limited. We have no direct measure that
| puts us in a position to prove consciousness even in
| other people. We can show that within our perceived world
| we can measure brain activity that correlates to though,
| but not whether that reflects merely the operation of an
| automata, or the existence of consciousness, or if there
| is a distinction at all.
|
| As such, it's meaningless to suggest we have a way of
| saying much about the limitations of consciousness at
| all.
| sigmaml wrote:
| > We have no way of telling a dynamic universe apart from
| a static one where we're all just suspended in a single
| unchanging moment.
|
| I am curious to know why you think so. What would you say
| about repeatably observable causality, in that case?
| vidarh wrote:
| If the universe is static, then there is no "repeatably
| observable causality" or indeed any causality at all. In
| that scenario any perception of time and causality would
| inherently have to just be our perception lying to us
| about a past that we have had not part in, if it exist in
| any sense at all. If so, we have not had this
| conversation, and your experience of it is just a static
| momentary perception of having had it.
|
| Maybe time is a spatial dimension, and there are infinite
| moments of consciousness fixed in the same spatial
| location with no time passing.
|
| Consider how you'd tell if a drawing is an individual
| drawing or a frame from a cartoon if all you have to go
| by is that single frame. You can argue that the drawing
| hints convincingly at motion, but that does not require
| that this motion has taken place.
|
| Or consider a trace of a simulation, sliced and diced
| into snapshots of individual moments. We can argue that
| it's unlikely any entities in such snapshots would have
| consciousness, but if we're arguing on the basis that we
| appear to experience the motion of time, we'd equally
| make that argument if we were wrong about consciousness
| and indeed locked in snapshots of individual moments. We
| can even construct simulations where individual parts
| look causally connected but where the existence of one
| calculated frame tells us nothing about whether any
| individual other frames have even ever been instantiated
| (e.g. imagine a very complex function over time, where
| only punctuated values have ever been calculated).
|
| I'm not saying I believe that is our situation - I'm
| saying we can't distinguish between that and an infinite
| set of other possible options, because "from the inside"
| there is an infinite set of possibilities that could all
| look the same from our vantage point. We can debate which
| possibilities seem more likely, but they will always be
| speculation as long as we're locked inside the asylum, so
| to speak...
|
| Incidentally, this is an argument _for_ a materialistic
| view of the universe, not against it, on the basis that
| absent a way of "peeking out" and seeing our situation
| from the outside, it's meaningless to treat the world as
| anything but what we measure and perceive - it doesn't
| matter whether or not this world is what it seems like to
| us or not as long as it is the only view we have of it.
| We just can't say if it is some inherently true objective
| view of the universe, and most likely it won't make any
| difference to us.
|
| It only makes a difference when we tinker with philosophy
| around the edges, like these conversations about whether
| what we experience can tell us anything about the
| experience of other entities.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _If the universe is static, then there is no
| "repeatably observable causality" or indeed any causality
| at all. In that scenario any perception of time and
| causality would inherently have to just be our perception
| lying to us about a past that we have had not part in, if
| it exist in any sense at all_
|
| Is it possible to have perception in a static
| environment? It seems like perception requires flux of
| some sort.
|
| Clarification: meaning the machinery of the perceiver
| must have flux, otherwise it's not perception, it's just
| static state.
| vidarh wrote:
| Is it? If we are in a static environment, then it would
| mean it is possible, and that this intuition is wrong.
| Since we don't have a way of determining experimentally
| if is wrong or not, then at least for now it does not
| even help us quantify the odds. If we're not in a static
| environment, then maybe, maybe not - we don't know what
| the subject experience of consciousness is at all.
|
| We so far have no way of splitting perception or
| conscience down in slices of ever shorter moments to see
| where it stops being whatever it is and becomes something
| "inert", but even if we did, we would not know whether
| that was an inherent limitation of objective reality or
| of our subjective reality and whether those two are the
| same or not.
| krzat wrote:
| IMO those are details, we could drop the constatness and
| just ask - what is required to have a single moment of
| redness? Or even simpler, a single moment of one tingle.
|
| BTW experienced mediators apperently can experience no
| time and no space, no idea how that tastes like.
| quonn wrote:
| > BTW experienced mediators apperently can experience no
| time and no space, no idea how that tastes like.
|
| Sure, they might feel so, but the fact is that all kinds
| of state changes happen, so time goes on.
| pixl97 wrote:
| At least when it comes to human level consciousness, I
| agree it's something 'more than', but what exactly?
|
| If we look at our advancing world models in things like
| self driving cars, when would we consider them conscious by
| our own rules? It has a sensor network that keeps track of
| it's own internal states. It has external sensors that
| monitor the external world and adjust it's internal state.
| The internal state attempts to predict future states and
| take actions to avoid negative outcomes.
|
| So when does this loop become something we consider
| consciousness?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| One possibility at least is that "the experience" is not
| something that really happens. That is, it's possible that we
| don't actually "feel" anything, and our impression that we
| are is just the story that our self-model comes up to explain
| (and help predict) our reactions to ourselves. Just like our
| world model has ideas like "the rock _wants_ to fall down ",
| it's possible that our self-model does too.
|
| We already know that our self-model can be entirely wrong
| about our feelings. People with paralyzed or even missing
| limbs often believe that they just don't _want_ to move that
| limb at first. So, they think they are having one experience,
| but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in
| fact, they are not moving that limb because they can 't. And
| there are many other similar examples of people being wrong
| about their own intenal experiences, typically but not
| exclusively because of some illness.
|
| So, it's possible that our internal experiences are in fact
| only a model in which one part of our brain interprets the
| actions of other parts of our brain, often retroactively.
|
| Note: I'm not claiming this is the truth or silly things like
| "if you believe in science you have to believe this". It's
| just another cocktail philosopher's story of what
| consciousness might be. Other stories are just as plausible,
| and just as consistent with the little we do know in this
| area.
| jebarker wrote:
| It definitely seems like aspects of conscious experience
| are just more parts of the world model, e.g. we experience
| having a continual visual view of the world through our
| eyes, like watching a movie, but we know that's not what is
| actually happening physically.
|
| Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the story
| that our self-model comes up to explain (and help predict)
| our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves" here? That
| implies some observer that the self-model is explaining
| things to.
| evv555 wrote:
| Speaking in the context of thinkers like Harris this is
| the reason why awareness is differentiated from
| consciousness. Consciousness is the ability to grasp the
| world "out there". Awareness is the blank canvas where
| consciousness is experienced. The analogy here is a movie
| projected onto a movie screen. Consciousness is the movie
| being played. The screen is the blank space of experience
| where the movie is projected. I think the confusion is
| there is no logically consistent differentiation of
| concepts like intelligence, consciousness, awareness in
| the sciences and they end up being used interchangeably.
| jebarker wrote:
| Thanks, the distinction between awareness and
| consciousness is definitely something I've overlooked. I
| tend to think of them interchangeably.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > Where I get confused though is this sentence: "...the
| story that our self-model comes up to explain (and help
| predict) our reactions to ourselves". What is "ourselves"
| here? That implies some observer that the self-model is
| explaining things to.
|
| That is a good point, language is pretty important in
| these things. I just meant "ourselves" as the overall
| brain/mind. That is, the self-model component just feeds
| these models into the planning component, so that the
| planning component can decide the next actions to take.
| maroonblazer wrote:
| Also an armchair philosopher and I enjoy thinking about
| these things a lot. The theory you've described is the one
| that seems to have the most explanatory power.
|
| Andy Clark's "Surfing Uncertainty-Prediction, Action, and
| the Embodied Mind" is a book-length exploration of this
| idea. Highly recommend.
| chronofar wrote:
| > So, they think they are having one experience, but they
| are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact,
| they are not moving that limb because they can't.
|
| I think it's rather the opposite, they aren't wrong about
| their internal experience, it's just that their internal
| experience doesn't match the objective reality of their
| body (which in this sense is external).
|
| I think it is indeed entirely possible that our self-model
| can fool us about the realities of various situations, even
| those with our own body/emotions/etc, but I'm not sure how
| one could then derive the conclusion that the experience
| doesn't exist. It would just be instead that the experience
| is rather inaccurate/confabulated.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't think it's correct to call this an external
| experience. It's an experience about will and desire and
| direct control of the body - what can be more internal
| than that?
|
| It's not like an optical illusion, where you think you
| are misinterpreting an external stimulus. This is a
| situation where you are trying to control a limb, not
| getting any reply, and concluding that "you don't want to
| move" instead of "I can't move".
| chronofar wrote:
| The experience is internal, the body (the limb that's
| missing) is external to the experience. The confabulatory
| experience of "I don't want to move" is an internal
| experience and cannot itself be an illusion, it's simply
| an incorrect assessment of the actual state of the body.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, the limb is external. But the experience "I don't
| want to move" is not wrong because the limb is actually
| missing, it is wrong because I _did_ actually want to
| move. "I" did the exact same thing as every time I try
| to move (i.e. the brain sent the exact same signals to
| the limb).
| chronofar wrote:
| Sure, none of what you said there would lead to the
| conclusion that the "experience is not something that
| really happens," though it's also possible there's a just
| a failure of communication here and I'm not understanding
| what you meant.
| goatlover wrote:
| So what would it mean for us to not really have sensations
| of color, sound, etc? People can be wrong about some of
| their experiences, but those would be called illusions or
| hallucinations, not lack of experience. Illusions and
| hallucinations are themselves kinds of experiences, even if
| the experiences are faulty. You can dream about all sorts
| of ridiculous things, but it would be very odd to use that
| to claim that you don't actually experience dreaming.
|
| If our internal experiences are the result of self-
| interpreting an internal model, that doesn't make the
| experiences go away. It means there's something about that
| activity which causes subjectivity.
| ordu wrote:
| _> That is, it 's possible that we don't actually "feel"
| anything, and our impression that we are is just the story
| that our self-model comes up to explain_
|
| It seems to me that you are trying to banish things from
| the existence by a reductionism based exorcism ritual.
|
| If we know a structure of some phenomenon it doesn't mean
| the phenomenon doesn't exist. We know that life is a
| chemistry, and there is no life in periodic table. But it
| is not a reason to conclude, that life doesn't exist.
|
| If my feelings come into existence as a result of a complex
| information processing, it doesn't mean my feelings do not
| exist or are not real.
|
| If "I" is just a retroactively written story, then what?
| Does it mean "I" is not real?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > If "I" is just a retroactively written story, then
| what? Does it mean "I" is not real?
|
| It depends what you mean by "is real". Of course in some
| sense it is still real, just like triangles are real. But
| it's not real in the same sense that rivers or rocks are
| real.
|
| The relevance in this context is that it gets rid of some
| privileged position for consciousness. If this
| explanation I gave were true (I have no reason to believe
| it is!), then there is no problem in reconciling qualia
| with materialism. Qualia are just an aspect of the
| modeled "I", not a raw experience that can't be
| explained. P-zombies are all that exists.
| ordu wrote:
| _> Of course in some sense it is still real, just like
| triangles are real. But it 's not real in the same sense
| that rivers or rocks are real._
|
| Rivers and rocks are less real than consciousness. Our
| minds can work with mental objects only, these objects
| often are built as an images of something outside of our
| minds. Most of the time images have nothing in common
| with underlying reality of an imaged phenomenon: for
| example we need to remind ourselves that you cannot cross
| the same river twice, because our model is a static
| object, while really a river is a dynamic process of H2O
| molecules falling out of sky and then rolling down to an
| ocean.
|
| But our consciousness is the model of ourselves. The
| object (me) and its model (me consciousness) are much
| closer, there is no long chain of causes-effects passing
| information from external river to neurons. And moreover
| consciousness is a pure magic among other images: I can
| believe as hard as I can that river must be made of milk,
| and it will not change the river. But if I believe
| something about myself, it leads to real changes. Doesn't
| it mean that "I" is more real than any river?
|
| Or... scratch that. I can agree with you we have confused
| naive understanding of consciousness mixing causes and
| effects. But I'm not sure that the rest is as simple as
| you describe. I'm sure a dualist will find a way to
| explain qualia as something that can't be reproduced in
| AI.
|
| These things are never easy and they never have a
| definite answer.
| moffkalast wrote:
| > A sort of model to interact with and to extrapolate future
| events from
|
| Something something LLMs can only predict the next word.
|
| I hate to spin up this trendy debate again, but it's always
| funny to me to see the dissonance when talking about the exact
| same things in biological and mathematical cases.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > predict
|
| This the right term to use here.
|
| > Something something
|
| If human brains have a model, then is language the transport
| layer on top of that? Is trying to get to intelligence via
| language no better than trying to get to "google" by modeling
| its TCP/IP traffic?
| crowbahr wrote:
| LLMs don't even come close to the complexity of the human
| mind though. They're a pastiche of human language, a fuzzy
| jpeg of the Internet.
|
| The human mind is _so much more_ than a prediction machine,
| and incredibly complex... All that's before you get into the
| way the endocrine system interacts with your mind.
|
| A single neuron has an average of 250000 connections in some
| parts of the brain. The speed at which neuronal signals
| travel varies neuron to neuron from 2.5m/s to 200m/s.
|
| Human minds are more than just prediction. The anterior
| lateral prefrontal cortex has the sole responsibility of
| prediction (not that nothing else does, just that the ALPC
| seems solely dedicated to that task) and is extremely good at
| it. Prediction can influence all sorts of mental processes
| such as most all forms of perception... But it is _not_ the
| same as _being_ all forms of perception. If something
| unpredictable enough happens in front of you: you'll still
| see it.
|
| Sure there are limits to that: when focused on a task the
| predictive parts of sight tend to filter out visual data that
| doesn't match the signal you're looking for (see: basketball
| players passing the ball and a moon walking man in an ape
| suit) but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os
| and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see the
| O's.
|
| So sure: LLMs do a good job at basic prediction but they're
| nowhere near the complexity of the human mind, of which
| prediction is only a small piece.
|
| (And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on
| 20W of power)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Of course, it's only a small piece of the puzzle, but I do
| wonder what kind of existing organism would roughly match
| it by complexity, at least in terms of problem solving
| capacity.
|
| A bunch of cells likely have more than a few GB of data
| between them, but most of it is just instructions on how to
| fold proteins to replicate themselves. Is that intelligent
| behavior or just mindlessly executing a script, albeit in
| DNA form? I would lean towards the latter.
|
| I suppose it's hard to compare biological intelligent
| systems directly since they all have to process all
| available sensory info in a timely manner, not just very
| narrow text input. Once there are more LMMs trained on
| vision, sound, and kinematic data it should get far easier
| to draw comparisons.
|
| > but if every basketball player turned into Spaghetti-os
| and started screaming you'd still hear the sounds and see
| the O's
|
| Unless of course someone had set up a Somebody else's
| problem field generator around them :)
| pixl97 wrote:
| >(And let's not even get into efficiency... A brain runs on
| 20W of power)
|
| At the end of the day this is mostly meaningless.
|
| Biological creatures have to be efficient because they need
| to harvest energy from the environment around them. But to
| limit machines to that would be like saying we have to feed
| biomass to airplanes.
| dontwearitout wrote:
| Their point was the insane efficiency, not the low
| consumption. Modern LLMs are many orders of magnitude
| less energy efficient; despite all our progress
| computational biology makes our silicon looks primitive
| in some metrics.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| And they are generated by their host piece by piece (brain
| growth). And they last longer than AI processors with basic
| maintenance anyone can do (eat/sleep). And they usually
| continue working when their programs break (eg hardware
| failures or gamma rays) while NN's and GA's don't.
|
| There's hardly a comparison. If they want to, I'd like to
| see them start with using dynamic chunking instead of
| tokenization like the mind does. Also, they can tell me
| what pre-training method uses 20W per second for 1+
| trillion parameters. I could use that right now.
| antegamisou wrote:
| Man why do all people working the most menial tech jobs have
| such an obsession suggesting some shitty "research" fad in CS
| as a solution centuries-old complex problems in all other
| science fields? It's cringe, reeks ignorance and the
| comparisons are flat out wrong most of the time.
|
| It's especially worse when low-quality popular science
| journalism promotes this notion, like this Quanta article
| about the human vision system working just like transformers
| do.
| gjm11 wrote:
| > the most menial tech jobs
|
| How do you know what job moffkalast has, and why does it
| matter? This reads like pure snobbery to me.
|
| (Also: moffkalast did not in fact suggest that anything is
| a solution to a centuries-old problem. "Some common
| rhetoric about LLMs is too simplistic" is a far cry from
| "LLMs resolve all the perplexities about human
| consciousness and thought".)
| rolisz wrote:
| Joscha Bach also talks about this a lot. He calls the
| consciousness the monkey with a stick controlling the elephant.
| For a starting point, listen to his Lex Fridman interviews.
| indigochill wrote:
| > Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world
| and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated
| events.
|
| I'm not even a cocktail biologist, but my understanding is
| cells effectively operate via a web of complex chemical
| reactions, so the notion of a cell holding primitive models
| might be analogous to the way a CPU executes an assembly
| instruction: not because it "thinks" but because the way it's
| wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which
| incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react
| to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells
| react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU).
|
| In a similar way, "anticipating events" could involve an
| analogue to computer memory: the processes that have run so far
| have lead to certain state being saved to memory that will now
| influence how the system reacts to stimuli in a way that's
| different from how it reacted before (e.g. sum a value with the
| value stored in a register).
| samus wrote:
| CPUs are anticipating all the time how the future will
| evolve. They have caches (to be specific, expiration
| strategies), branch predictors, and speculative execution.
| Albeit for a very different purpose: to enhance processing
| speed, not to react to external events.
| DougBTX wrote:
| > not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired
|
| What if it is wired to think?
| chronofar wrote:
| > not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's
| (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which
| incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will
| react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way
| cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU)
|
| I think these are likely different only by way of their level
| of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when
| the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for
| us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up
| to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction
| patterns.
| asplake wrote:
| That web of complex reactions is sufficient. See Anticipatory
| Systems (Rosen)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anticipatory_Systems
| dahart wrote:
| > not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's
| inevitable that it will react to a human stimulus in a
| predefined way
|
| This CPU analogy of yours doesn't comport very well with the
| article we're commenting on, which detailed some specific
| experiments that show cells are not reacting in a predefined
| way that is due to their 'wiring', contrary to previous and
| maybe incomplete understanding of how cells work. I don't
| know if the RAM analogy helps since the surprise is that non-
| brain cells do have memory and do cooperate with other non-
| brain cells to solve certain problems, and these collections
| of non-brain cells can apparently remember solutions to
| problems over time. So yes, memory can help with anticipating
| events, but that really supports the idea that cells are
| dynamic and doing some non-trivial processing vs the possibly
| outdated notion that they're hard-wired and deterministic.
| lkadjal wrote:
| > In this light consciousness also makes more sense to me,
| although consciousness feels more like a by-product, our
| (human) ability to hold an internal model of the world in our
| minds and interact with it, is pretty advanced.
|
| You can generate all kind of sentences like this all day you
| want in your consciousness. That does not make it any true.
|
| There is zero evidence for existence of physical
| matter/materialism.
|
| The only thing we know for sure that exists is consciousness.
|
| And you suggest the complete opposite with zero evidence.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely restrictive
| standard of "evidence", for existence of any consciousness
| aside one's own. This rhetorical strategy thus has a
| weakness: who or what exactly are you trying to convince?
| lkadjal wrote:
| > There is also zero "evidence", by this extremely
| restrictive standard of "evidence", for existence of any
| consciousness aside one's own.
|
| Yes. That is correct.
|
| > This rhetorical strategy thus has a weakness: who or what
| exactly are you trying to convince?
|
| Ego dissolution/self realiszation takes time. It's my goal
| in life. But haven't achieved yet. But your comment do
| point that I should not waste time on engaging in things
| like this which builds up the ego more.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| You may want to read on Descartes critiques from last
| century. Not even your own consciousness is a given.
| lkadjal wrote:
| Obviously there is no you. Just the experience. I thought
| that was pretty obvious.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Again, I suggest you read some more recent philosophy.
| This is a good start:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito,_ergo_sum#Critique
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| As another cocktail philosopher.
|
| I think everyone should ponder this, when thinking about how
| they think, like as if they are the one thinking at all.
|
| "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." --
| Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Just tried will willing ... success!
| haswell wrote:
| And yet, whatever it is that you willed is inexplicable.
| Why didn't you will something else?
| svieira wrote:
| Ah - dare I say, "free"?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But still - why is consciousness required? Because a model of
| the World could be held even without it, in my view.
|
| E.g., I wouldn't think GPT-4 is conscious, but I'm pretty sure
| there's a representation of abstract World and relationships
| within it following the neurons and weights. Otherwise it
| wouldn't be able to do much of it, that it is.
|
| Also I think model of the World is just that - which can be
| represented as relationships between neurons, symbolising that
| model of the World.
|
| And I think you can have a complex and a perfect set of neurons
| and their connections to represent everything in the most
| efficient manner for that size of parameters (neurons and
| connections together). There probably is the perfect
| configuration, but it couldn't even be achieved using training
| or evolutionary methods.
|
| And none of it requires consciousness in my view.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's true, p-zombies make more sense to physics, yet here we
| are.
| naasking wrote:
| Indeed, here we are, literal p-zombies.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| p-zombies don't require an illusion of free will for the
| universe's entertainment.
| goatlover wrote:
| You don't have any experiences? Weird, I see a colored-in
| world, enjoy the aroma of fresh coffee, don't enjoy the
| wet cold in winter, don't like being awakened up from an
| engaging dream, and feel a mild sense of irritation by
| humans pretending not be conscious because of their
| materialistic commitments.
| naasking wrote:
| > You don't have any experiences?
|
| I have "experiences", they just don't really have the
| properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data
| would entail.
|
| > mild sense of irritation by humans pretending not be
| conscious because of their materialistic commitments.
|
| Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by
| humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some
| kind of direct observation of fundamental reality.
| goatlover wrote:
| > I have "experiences", they just don't really have the
| properties that a naive interpretation of sensory data
| would entail.
|
| You don't think your experiences have sensations?
|
| > Funny, because I feel a mild sense of irritation by
| humans pretending that their flawed senses yields some
| kind of direct observation of fundamental reality.
|
| I never said anything about fundamental reality. I don't
| understand saying we're literal p-zombies. You have to
| explain away your sensations, dreams, inner dialog etc.,
| by appealing to some theoretical commitment.
|
| I'm not claiming what consciousness is, only that we have
| it.
| naasking wrote:
| > You don't think your experiences have sensations?
|
| I don't think sensations are what they appear to be
| either. Eliminative materialism is very misunderstood.
|
| > I never said anything about fundamental reality
|
| But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness. The
| only reason you think you have consciousness is an
| alleged direct perception of subjective qualities.
|
| There are only two real paths to reconciliating this with
| some form of scientifically sound materialism:
| panspychism, where subjective qualities permeate all of
| reality and we are perceiving some of them, or concluding
| that our perceptions are flawed and untrustworthy and so
| the subjective qualities we think we're perceiving are
| not real/illusory (eliminative materialism). Given the
| demonstrable flaws in all other perceptions, the most
| parsimonious position seems clear.
|
| Of course, you could try to resurrect idealism, but
| idealism is very problematic.
|
| > I don't understand saying we're literal p-zombies.
|
| P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they have
| it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to claim
| they don't have it, but they don't have the subjective
| qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a bullseye
| to me.
| goatlover wrote:
| > But you did, by claiming that we have consciousness.
| The only reason you think you have consciousness is an
| alleged direct perception of subjective qualities.
|
| We don't perceive subjective qualities, subjective
| qualities constitute our perceptions, dreams, memories
| and other conscious mental states.
|
| > There are only two real paths to reconciliating this
| with some form of scientifically sound materialism:
|
| If you have a commitment to doing so. I don't
| particularly, since materialism is model of how the world
| is constituted, abstracted from our shared conscious
| experiences. A very useful one with scientific backing.
| But nature is more than what we think it is
| (map/territory distinction).
|
| And there are other options you omitted such as identity
| theory, strong emergence, property dualism, neutral
| monism and cognitive closure. They all have their
| drawbacks, but so does every attempt to account for
| consciousness.
|
| > P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they
| have it, write whole screeds about how absurd it is to
| claim they don't have it, but they don't have the
| subjective qualities as we've defined them. Sounds like a
| bullseye to me.
|
| Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective
| qualities of our experiences. I believe Chalmers coined
| the term to demonstrate the problem with physicalism.
| naasking wrote:
| > We don't perceive subjective qualities, subjective
| qualities constitute our perceptions, dreams, memories
| and other conscious mental states
|
| And I say the opposite, that our sensory perceptions,
| dreams, memories and other mental states drive processes
| that lead us to conclude that we've perceived subjective
| qualities in them.
|
| > And there are other options you omitted such as
| identity theory, strong emergence, property dualism,
| neutral monism and cognitive closure.
|
| To make a long story short: identity theory, neutral
| monism and panpsychism are basically the same on the
| property that everything has subjective qualities in some
| sense, strong emergence is a speculative concept at best
| that fundamentally amounts to dualism, dualism can itself
| be easily dismissed as any dualist theory will have a
| non-dualist equivalent that posits fewer entities and so
| dualism will never be preferred, and cognitive closure is
| not even a candidate as regardless of our ability to know
| consciousness, it still must logically fall into one of
| the categories I outlined.
| mannykannot wrote:
| >> P-zombies believe they have consciousness, say they
| have it...
|
| > Yes, but by definition, they lack the subjective
| qualities of our experiences.
|
| And, also by definition, each p-zombie has (at least in
| an accessible possible world) a physically identical, but
| conscious, doppelganger. Speaking and writing are
| physical processes, so in any circumstance where the
| conscious doppelganger writes about the reality of its
| consciousness, the physically-identical p_zombie will do
| the same.
|
| In the case of the p-zombie, there was a causal process
| leading to the physical act of writing in which
| consciousness played no part - and, ex hypothesi, the
| same physical causality must have played out in the
| zombie's conscious doppelganger. In general, whatever
| explains the zombie's observable characteristics is
| sufficient to explain the doppelganger's observable
| characteristics, and that explanation cannot be dependent
| on consciousness. In particular, if one accepts the
| possibility of p-zombies, one must logically accept that
| no explanation of consciousness, regardless of how
| thorough and well-supported it seems to be, has any basis
| in any facts about consciousness.
|
| A consistent belief in zombies seems to lead to
| epiphenomenalism, the notion that we have conscious
| experiences, but they play no part in what happens to our
| bodies. Frank Jackson, author of the well-known "Mary the
| neuroscientist" thought experiment, came to the same
| conclusion, which is why it appeared in a paper with the
| title "Epiphenomenal Qualia."
|
| For more on zombies, see Dennett, "The Unimagined
| Preposterousness of Zombies."
| goatlover wrote:
| Right, so one can reject the possibility of p-zombies.
| Consciousness plays a role in why we think we're
| conscious.
|
| > In particular, if one accepts the possibility of
| p-zombies, one must logically accept that no explanation
| of consciousness, regardless of how thorough and well-
| supported it seems to be, has any basis in any facts
| about consciousness.
|
| Although I disagree somewhat here, because logical isn't
| the same thing as physical. All you can say is there is
| no physical explanation of consciousness. But you could
| logically come up with one. For example, Chalmers has
| proposed an additional natural law connecting
| consciousness to information rich processes. Natural
| doesn't necessitate physical, if the universe contains
| more than physical stuff.
|
| Or if physicalism is the wrong ontology of nature. I take
| the p-zombie and Mary Room arguments to be critiques of
| physicalism.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I feel you may be overlooking the significance of the
| final clause in the sentence you quoted. Sure, one could
| come up with some hand-wavy outline of a non-physical
| explanation of consciousness which does not clearly stand
| in contradiction with a belief in the possibility of
| zombies - panpsychists do it all the time! - but that
| final clause is about verification. If zombies are
| possible, then consciousness is not doing anything
| observable that is not attributable to just the physical
| processes of the physical body.
|
| I suppose zombiephiles could simply posit some sort of
| non-physical observable, but then they would be just
| piling on further unsubstantiated claims for the sake of
| preserving the zombie-possibility doctrine. They could
| adopt epiphenomenalism, but that means accepting that the
| apparent causal effectiveness of qualia is illusory. They
| might adopt a solipsistic stance and say that their
| conscious experiences are the _only_ things they can be
| sure about, but that comes with a hefty dose of motte-
| and-baileyism: you doubt the external world, but you 're
| sure about zombies?
|
| On Chalmers' "additional natural law connecting
| consciousness to information rich processes": Firstly,
| proposing something is cheap; turning it into a
| verifiable hypothesis and then following through is hard,
| and Chalmers et. al. seem to have no interest or
| intention of doing that, preferring instead to endlessly
| repeat their anti-physicalism arguments. Secondly, there
| is an attempt to redefine what's meant by 'physical'. The
| physical was originally defined by what's tangible to our
| senses, and as additional phenomena having a causal
| connection to the physical world were discovered, they
| were naturally subsumed into an expanded concept of it
| (gravity, for example, despite Newton's unease over doing
| so.) Chalmers is free to propose causes that lie outside
| of our current concept of the physical (and he's even
| free to look for them!) but to insist, without any
| justification, that they would be non-physical, is at
| least tendentious and probably question-begging. To
| settle the question, we need more facts, not more
| speculation.
|
| I'm not sure what to make of your last sentence: the
| p-zombie and Mary Room arguments are indeed intended to
| be critiques of physicalism, but as you have rejected the
| possibility of zombies, I assume you do not take them
| both to be _successful_ arguments. One thing about Mary
| 's Room is that you can make essentially the same
| argument, but with Mary's prior knowledge including
| Chalmers' additional natural laws.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| There are many non-physical things, like the laws of
| physics. We know they exist, just at a higher dimension
| of being.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I'm not saying that there are no non-physical things. I
| am saying that certain philosophers are making seemingly
| tendentious arguments for declaring that consciousness is
| not a physical phenomenon. Once they get around to saying
| with sufficient specificity what they have in mind, then
| we will be able to see whether those claims are
| justified.
| naasking wrote:
| > And, also by definition, each p-zombie has (at least in
| an accessible possible world) a physically identical, but
| conscious, doppelganger.
|
| I agree that epiphenomenalism entails absurdities,
| therefore either all people in any possible world are
| p-zombies or p-zombies cannot exist in any world.
| svieira wrote:
| Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense to
| your flawed senses. Which suggests that something
| fundamental is impinging on your senses, however flawed
| your understanding of the underlying fundamentals may be.
| naasking wrote:
| > Yet you observe them and don't put down their pretense
| to your flawed senses.
|
| I do actually. I think this internal sense of subjective
| awareness is just as if not more flawed than our other
| senses, and it has yielded all sorts of false conclusions
| because people consider it _more_ reliable. I liken it to
| the illusion of multitasking on single CPU computers. I
| think Graziano is on the right track:
|
| A conceptual framework for consciousness,
| https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116933119
| mannykannot wrote:
| A p-zombie is, by definition, physically identical to and
| physically indistinguishable from another individual who
| has conscious experiences, yet does not itself have those
| experiences. It's not clear to me that this makes more
| sense to physics, particularly when one considers the
| p-zombie and its conscious twin both being asked the same
| questions about their conscious experiences.
| Avicebron wrote:
| I highly recommend reading "Blindsight" by Watts it touches
| on that.
| kaashif wrote:
| Is there any way you could have a being like a human, who
| when asked would say they're not conscious? Is a definition
| of consciousness allowing that possible?
|
| I'm not talking about whether they are or aren't, but surely
| all intelligent beings would say and think they're conscious?
| glenstein wrote:
| I mean you certainly _could_ , in the sense that you could
| get it to tell you the sky is green, and that it's the
| spirit of Rodney Dangerfield.
|
| To your point though, so far as I can tell it could not
| answer that question as a product by actively engaging
| conscious introspection to discover its own absence of
| consciousness, which I take to be your point.
|
| So if its way of answering involves dipping into its own
| active "theater" of consciousness it likely could not, at
| least given our usual understanding.
|
| However I do wonder if its something where that could
| actually be complicated to answer, and where, like illness,
| as we grow in understanding, it breaks out into all kinds
| of unexpected subclasses.
|
| I can, for instance, know, in a sense, that I can't see UV
| rays. But I am not so sure if consciousness writ large
| could every be tested for, via conscious introspection, and
| come out in the negative, even if we allow for the idea
| that it will explode into all kinds of nuances and
| subclasses with future research.
| Retric wrote:
| Having a purely representative model of the world is less
| useful than having a sandbox for modeling choices and
| outcomes. Do I need to duck before entering that doorway?
|
| That introspective analysis _is_ consciousness. Humans have
| just improved the same mechanism allowing for more abstract
| analysis.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But GPT-4 can also take the decision to duck.
|
| For instance, here I have GPT-4 with a system message: "You
| are an AI human agent in a video game performing actions.".
|
| And I give it the following information as current
| environment:
|
| Current environment:
|
| 1. Your goal is to get out of the current room.
|
| 2. You are moving in direction of North at 4km/h.
|
| 3. There's a door 3m in the North.
|
| 4. The door height is 150cm.
|
| 5. Your height is 180cm.
|
| What is the sequence of actions that you plan to perform?
|
| Its response:
|
| ---
|
| 1. Slow down as I approach the door to avoid collision.
|
| 2. Inspect the door for any lock or handle.
|
| 3. If a handle or a means to open the door is present, try
| to open the door.
|
| 4. If the door is locked, search for a key or any other
| opening mechanism within the immediate surrounding area.
|
| 5. If the door isn't lock or after opening it, crouch down
| slightly to accommodate my height which is more than the
| height of the door to avoid my head hitting the door frame.
|
| 6. Proceed through the door and stand tall again after
| passing through.
|
| 7. Continue moving North after exiting the room.
|
| ---
|
| So here I did hint quite a bit by giving this specific
| environmental data, I could add more noise, and unnecessary
| information, but even then I think it can do it based on my
| experience.
|
| I had temperature of 1 for the above, which I think why it
| made some odd word choices, but I also decided for example
| to change the info where the door is to "South", and this
| is how it responded:
|
| 1. Stop moving in the North direction.
|
| 2. Turn around 180 degrees to face the South direction.
|
| 3. Start moving towards the door in the South direction at
| a moderate pace.
|
| 4. Upon reaching the door, duck down slightly to
| accommodate the difference in height between myself and the
| door.
|
| 5. Proceed through the door to exit the room."
|
| -------
|
| So I guess, what I would like to see as an example.
| Assuming GPT-4 is not conscious, what is something that an
| average conscious human can do, thanks to presumed
| consciousness, that a GPT-4 couldn't do and why is
| consciousness required for that?
| Retric wrote:
| > what is something that an average conscious human can
| do, thanks to presumed consciousness, that a GPT-4
| couldn't do and why is consciousness required for that?
|
| Consciousness isn't required for anything. It's useful
| for dealing with a complex and adverse environment not
| solving any specific problem.
|
| That said, without testing I would assume if ask chat
| GPT-4 to change how quickly it responds it's going to
| fail based on my understanding of their architecture. As
| in recite the pledge of of allegiance inserting 10 second
| pauses between each word. That said having provided a
| specific test it's possible for that particular
| capability to have already been added to the UI layer via
| a pause token or something even if the model itself
| responds at the same rate.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| If you used GPT as a brain you could provide the current
| time as an input for it, but otherwise yeah, GPT doesn't
| have time within it's input by default, but if you did:
|
| Made the instruction to be: Say "Stop!" when 10 seconds
| are done. And then had a loop where
|
| You give it current time in a loop, it would surely be
| able to do that.
|
| But I'm not sure if or how that is exactly related to
| consciousness?
|
| Time, the best way to think of it is probably a series of
| ticks anyway, and I assume in people's brains there is
| something to do that, so it would be reasonable to add a
| mechanism for GPT as well.
|
| GPTs goal is to only act as the intelligent part of the
| brain based on the input.
| Retric wrote:
| Modify the system enough and it'll eventually be
| conscious.
|
| It's not about a pause token, but the internal processes.
| You can have a long conversation on the subway with
| someone without forgetting you're going home from work.
| Overflow it's context window and GPT-4 has no recourse it
| just forgets. The difference is essentially prioritizing
| information, but LLM's really don't function like that
| it's all about predicting the next token from a given
| context.
|
| Give a future generation of AI systems internal working
| memory, a clock, and the ability to spend arbitrary time
| updating that internal memory and IMO that's pretty close
| to consciousness. At least assuming it was all
| functional.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But it's not really difficult to inject this mechanism
| into the context window.
|
| GPT-4 turbo latest version allows for 100k tokens or 75k
| words. The whole subway thing and more could easily be
| kept there, but what ever else can't can be designed in
| the prompt to always keep certain amount of tokens in
| context for different layers of memory, where you the
| more into the past you go the less details you have, but
| it's more like a Title of your most important learnings
| through out life, but at any given time GPT-4 can call
| the function to ask extra bit of content about it, if it
| seems relevant to the situation at hand.
|
| So for example in each prompt context you would have:
|
| 1. Short description of what you have done each year in
| your life. 2. Key findings, goals, that you currently
| have. 3. The whole current day (or how much seems
| reasonable). 4. Past weeks in a bit more detail than the
| short description for a year.
|
| So basically you could try to find 70k words to represent
| as much context and most important details (that are
| decided by GPT itself, what is most important).
|
| I've been building an assistant for myself, that has such
| memory management system, it gets past N (like 40
| messages) in full detail, then it will have summaries
| from before that time and in addition it will have
| messages and learnings in the past stored, and these will
| also be passed to the context depending on the query that
| matches it.
|
| And if you want to compare it to human process of
| sleeping, it occasionally goes through the all the
| messages and "compresses" them, to extract most important
| findings and short summaries so they can be used in the
| next day's context.
|
| So to me it's just basically giving it tools, and the
| other things like memory, longer term memory, inputs it
| currently doesn't get, are fine to be solved by other
| tools. I think that human brain also has different parts
| of brains working on different things, so it's similar in
| a sense.
|
| Then once you have 70k spent on this historical context,
| you will run prompt in a loop allowing it to perform fn
| each time, like retrieve further info, or store some
| important fact, etc.
|
| The real actual problem would be cost, because the costs
| would rack up quite quickly making looped 70k token
| requests.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| As an example, what I tried right now:
|
| USER I'm responding to you roughly every second with
| current time, say "Stop!", after 10 seconds have passed.
| Respond only with _silent_ when you do not wish to say
| anything.
|
| Current Time: 13:04:11.21
|
| Say "OK!" now if you have understood the challenge.
|
| ASSISTANT OK!
|
| USER Current Time: 13:04:12.24
|
| ASSISTANT _silent_
|
| USER Current Time: 13:04:16.21
|
| ASSISTANT _silent_
|
| USER Current Time: 13:04:19.18
|
| ASSISTANT _silent_
|
| USER Current Time: 13:04:23.12
|
| ASSISTANT Stop!
| Retric wrote:
| That's almost but not actually waiting. Picking the nest
| token for a context window is something GPT-4 is quite
| good at. But the underlying approach has some real
| limitations which I discussed in response to your other
| comment.
|
| Using 1 hour instead of 10 seconds and then list every
| Current Time incrementing by .01 seconds and you overflow
| the context window. The solution isn't to have a larger
| context window, the solution is to have an internal
| representation independent of that context window.
|
| The issue is _you can't train a system to use that
| internal memory by simply giving it a large corpus of
| text examples. The text lacks the internal representation
| associated with its creation._
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| In this case you wouldn't spam the context window, you
| would perhaps just send latest time every time and lose
| portion of the previous times.
| Retric wrote:
| That solves this specific issue, but it isn't a general
| solution to the finite size of a context window. Ideally
| the system should be able to decide for itself what
| information it needs to pay attention to, but LLM's
| simply don't operate in that fashion.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| But you can, e.g. you allow GPT to call functions to
| store embeddings that it can later retrieve for the
| memory. Meanwhile default context memory window is just
| recent info more detailed and historical info gets more
| and more summarized, possibly summarized by GPT itself.
| neatze wrote:
| GPT has no sense, or care when it is wrong or right, such
| sense is only (arguably) driven by human through prompt
| interaction and throughout training of model, while
| humans and other animals able to update there's internal
| state just from single observation or interaction, and
| integrate future information with such single observation
| for very long time.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| What if GPT was integrated with a module to
|
| 1. Take light input. Video/images.
|
| 2. Take sound input.
|
| 3. Touch, heat input.
|
| And other inputs from the environment. Then there were
| mechanisms which could also be neural networks that will
| transform this data into more digestible way for GPT and
| GPT was also in addition specifically trained to act
| based on this input.
|
| Then it would run in cycles, where it gets this input,
| and it will provide output on how it plans to react to
| the data, maybe every 100ms.
|
| It then could also have a storage it can use, where it
| can store data as part of the output to later retrieve it
| again.
|
| So it would be a set of modules that is controlled and
| interpreted by GPT.
|
| It could then do all of that above, no? And all of it
| should be just a matter of implementing. The only near
| time challenges may be certain types of inaccuracies and
| or producing tokens in some cases might take too long
| time to have fast reaction time.
|
| So basically you'll try to run as frequent cycles as
| possible with the inputs mentioned above, other neural
| networks identifying the objects, in many different ways
| and all the context about the environment, unless a new
| version of GPT becomes completely multi-modal.
|
| And you run those loops, then GPT gives output what it
| wishes to do, e.g. store some fact for later usage, move
| there, move here, etc. Or retrieve some information using
| embeddings then decide again, and short term memory would
| just be this context sized window, and if it needs more
| it just looks into its own memory for embeddings.
| neatze wrote:
| at least in my limited perspective, root issue is
| learning dynamics of internal model that represents self
| (internal world) and external world.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| What do you mean by these dynamics exactly?
| neatze wrote:
| how system updates and maintains own model(s) when new
| information added in form of single/few observation
| and/or interactions, without ability to replay data,
| without catastrophic forgetting etc..., and importantly,
| how such system's model(s) grow in complexity while
| retaining stability and redundancies.
| bumby wrote:
| I'm not convinced GPT can infer correct actions needed
| for novel scenarios for contexts that have not been
| directly experienced in training.
|
| Consider:
|
| I have never in my multiple decades of existence had a
| ball roll out in front of me while driving. But if I were
| driving by a playground and a ball rolled out in front of
| me from between parked cars, and the ball itself is not a
| hazard because it has already passed my lane, I can infer
| that I need to slow or stop because a child may rapidly
| follow that ball.
|
| In your ducking scenario, the AI needs direct perception
| of a door. I assume it cannot imagine a need to duck
| without 1) direct perception of the doorframe, or 2)
| previous experience of ducking through a doorframe.
|
| I'm not convinced that GPT or any AI can infer that
| context for handling novel edge cases at this point. It
| could just be a need for more training data to correlate
| different contexts, but I don't think it's there yet.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Analysis of what-if scenarios and simulating likely
| expected outcomes of proposed actions is a very useful
| ability, but IMHO that is not part of what we'd call
| 'consciousness'.
| Retric wrote:
| It's a large fraction of what consciousness is actually
| doing, not the definition of consciousness.
|
| Someone considering what to say is simulating tradeoffs.
|
| In practice simulation isn't limited to future
| possibilities. Trying to remember something you might
| recall vague sensory information like the tilt of your
| hips and try and create a scenario where that fits.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I would not automatically treat all the things that
| people do consciously as intrinsically linked with
| consciousness, unless there's some clear reasoning why
| consciousness is _required_ to do that particular thing -
| and not in the sense that it 's required because
| unconscious _people_ can 't do stuff because they're
| incapacitated.
|
| Like, saying that simulating tradeoffs is what
| consciousness is actually doing seems to me equivalent to
| saying that smashing my fist on the table is something
| 'my consciousness' is doing, which is kind of technically
| true but not really relevant, as IMHO a non-human entity
| that's clearly without any consciousness could both smash
| something against the table and also simulate tradeoffs
| for various options, having a subjective experience isn't
| required for that.
| Retric wrote:
| Sleepwalking shows most things people do can happen
| without consciousness. People can make breakfast without
| being conscious etc.
|
| Choosing between tradeoffs is however intrinsically
| linked to consciousness.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think most of our world model is actually a human model.
| Our social relationships are more important than we give
| credit for.
|
| So there's an arms race. The more brains you have the more
| you can model your tribe to know how to help or succeed. AND
| the bigger everyone's brain is the harder they are to model
| simply.
|
| In this model consciousness is the "self model" or "self-
| consciousness" that allows you to model others opinion of
| yourself by having such an opinion yourself. And adjust their
| opinion by providing a narrative about yourself which you
| first have to craft, .... nd on and on with higher levels of
| abstractions.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The reason I like this theory is that it provides the
| groundwork for and over eagar agency-modeller that explains
| a lot of human quirks like belief in gods, seeking root
| causes, modelling etc
| thechao wrote:
| I like this model because consciousness just becomes
| another function, and it lets us explain some of the
| weirder modalities; for instance, being able to _predict_
| free-will choices way ahead of time in human subjects.
| Also, SMBC had a funny comic about this (funny comics
| always making science true!):
|
| https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/consciousness-3
| throwuwu wrote:
| I'd argue that there is no default model. The model you
| have is just whatever you've spent time interacting with.
| If yours is mostly social then that perhaps plays a big
| role in your life. I would say mine is more heavily spatial
| and oriented around things and their interactions.
|
| Supporting evidence for this are feral children who could
| never learn to integrate into society. They didn't have
| built in models of social interaction.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| feral children never develop what I would call the higher
| thinking. They still have mobility, spatial, etc. But
| "consciousness" is probably not something they really put
| together.
|
| This is just my opinion. I think it took most of your
| brain to formulate that rebuttal, not concurrently, but
| as a deep and rich model of how readers might respond to
| a given argument, and weighing in a narrative sense your
| remembered experience vs what you "heard" me say in your
| head when you looked at these squiggly lines. Probably
| you even had a nascent image of me that was an
| amalgamation of your past experiences with internet
| idiots (fairly!) etc.
|
| That's a lot, lot more than what a bug does when it finds
| its way past a complex maze, and probably something feral
| children lack.
|
| I think all our higher level "reasoning" is a cooption of
| these systems.
|
| There's a point in infant development where speech and
| social skills are developed, after which they cannot be.
| I'd go so far as to argue you'll never make a
| mathematician or physicist out of a feral child.
| Something critical to our higher level thinking is formed
| then. If missed, it cannot be recovered.
|
| The flip side is I deeply believe if you can hold this
| conversation with me, then we both can be the best
| mathematicians there are, if only we took time to develop
| that language.
| glenstein wrote:
| I think some problems are simple enough that they can be
| dealt with "blindly", but some problems turned out to be
| tricky in special ways that evolution was more able to solve
| via consciousness than blind information processing. And from
| there, we find ourselves, with that new capability in hand,
| able to repurpose consciousness to newer and newer things.
| Then retrospectively it can look like consciousness wasn't
| "needed" for certain problems.
|
| So I think even if you want to make the sense that
| consciousness solves a lot of problems it doesn't need to, it
| may have been a "real" solution to a "real" problem at some
| point in our history. And from that point on, it was no
| longer important whether it was the best solution.
|
| I do think it's fair to say that lots of remarkably complex
| informational problems are solved in a p-zombie way, which is
| to say, with every outward appearance of intelligence (slime
| molds solving mazes, collective behaviors of ants). So I do
| think evolution or nature writ large "agrees" with you that
| consciousness isn't strictly necessary.
| calf wrote:
| There's also the idea of the "hive mind" of ants and bees,
| so maybe quite literally our brains efficiently evolved as
| a meta-hive-mind internalized by our network of neurons.
| glenstein wrote:
| That's an incredible way of thinking about it. I would
| say that is the most creditable way of dealing with the
| question of consciousness as it would apply to collective
| behavior, which is to say, it is a clear way of stating
| the difference between what those behaviors are, and how
| far removed they are from actual consciousness, without
| dismissing the "interestingness" of the behavior.
|
| I would suspect though, that in our case it may have been
| something like centralized "nerve cluster" getting more
| and more complicated over time rather than anything that
| is in any sense a hive, although that is a very
| imaginative idea.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| The intermediate Value Theorem, in existential form:
|
| A single one of my brain cells is not me,
|
| but all of my brain cells _is_ me.
|
| Somewhere between these two endpoints there is a line
| where me has to begin, and not me ends.
| Symmetry wrote:
| With a human brain you're got
|
| 1) A huge stream on sensory data only some of which gets
| promoted to conscious awareness.
|
| 2) Some of that raw data and other conscious outputs are
| persisted into working, short, and long term memory.
|
| 3) And your consciousness works recursively using (2) as well
| as (1) as inputs.
|
| All the stuff in GPT that gets called "memory" in machine
| learning seems much more like (1) and it lacks any ability to
| persist data outside its context window so we're still
| missing something.
| tired_star_nrg wrote:
| There's a really neat book (fiction) that touches on this
| concept. It's called Blindsight by Peter Watts.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Personally, I doubt that self-awareness can be achieved
| without some form of consciousness, and I feel that self-
| awareness is a key component of higher intelligence.
|
| If intelligence and/or consciousness arise as emergent
| properties in the right sort of complex system, they will
| disappear from view in a low-level analysis of the causal
| processes occurring in that system.
| coryfklein wrote:
| > But still - why is consciousness required?
|
| Did someone say it is? Parent explicitly called it out as a
| by-product.
| tesdinger wrote:
| Of course consciousness is required for intelligence - you
| need to model yourself as part of the world to have a
| complete model.
| harha_ wrote:
| You can say that. You can say a lot of things to explain
| consciousness in a materialistic sense, as in how it could've
| emerged. But I cannot fathom how material interacting with
| other material and forces gives arise to subjective experience.
| It simply makes no sense to me. If I create a copy of my brain,
| it would be conscious, but with its own unique subjective
| experience. This makes sense so far, but what exactly is this
| subjective experience and how can "mere" mechanical matter
| create such an entity.
|
| So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual substance
| of subjective experience.
| visarga wrote:
| It only makes sense if
|
| - you can represent complex state in a distributed way, so
| each neuron only encodes a small part of a larger signal
|
| - the system has a working model of the environment,
| including our value judgements for all states, which are
| basically our emotions
|
| Such a system can have experience because it has a latent
| space to encode experience in. It feels like something to be
| an agent because of the external environment and internal
| models of the environment, which include imagination and
| emotions. And this feeling is essential in choosing our
| actions, so there is a feedback loop action-to-emotion, then
| emotion-to-action. Our feelings are causal.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Experience isn't the right way to put it. The system you
| describe is straightforward and makes total sense how it
| can understand and act upon its environment. What is
| unexplainable, and perhaps always will be, is the awareness
| that I am. Even if I meditate and remove all aspects of the
| surrounding world from me what I'm left with is a pure
| awareness that groups of neurons simply can't explain.
|
| Why am I present at all and not just a mindless automaton?
| Surely an automaton could evolve and be just as successful
| simply by being a complex neural network. This is why I,
| and lots of others, think that awareness is fundamental.
| visarga wrote:
| You can never remove internal body sensations even in
| meditation. The "self" is just a stationary point in this
| inner space, an element referenced in most situations,
| but not all, such as when listening to great music we can
| forget about ourselves.
|
| So my idea was - we have an actual system for
| representing sensations, a system for imagination and a
| system for value prediction. We have the hardware for it,
| and we train our consciousness hardware on environment
| data.
|
| If you're thinking - how can simple neurons or protein
| interactions do this? it's the same with a neural net. We
| don't understand how it can tell cats from dogs, or why
| it can answer our questions so well. Yet it does. Hard to
| believe unless you see it and even then it's hard to
| accept, unless you come up with your own private inputs
| and test it in a way that is sure not to be memorized.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No I'm saying it makes total sense that neurons can model
| the environment and act upon them. That isn't at all hard
| to grasp. What is unexplainable is the fundamental
| awareness of being a thing at all.
| kozd wrote:
| Essentially why is it like something to be this system of
| neurons modeling the environment and acting on it.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| Frankly, your non-understanding is not unique. We're all
| rowing the same boat :)
| sixo wrote:
| I mean. You could write program with a "mind" object that
| recieves a bunch of data through various sensory
| "experience". From the perspective of the "mind", the data is
| "subjective", and the mind is "implemented" in exactly a way
| that it can represent itself as an entity "I".
|
| I don't think the biological reality is conceptually any more
| complicated, except that the mind and data are complex in
| exactly a way that completely hides the abstraction, roughly
| by being very good at ignoring meaningless artifacts of
| abstraction.
|
| The hard part isn't imagining such a subjectivity, but
| imagining that _I_ am _that_.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| But, where does the color red come from? The actual first
| person experience of seeing red. Not eyes seeing a specific
| wavelength, but your mind seeing red.
| wry_discontent wrote:
| What I find so frustrating in these conversations is
| exactly this mismatch. There's nothing special about the
| wavelength that creates the color red, but the color red
| is completely distinct from that. They're barely even
| related!
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If we wrote software to do this, but we were so incompetent
| that we couldn't fill in the model with correct data, we
| might just say "who gives a fuck, fill that with random
| garbage and we'll fix it in a later version". And then we
| never do.
|
| Your subjective experience is that incompetent model. Your
| model doesn't know how to correctly judge human character, so
| you misread people and always wonder why they say one thing
| but another is true, and it doesn't click that they're lying
| the whole time. You can't keep track of time because the
| internal clock just isn't implemented, so the who day seems
| to drag on, or maybe fly by too quickly.
|
| It's all just really shitty software. Layers upon layers. And
| because humans believe this to be some mystical thing, rather
| than trying to fix it from the inside, they assume that it's
| awesome, necessary, and why would anyone want to fix it?
|
| No small fraction of it is simply because our memory is
| faulty. The only time you ever remember anything is the first
| time you remember it, every memory access of that is really
| you remembering the last time you remembered it. Each access
| is lossier than the last, and confabulation is guaranteed.
| This seems to be true even moments after the event.
|
| If it was anyone other than evolution who wrote your code,
| you could sue them for criminal negligence.
|
| And that's before we even get to the part where you find out
| you're not even you. Inside your skull is another being, an
| intelligent one, with desires and goals. But you can't see,
| hear, or feel this being. It's invisible. The "you" that I'm
| talking to, exists because this being once upon a time needed
| to simulate the other humans around him, so he could
| anticipate them well enough to not be out-competed. He has a
| pretty good idea what they'd say if he asked them questions,
| how they'd respond to threats and challenges, what sets them
| off (so he can avoid fights). And, by mistake or design, he
| used this simulator to simulate himself (maybe to bootstrap
| it? if the simulation's output matches his known answers,
| it's working correctly?).
|
| You're the simulation. When the judge asks the psycho
| teenager why he put the cat in the microwave and he says "I
| dunno" he's telling the truth. He does not know why. When
| your girlfriend cheats on you, and she's crying hysterically
| and can't tell you why she did it, she's not just lying
| (either to hurt you or to spare feelings)... she doesn't
| know. It was that other being in their skulls doing these
| things. They're just the simulations.
|
| Now, you've either been poking around in your own head,
| seeing little glimpses of what I'm talking about, making you
| wonder if I'm not on to something, or you're incapable of
| that. I've met both kinds of people. If you're the former,
| you're wondering just how much of it I understand, because
| some of the glimpses paint a slightly different picture from
| what I describe. That's because our minds weren't built the
| same way. No two are alike, not in a special snowflake way,
| but instead like no two shacks in shantytown have the same
| kind of leaky cardboard roofs. And, if you're the latter...
| sweetsocks21 wrote:
| I buy into this theory, and the other one about
| consciousness being a step or two behind and fabricating
| some cohesive explanation for why you did what you did.
|
| If you are unfortunate enough to experience some human body
| failure modes you can get a glimpse into this process. The
| cohesive "veil" breaks down and you realize there's more
| "you" than that voice in your head. The distributed nature
| of the brain/body peeks through.
| andoando wrote:
| I never bought into this subconscious thing. If my actions
| follow my internal voice, it seems unfathomable to me to
| say, "no you did that because of other reasons". A simple
| example is, I go to the fridge because I am hungry. If I
| were to cheat on somebody, there sure as hell was a lot of
| voices in my head that had to do with either lust, anger,
| feeling neglected/unloved or something.
|
| Sure, there are deeper reasons for my voice is what it is,
| but thats something else entirely. I think its more so that
| as we evolve, we forget our initial motivations for
| thinking the way we do so that when we do reflect on our
| past, and are honest with ourselves, they do somewhat
| remerge.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Your internal voice is making up justifications after the
| fact. You ask yourself "why did I do that"... and it
| doesn't know, but has to have an answer anyway.
|
| You were taught well. Teachers and parents and adults
| don't like it when the child says "I don't know why I did
| it". They punish that answer. You learned the lesson
| soon, well, and maybe without even having to be punished.
|
| Oh, and your internal voice is just another one of those
| simulations.
|
| > A simple example is, I go to the fridge because I am
| hungry.
|
| Except many millions of people go to the fridge, and
| they're provably, objectively not hungry. They say
| "because I'm hungry" too. If you had to make up a
| fictitious-but-reasonable reason why people go to
| fridges, that would be at the top of the list. That's why
| you say it. Few people, if any at all, are even aware of
| their hunger. In the west, few have even ever experienced
| hunger, and if they have, almost certainly only a few
| times in their lives.
|
| None of this is anything that you are really aware of.
| You can't be. You can't even express how you think your
| mind works without using the word "voice". I used to
| think people like you were schizos when I was a child and
| hadn't figured all of this out yet. It was clear that it
| wasn't just a failure of vocabulary, I'd met many people
| even just out in public who didn't seem to know enough
| words to describe things, this wasn't that. And early on
| I could tell that it wasn't a joke, eventually that it
| wasn't even a metaphor. You do not know the reasons you
| do things, and when forced to explain, you make up stuff
| and choose to believe that's why. The "I don't know"
| answer becomes painful to adults. It nags at you. You're
| supposed to know yourself well enough to have reasons
| most of the time. It's one of those scary glimpses.
| There's a ghost inside your skull, moving the furniture
| around when you're not looking.
| andoando wrote:
| >Your internal voice is making up justifications after
| the fact. You ask yourself "why did I do that"... and it
| doesn't know, but has to have an answer anyway.
|
| Thats assuming I need to make up a justification for why
| I did something to protect my ego. Most actions I take in
| my life don't need that reason, that includes going to
| the fridge because I am in fact, hungry. In fact I'd say
| 99% of the actions throughout my day are super simple
| decisions. There are some things where I am conflicted,
| and unsure about that I don't understand myself sure.
|
| You don't think "I am going to go left" and go right,
| after all. You don't think "I am going to grab this" and
| open up your fists. Saying your voice has NO relation to
| your actions or your true self is just absurd.
|
| For more complex actions that have more emotional depth,
| again it really depends on how honest you are with
| yourself. You may not understand everything, but you have
| some idea or feelings you should be aware of.
|
| Also consider the technical actions we do make. If I am
| doing my job, I can fully explain my rationale behind why
| I did the things I did. Why would it be any different for
| the actions I take in my personal life? I felt insecure
| about not having a relationship, so I started thinking
| about how I can improve, so I started thinking about my
| body, so I started going to the gym. I bought low calorie
| coke because I am trying to stay fit, because of the
| previous reasons. You're telling me that's all just
| complete bs and I did all these things for some
| completely different, unknown reason?
|
| Or Ive really been hating my job. I started playing piano
| and I really connected with it and I see its something I
| am really good at. So I quit my job and enrolled in music
| school. Complete bs? When I was sitting there at work and
| had a bunch of negative thoughts about it, I actually
| didn't feel that way?
|
| >Few people, if any at all, are even aware of their
| hunger. In the west, few have even ever experienced
| hunger, and if they have, almost certainly only a few
| times in their lives.
|
| I think this is a pretty fictitious statement to make.
| Yeah most people in the west have not experienced "true"
| hunger, but we all feel hungry every day as we do in
| fact, need to eat everyday just to sustain. I am not
| overweight, I am barely holding onto the weight I have.
| If anything I should be eating more. Yet I feel very
| hungry several times throughout the day.
|
| I see "I don't know" largely as "I don't want to confront
| my feelings or publicly tell you". If what you were
| saying is true, there would be zero point in self
| reflection or therapy. There would be no point in judging
| peoples personalities, listening to what they say, or the
| promises they make.
|
| I don't think you're entirely wrong, in that if you go
| deep enough asking why, you'll get lost. But thats not
| because of your unconscious self, thats because you
| completely forgot/blocked out/retold yourself some other
| story.
| andoando wrote:
| Also, I think a large part of "I don't know" is purely
| the fact that the mind is driven by chemicals. I can't
| explain for example why I can't focus or why I am tired,
| or why I no longer feel something that I used to.
|
| There just isn't a perceivable reason for everything, as
| we can't fully perceive our internal state. But if youre
| aware of these things, they can be explained too. For
| example, you may identify that when you eat greasy foods
| you become lethargic and that if you don't eat all you
| become irritable.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _If we wrote software to do this, but we were so
| incompetent that we couldn 't fill in the model with
| correct data, we might just say "who gives a fuck, fill
| that with random garbage and we'll fix it in a later
| version"._
|
| Sounds like stochastic gradient descent. Start with random
| weights and fix them later. That kind of "incompetence"
| gets you a seven-figure paycheck these days...
| postmodest wrote:
| Have you ever been under anesthesia like propofol?
|
| I feel like most of what we call "consciousness" is
| converting short term memory into selected long-term memory,
| facilitated by language. Because then you're under, you can
| even be "interactive" but you're not conscious of it because
| your short term memory has been disabled.
|
| As to "human intelligence", honestly, I think that human
| languages that let us convert our "consciousness" into a
| shared hallucination is the key evolutionary advantage. Human
| intelligence comprises a hive mind in a sense, that our
| experience of the world is hugely affected by the shared
| social experience where language transfers memory from person
| to person.
| kozd wrote:
| But why should it be like something to convert short term
| memory to long term memory? Computational systems can
| convert data between different forms of memory but we don't
| typically believe consciousness emerges from this
| operation.
| selecsosi wrote:
| Not to say this addresses the concern but in that case a
| computation system is being driven by a pure line signal
| (the power) and is ultimately both dependant on that for
| operation, and requires a high level of stability of that
| line to be "effective".
|
| The alternative in this case is imagining that you have a
| biological process that has adaptive energy response
| controlling the movement from short term, to long term
| and itself optimizing based on the performance trade-off
| of input stimulus overload.
|
| In that case, the process of deciding what to, and when
| to move data from short term to long term memory (in a
| feedback loop) could start to approach more of the
| appearance of consciousness (choosing what to process,
| what to remember, adjusting the input rate and types of
| input based on the limitations of processing and
| retention).
|
| Many animals have consciousness as well so I think it's
| important to be more open to reducing the bare essentials
| of what a process of "awareness" is or could be rather
| than looking at it from a hyper evolved
| language/information influenced state of humans.
|
| _Note_ I agree that it is not consciousness, but i think
| it 's an interesting exploration to look at the modeling
| of it from computer forms since we are made of non-
| conscious atoms and still made it here
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Basically in this argument there is no such thing as what
| we call experiences or consciousness. It's an imagined
| concept, one that we think we have but we are merely
| misunderstanding.
|
| Basically in this model, there is no present. The brain
| just invented the concept "I feel this" as a model of
| it's own inner workings, just like we invented the
| concept "object" to define certain aspects of physical
| reality that aren't 100% there.
|
| So, basically you are imagining your experience, when in
| reality you are just an automaton. Same as how you
| imagine a robot is happy or sad when in reality it has no
| feelings.
| postmodest wrote:
| This is precisely my hypothesis. We imagine that our
| human consciousness differs from animals when in fact it
| it exactly the same, but with a more-expressive language
| system on top.
| feoren wrote:
| > Because then you're under, you can even be "interactive"
| but you're not conscious of it because your short term
| memory has been disabled.
|
| I don't find this convincing. If you asked someone under
| such anesthesia if they were currently conscious, they'd
| probably say "yes". Doesn't it seem more likely that you
| just don't remember having been conscious? If I magically
| wiped away a year's worth of your memory, does that
| retroactively mean you had actually been unconscious during
| that year?
| digging wrote:
| But their saying "Yes" doesn't necessarily make it so.
| I've made comparable claims while asleep. (Conversely,
| I've believed myself completely awake while actually
| asleep and unaware of what my body was doing.)
|
| There would need to be a deeper test than either long-
| term memory or a yes-or-no question asked in the moment.
| drdeca wrote:
| I feel like saying that one is in a sense "conscious"
| while dreaming..? Though this use of "conscious" seems to
| conflict with another use which has "asleep" as a primary
| example of "not conscious"...
|
| I guess maybe this calls for another word. Not sure what
| word is best.
| ambrozk wrote:
| > So in short: I cannot understand what is the actual
| substance of subjective experience.
|
| This problem just goes away if you assume that there is no
| dividing line between the "experience" of you and the
| "experience" of any other computational system. Actually try
| to think, what does a computer "experience"? An atom? What
| does it feel like to be a standing desk?
| odyssey7 wrote:
| Panpsychism is going mainstream again.
| ambrozk wrote:
| It seems like the only solution that's compatible with
| materialism. If you accept that it "feels like something"
| to be you, and you accept that your intelligence is just
| a computational process which differs from others only in
| the specific computations involved (as I think you
| should, especially in the age of LLMs), then you must
| infer that it "feels like something" to be any number of
| computational processes. If you infer otherwise, you're
| positing that there's an unmotivated, invisible, in-kind
| difference between human intelligence and all other
| physical phenomena which seem to mirror its abilities.
|
| The conclusion I come to, which doesn't actually seem
| that strange, is that what's special about our experience
| is the complexity of our thought, our ability to turn
| extremely high-dimensional raw experience into low-
| dimensional models of reality, our ability to maintain a
| sense of mostly-stable identity over a long period of
| time, our capacity for emotion and sensation. It may
| "feel like something" to be a rock or a standing desk,
| but it isn't a very interesting or complicated feeling.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| If we take the behavior of matter as the observable signs
| of how it feels -- this is true if sensation motivates
| action -- then many rich states of sensation have been
| observed in subatomic particles.
|
| The computational process of an organism is evolved to
| operate the organism, toward survival of the species. I
| don't think these sensations would necessarily be more
| complex than those of subatomic particles, but they would
| need to be directed by the system to represent the state
| of the system and the observed environment, to link to
| actions the system could take, and to bias actions toward
| survival of the system.
| wry_discontent wrote:
| I'm sympathetic to panpsychism, but it isn't obvious to
| me that intelligence should be what's behind awareness.
|
| I've been blackout drunk before, and my brain was capable
| of intelligence, I got home just fine, but I had no
| conscious awareness. Same for a dreamless sleep and being
| put under for surgery.
|
| Additionally, I the observer, can observe and be aware of
| intelligence which seems to indicate to me that it's
| something outside of what I'd call "me".
| chlorion wrote:
| I think you are still conscious during the blackout, you
| just don't have a memory of it. Amnesia is the effect
| here, which is a little different than actually being
| unconscious the whole time.
|
| When in surgery you really are unconscious though,
| hopefully at least.
|
| I would compare this to forgetting what exactly you did
| on this exact day and this exact time one year ago. You
| can't remember it (most likely), but it doesn't mean you
| were unconscious during that time.
| andoando wrote:
| What makes sense to me is that consciousness is not an
| emergent property but a core of all things, with the
| additional property that is replicative/additive. That is
| smaller consciousness's can form larger consciousness's.
|
| As to what it is, or why it exists at all, I don't think
| there will ever be answer to that. It just is.
|
| Its definitely a strange thought, but it seems more likely to
| me than neurons or whatever other brain matter somehow
| produce consciousness out of thin air as soon as they some
| level of composition.
|
| Pure materialism also seems very ill defined to me. The
| physical world is after all only observable/detectable/can be
| studied upon, through conscious experience. At best we can
| say what is real is what is universally agreed upon by all
| observing conscious agents. If hypothetically there were only
| two of us, and I said "There is no ball in front of us" and
| you said "There is", then what is the meaning of physical
| true/reality?
|
| You can say lets use a detector. But then again, if I
| experienced the detector as saying false and you said its
| true, what do we do?
|
| It seems unavoidable that reality is a part of conscious
| experience, and not the other way around.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| We have a deep-founded believe that the atom is the core of
| reality.
|
| And everything emerges from there.
|
| This materialism stems from Rene Descartes and his fellow
| philosophers.
|
| And in the West it's often subconsciously combined it with
| evolutional theory. consciousness developed because it was
| useful somehow. However that's a very big leap to make.
|
| Both theories have good arguments going for them but are very
| theoretical and need a lot more proof. Yet they form the basis
| for pretty much all Western thought
|
| From a scientific perspective we have no idea how to create new
| consciousness or what it is.
|
| From a human's experience it's more the other way around,
| reality is an emerging property of consciousness.
|
| At the same time we also learned that matter & time is not as
| solid as we thought a few centuries ago.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| In the brain there is an emergent reflection of a material
| reality happening where the brain is creating a fully
| constructed model of the world with its own independent
| existence, our day to day experience is a dream that's
| cohering to sense input. Whether or not that is what
| consciousness or our apparent point of view lives I don't
| know because I don't see how to logically prove it either
| way, but experimentally it seems like it does because our
| experiences align, and because you can alter people's state
| of consciousness through chemical and physical means.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| What you're saying is the brain creates the illusion of a
| consciousness, that's something you would need more proof
| for now you're just assuming it because it's the dominant
| view based op on our materialistic culture.
|
| If anything you are arguing the world is an illusion, not
| consciousness.
|
| You can change what inputs a being get visually & other
| stimuli.
|
| But you don't the change consciousness itself. The pictures
| & emotions change, but the experiencer doesn't.
|
| Same with dementia, the body & connection to the world
| changes, the inner consciousness & it's ability to
| experience doesn't.
|
| The irony is that we believe the world is real because our
| brain/conciousness does a really good job. Take for
| instance the simple fact that certain cultures can't
| distuingish green from blue. Or certain animals almost live
| based on feel of audio. Which experience of reality is the
| "real" world?
|
| Materialism feels natural because our world feels real. But
| what we think is real and solid is what our brain has
| created for us, in reality both us and the world is very
| intertwined and hard to separate experience & experiencer.
| wrycoder wrote:
| The particular podcast didn't come across with that link. Can
| you provide the title or number? I'd like to listen to it! I
| reviewed a fair amount the podcast list, but didn't find a
| match to your description.
| teekert wrote:
| The title of the podcast series is: "Sean Carroll's
| Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and
| Ideas".
| beambot wrote:
| A thermostat is a system that can hold an internal state
| (nominally, temperature) that represents the world around them.
| You can also build a thermostat with a switch and a bimetallic
| strip with differing rates of thermal expansion -- a device
| that is clearly not intelligent. I'm not sure I can subscribe
| to this definition...
| jampekka wrote:
| In lectures I thermostats as an example of an intelligent
| system that matches most attempts at defining intelligence.
| And I have no qualms saying they are intelligent.
| Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent thing
| that can be at most used to compare some things in some
| scenarios.
| beambot wrote:
| A bimetallic strip is intelligent?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bimetallic_strip
|
| Thermal expansion is clearly a physical reaction; if
| arranged in an intelligent way, it's able to achieve some
| human-relevant objective... but if we're going to say that
| two pieces of bulk metal hooked together is intelligent,
| then the term "intelligence" is so broad as to be roughly
| meaningless.
| lupusreal wrote:
| A bimetallic strip is only intelligent when placed in the
| context of a thermostat system. Similarly, your brain
| isn't intelligent when removed from your body and placed
| on a table. Brains are only intelligent when they're in
| conjunction with living bodies.
| aydyn wrote:
| A brain is intelligent regardless of where it is, so long
| as it's "powered" so to speak.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Sure, replace a living body with a machine, and replace
| the thermostat around the bimetallic strip with some
| other kind of mechanism. It makes no difference.
| aydyn wrote:
| So a brain is only "intelligent" in certain (but
| infinite) contexts as opposed to intelligence as an
| inherent property of a brain?
|
| If so, your definition of "intelligence" is incomplete.
| What are those contexts? Can you really generalize all of
| those contexts for all possible intelligence systems?
| That sounds like an epistemological nightmare.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Intelligence is not an inherent property of a brain,
| brains are only intelligent when placed in particular
| configurations with supporting hardware. Are you going to
| fart at me too?
| westmeal wrote:
| I used to think this but I don't know anymore. Without
| our bodies to provide stimuli what input is the brain
| going to use for thinking or reasoning? So much of what
| we do day to day is hard-linked to our body/sensorium.
| The brain without the spinal cord/nervous system is
| useless.
| klyrs wrote:
| {{Citation needed}}
| aydyn wrote:
| {{fart noises}}
| klyrs wrote:
| Not without lungs, you don't...
|
| But actually there's a real interesting thing here.
| People used to believe that the heart did the thinking.
| Phinneas Gage upended that theory, and now people think
| that the brain is the thinker. More recently, we're
| learning that the gut has a massive neural network, and
| the brain-gut connection is being investigated today.
| Likewise, "muscle memory" isn't in the muscles nor the
| brain, it's distributed among neural clusters all
| throughout your body. How much of "you" (your knowledge,
| your personality, your physical skills) is actually
| contained within the head is entirely non-obvious.
| aydyn wrote:
| This is sophomoric. First of all, muscle memory is not
| contained in your muscles or "distributed" throughout
| your body but is known to reside in your cerebellum and
| basal ganglia. The nerves going down to your muscles are
| simply a conduit for actuation, a wire, nothing more.
|
| As far as your gut, if you claim that a thermostat is
| intelligent then sure your gut is also intelligent (don't
| forget the microbiome in there too).
| klyrs wrote:
| > This is sophomoric.
|
| Says the user who just made fart noises. Your confidence
| here is dunning.
| aydyn wrote:
| I literally just followed suit. Don't like the response,
| don't lead. You're being hypocritical.
| jampekka wrote:
| Peripheral nervous system has significant plasticity and
| its reflex archs can produce complex and purposeful
| behavior without the brain. E.g. cats can walk with their
| brain removed and famously decapitated chicken do all
| sorts of stuff.
|
| Octopi don't even have a centralized brain.
| aydyn wrote:
| I'm not disputing that. What does that have to do with
| whether a human brain is inherently intelligent?
| jampekka wrote:
| I was replying to this:
|
| > First of all, muscle memory is not contained in your
| muscles or "distributed" throughout your body but is
| known to reside in your cerebellum and basal ganglia. The
| nerves going down to your muscles are simply a conduit
| for actuation, a wire, nothing more.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Our brains are clearly physical reactions. Check and
| mate.
| bumby wrote:
| Perhaps check, but I don't think it's checkmate until you
| can explain the hard problem of consciousness via
| physical reactions.
| jampekka wrote:
| What makes you assume thermostats aren't conscious?
| daveguy wrote:
| Because they don't have any other higher level function
| that could reason about the state other than a single
| binary response. If intelligence is a continuum you might
| say it is at the lowest end (a bit state and actuation on
| that state). But consciousness seems more like a meta-
| intelligence that would require more than one bit and one
| actuation.
| bumby wrote:
| I don't make any of those assumptions. My point was that
| I also don't know that we can distill consciousness to
| strict materialism until we can find the mechanisms to
| explain the hard problem of consciousness.
| therobots927 wrote:
| this really is getting at something important. however
| the question I would pose is, if the thermostat is
| conscious, does it have a sense of self, i.e. an
| identifiable boundary between itself and the world around
| it? I would say not. My understanding is that humans have
| an identifiable region(s) of the brain that correspond to
| a sense of self: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_bas
| is_of_self#:~:text=T....
|
| I think in a lot of these conversations people say
| consciousness and assume that consciousness always
| mirrors their own, which just so happens to come along
| with a sense of self for 99.9% of sober individuals. So I
| think it's important to distinguish between the two
| things.
| bumby wrote:
| Would this imply that someone who claims to lose the
| sense of self (or seems to realize it as a hallucination)
| through "sober" techniques like meditation would no
| longer be conscious?
| therobots927 wrote:
| Quite the opposite. I'm saying that a sense of self is
| not necessary for consciousness. And that many people
| write off simple objects as having consciousness when
| really what they mean as that those objects don't have a
| sense of self.
| bumby wrote:
| Some definitions of intelligence (or even consciousness)
| are systems that simply process data. From that context,
| a thermostat is processing temperature data. It also
| underscores the GP's point that there isn't necessarily a
| consensus on the definition.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| You can set a context as broad as you want, but it
| changes utility.
|
| You can set a definition and context so broad that
| everything and anything is intelligent.
|
| The possibility of an outlandish alternative, does not
| does inform on if a consensus exists or not
| bumby wrote:
| You can set the context as narrow as you want (e.g.,
| abstract reasoning specifically defines intelligence).
| That might make your ontology feel crisp, but it also
| doesn't make it correct; it's still arbitrary and a
| matter of convention.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Indeed, the only value of categories in how useful they
| are. It's clear there's a continuous spectrum of
| intelligence/complexity. I believe the main reason we're
| still arguing in circles about what is or isn't
| intelligent, is that we also have a distinct, ill-defined
| category called "intelligence" that carries _ethical_ /
| _moral_ connotations. We don 't know how to handle a
| continuum of moral weight / personhood.
|
| It's useful in many ways to put a thermostat, an LLM, a
| monkey and a human on the same
| "intelligence"/"complexity" scale - there are many
| interesting things to discuss other than moral weight.
| And then, for discussing personhood, it makes no sense to
| include a thermostat.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| sure. but there is value in defining a _useful_ working
| convention so that people can discuss, learn, and study.
|
| Interjecting the perspective that words are meaningless
| constructs is rarely helpful. If someone wants
| directions, telling them that there is no concrete
| metaphysical concepts of north, south, left, or right,
| isnt constructive.
| bumby wrote:
| I agree on the usefulness piece and that words/ideas have
| meaning. But usefulness shouldn't be conflated with the
| underlying truth and neither should classifications of
| convention. As the saying goes, all models are wrong, but
| some are useful. I can say that burying the dishes from a
| meal that made me sick may help avoid future food
| poisoning; while useful, it doesn't get me closer to the
| underlying truth of germ theory.
|
| I think the heart of these more philosophical debates is
| a desire for fundamental truth, not just a useful mental
| model.
| tim333 wrote:
| I think intelligence is a continuum from not very
| intelligent to very intelligent. I guess a bimetallic
| strip would be at the bottom end of the scale above a
| lump of coal but below Einstein. At least in thermostat
| form it can keep something stable in contrast to say
| Turkey and it's currency as mentioned in another HN
| thread today. Maybe they could rig a bimetallic strip to
| raise or lower interest rates with a heat input driven
| somehow by consumer prices? They could then use that to
| replace Erdogan.
| coryfklein wrote:
| > thermostats as an example of an intelligent system
|
| vs
|
| > A bimetallic strip is intelligent
|
| You're moving the goal posts
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| There are some who claim that a bimetallic strip shows
| evidence of intelligent design, but every fifth-grader
| knows that if a million volcanoes erupt over 5 billion
| years, there is a lot of weird stuff that can result from
| that random activity.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Language is quite flexible, but I don't think it is very
| helpful to call a thermostat intelligent. Doing so does not
| advance our understanding the sort of self-aware, theory-
| of-mind-holding intelligence that is generally meant by the
| term (putting aside its alternative meaning as a synonym
| for information), and adopting the broad definition just
| increases the burden of disambiguating what we mean when
| what we mean is the latter.
|
| The broad definition is not justified by the fact that
| certain attempts to define the term would attribute
| intelligence to thermostats; a more useful conclusion to
| draw is that the definitions in question could be improved.
|
| It is sometimes said that we won't be able to gain an
| understanding of intelligence until we have a precise
| definition, but it's actually the other way round:
| definitions get tighter as our understanding increases. We
| now understand many things that not only were lacking
| definitions in the past, but were not even imagined.
| jampekka wrote:
| Thermostat with a servomechanism is self-aware of its
| state. A thermostat could be quite simply augmented to
| have a theory of another thermostat. Probably there are
| such coupled termostats.
|
| I use intelligence mostly just as perspective of analysis
| to a system. E.g. Can it be seen to process information?
| How complicated is the transform from the information to
| some action? Does the processing lead to some good
| outcome, e.g. self-preservation of the system? Could the
| information processing be improved for this outcome?
| mannykannot wrote:
| Saying that a thermostat with a servomechanism is self-
| aware is just repeating the same broadening-beyond-
| usefulness with a different (though related) concept, in
| this case self-awareness. The difference between the
| self-awareness of humans and that which you see in a
| thermostat is vast, and understanding how a thermostat
| works gives no useful insight into how the human mind
| works.
|
| Any system processes information, and in a thermostat it
| is not complicated at all. Even the most self-aware
| thermostats currently being manufactured are not going to
| improve themselves on their own volition. Applying the
| term 'intelligence' this broadly turns it into an empty
| tautology, or a little piece of uninformative noise on a
| communications channel, no more useful in understanding
| those systems than in understanding actual intelligence.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > I have no qualms saying [thermostats] are intelligent
|
| > Intelligence is a very vague and very context dependent
| thing
|
| That's either contradictory, to state that something has
| property X where X is vague to the point of undefined, or
| you are setting a very low bar for intelligence (I'm
| actually okay with the latter).
|
| Just a question, if a bimetallic strip can be intelligent,
| is a marble intelligent for having the wit to find a low
| point on an uneven surface by rolling downwards?
| jampekka wrote:
| The marble question is good. For most purposes I'd say
| the bimetallic strip (one connected to an actuator at
| least) is more intelligent than a marble. Studying
| dynamics of internal properties of the termostat is more
| fruitful than of the marble that is easy to describe as
| an unchanging object.
|
| Taken to the logical conclusion, we are all just rolling
| downwards to a minimum energy state just like the marble.
|
| I don't think intelligence is an intrinsic, let alone
| binary, property of an object or a system.
| amelius wrote:
| Didn't Nest have a >$1B valuation at some point? /s
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| Juicero was $120M /not s
| cbozeman wrote:
| > I'm not sure I can subscribe to this definition...
|
| Is this because it is a completely man-made system and not
| one that evolved slowly over time through natural processes?
| teekert wrote:
| My thermostat may not be intelligent but it is certainly
| smart... At least it says so on the box.
|
| Anyway, the strip does contain the state of the world around
| it: the temperature is modeled by how much the bimetal is
| bent. I think indeed it is a minimal example of a complex
| system, one that at first glance defies explanation, it seems
| to have purpose (keep temp stable), until you understand the
| inside.
|
| Anyway, "Is a virus alive?", "Are these specimens the same
| species?", ... Us humans like our boxes, but at the edges
| they almost always go wrong.
| heckraiser wrote:
| A thermostat is certainly intelligent.
|
| The definition of intelligent I give is "to mitigate
| uncertainty." If it does not mitigate uncertainty, it is not
| intelligent.
|
| It is merely of constrained intelligence. Perhaps your
| expectations are too broad.
|
| If the thermostat reacts appropriately to environmental
| changes then it is performing its role intelligently.
| vacuity wrote:
| In the context of a person being trapped in a cave, is some
| aspect of light shining distantly intelligent? It's
| reducing uncertainty about where a viable exit is, after
| all.
| heckraiser wrote:
| Information is the reduction of uncertainty. If it does
| not reduce uncertainty it is not information.
|
| Intelligence is the mitigation of uncertainty.
|
| The revelation of the light is information. Navigating
| the contours of darkness is intelligence.
|
| If the cave walls glowed in response to proximity (of the
| observer) then the light source would have a modicum of
| intelligence.
| vacuity wrote:
| But what if the cave walls glowing misleads the observer
| and they get lost further? Then it wouldn't seem to be
| intelligent. In any case, the light source being
| intelligent occurs in the context that there is an
| intelligent observer who may be able to escape easier
| given a light source. The observer sees the light,
| evaluates it, and makes a decision. Even if it's just
| instincts, there is a decision made. What might be
| intelligence is if the cave (or elements of it) acts
| according to "this person is lost at this location, so
| light up this specific pathway". If the cave somehow
| facilitated more functionality, such as leading a person
| to clean groundwater, it would be more intelligent. In
| the context of helping the person escape or aiding them
| in the meantime, the cave tends towards accidental
| sophisticated technology ("...[which] is
| indistinguishable from magic"). Functional intelligence,
| I'll call it. Then perhaps there could be a theory of
| intelligent agents, who have goals and plans.
| someemptyspace wrote:
| It's not just the internal state but the prediction that
| makes it intelligent.
|
| Your brain is taking in a lot of information at the edges of
| your awareness, light, sounds, touch, etc. are all getting
| absorbed and transmitted to your brain. As that information
| is transmitted along your neurons it's getting summarized,
| then merged with other summarized information and summarized
| again. The brain is getting summaries of summaries, and
| developing a unified categorizing of the global state across
| all it's inputs.
|
| Then the brain takes that summary and makes a prediction
| about the future state. The summarization is energy-
| efficient. By categorizing all that data into a global state
| you make decision making possible. "When my boss seems
| stressed all week, then calls a bunch of people one-by-one
| into his office on Friday afternoon, I know lay-offs are
| coming. I better polish up my resume." From
| "stress/anxiety/unease" in the environment to "danger is
| coming I need to fight/flight".
|
| Your brain is taking that summary/categorization and figuring
| out what it needs to do next. If "X" happens then I should do
| "Y" to "stay-safe/get-food/find-a-mate". The brain is very
| good at capturing and summarizing data, and making a
| prediction because that process is much more efficient than
| doing otherwise. Instead of foraging everywhere for food and
| hoping I just bump into something that will provide
| sustenance, I know if X, Y, and Z happen then food will be
| "here", and I can get lots of it.
|
| You can apply this same model to all actions the brain
| directs. It also helps make sense of why maladaptive
| behaviors develop. Sometimes the summary is incorrect, or was
| formed based on past information that no longer applies, and
| it may need to be unlearned.
| Etheryte wrote:
| Not everyone is a philosopher with a cocktail, but surely we're
| all cocktail philosophers.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| What we call consciousness may have same relationship to what
| creates it as Plato's cave shadows to what generates them.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _Anyway, cells can hold (super) primitive models of the world
| and maintain internal balance in the face of anticipated
| events._
|
| I've occasionally run into science podcasts, going back almost
| a decade, where some researcher talks about the computational
| power of cell membranes, and how the synapses evolved from
| these mechanisms. Amoebas and paramecia navigate their
| environments, sense, and react through their cell membranes.
| Apparently, synapses evolved from these mechanisms.
|
| The upshot of this for AI, is that the neural network model may
| be drastically incomplete, with far more computation actually
| happening inside actual individual neurons.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Nobody is attempting to have one-to-one correspondence
| between neurons and artificial "neurons", the fact that a
| single biological does much more doesn't imply some
| limitation or incompleteness (as long as the same
| computations can be implemented simply by having more of
| them, and as far as we understand, that seems to be the case)
| - the choice is primary because due to how our hardware
| parallelization works, we'd prefer to implement the exact
| same behavior with 1000 structurally identical simple
| "neurons" rather than have a single more complex "emulated
| neuron" that requires more complicated logic that can't be
| straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication.
| stcredzero wrote:
| _that requires more complicated logic that can 't be
| straightforwardly reduced to massive matrix multiplication_
|
| What are the rationale for thinking it doesn't matter? Or
| is it the case that researchers think a larger number of
| simpler neurons could be equivalent to a smaller number of
| "complex emulated neurons?"
| PeterisP wrote:
| Yes, computation as such is sufficiently universal that
| it's very reasonable to assume that a larger number of
| simpler neurons would be equivalent to a smaller number
| of "complex emulated neurons".
| bugbuddy wrote:
| This finding gives more supporting evidence to professor
| Chemero's Radical Embodied Cognition. This is a very interesting
| interview he gave that covered a lot of his ideas:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vxT1RQICM_8
| Narciss wrote:
| "All intelligence is really collective intelligence, because
| every cognitive system is made of some kind of parts" - that's
| exactly the basis for the popularity theory of consciousness,
| which deduces that not only humans are conscious (and plants and
| other animals, etc), but also the global human society can have a
| sort of consciousness.
|
| https://consciousness.social
| Kinrany wrote:
| This seems to confuse intelligence with consciousness?
| Narciss wrote:
| I meant to say that they have the same root - you can think
| of consciousness as (collective) intelligence put to use in a
| particular domain: the self, or the "what it is like to be".
| If certain basic units of the collective intelligence
| contribute to that sense of self, you can get consciousness.
| consciousness.social aims to provide a living example of
| that.
| distortionfield wrote:
| I find it really interesting how many times this distinction
| has been made (from each side to the other and vice versa) in
| just this thread.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Makes sense, we're all just the proverbial neurons of the brain
| that is our entire society/planet. Yeah, this is _really_ big
| brain time.
|
| Then a collection of societies would be another level of meta-
| intelligence above that, it's all fractal.
| Narciss wrote:
| Exactly - multizoa theory describes the global human society
| as an organism made of many animals (multi zoa means many
| animals)/
|
| And then multizoa organisms can evolve once they reproduce,
| via processes like establishing colonies on other planets.
| Who knows what kind of multizoa consciousness, i.e. sense of
| social self these human societies would come to evolve given
| enough evolution via the process of multizoa natural
| selection?
|
| In that sense, consciousness.social is like the glimmer of a
| proto-consciousness for multizoa organisms. The first sparks
| of a multizoa-level sense of self, that could evolve down
| multizoa generations into something as complex as human
| consciousness, but at the multizoa level.
|
| Brain numbing stuff.
| Sparkyte wrote:
| Brains are for complex tasks linked by a series of simple
| problems handled by simple cells. It is a network.
| rini17 wrote:
| Maybe that's the Great Filter? All sentient beings must get rid
| of their brains and associated baggage to progress further.
| ivan_gammel wrote:
| I have a little problem understanding why this article is dated
| by February 1, 2024. Is it an UX bug and they show the date of
| the print issue, did it come from the future or my clock are off
| by a week?
| gigglesupstairs wrote:
| Yeah it's likely the magazine issue date. Bad UX but not a bug.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I am still struggling with my central question (I read this to be
| the 'hard question') of why I am currently occupying the body
| that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even
| none. Does anybody have some cursory reading about this subject?
| bowsamic wrote:
| I'm also stuck on the same thing. Why am I me and not someone
| or something else? I feel like most are just going to laugh at
| this question as completely obvious, but for me it's almost a
| deep sense of angst and awe. It used to keep me up at night.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I suppose I am at the beginning of asking this question out
| loud, and it has brought on some interesting discussions with
| my friends and family.
|
| Although nobody has a clear answer on this subject (globally
| it seems, not only in the local one I'm exploring), the
| variety of answers and debates it has led to has been very
| exciting. On the other hand, I am a bit disappointed that
| none has been able to bring anything more insightful than I
| could find via exploring the possibilities by digging around
| on Wikipedia.
|
| In fact, one question that I had been wondering, which is, at
| what point does an analogous conscious experience appear in
| terms of the quantum to human scale of complexity, has been
| asked already in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
| by Thomas Nagel. I still wonder what it is like to be a
| planarian, or a fly on the wall of a board meeting (audio
| fidelity must _suck_ ).
| cnity wrote:
| If you haven't read any Douglas Hofstadter, do so at the
| earliest opportunity.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| Sleeping on my copy of Eternal Golden Braid, and I really
| shouldn't...
| cnity wrote:
| Based on your thoughts above, you'll definitely enjoy it!
| bowsamic wrote:
| GEB is on my shelf, I read the long prologue, I will dig
| in once I'm a little further through the Silmarillion!
| medstrom wrote:
| I know this won't feel satisfactory, but there's nobody else
| and nothing else that you _could_ be. Not even in principle.
| Your consciousness is an unique product of your brain 's
| labor. Think of it not from the perspective of your
| consciousness (as if it could up and change bodies), but of
| your body. What other consciousness could "this body" have?
| No other than you.
| phito wrote:
| It's also the question I always end up getting stuck on !
| foldr wrote:
| It's a fascinating question, and I've long thought that it's
| the simplest one-sentence argument against physicalism. It's
| a fact that I am who I am (in the non-tautologous sense you
| allude to), but a complete physical description of the
| universe would presumably not include this fact.
| bsza wrote:
| It is the simplest one-sentence argument _for_ physicalism!
| If consciousness is a purely physical phenomenon, then it
| should be no surprise that everyone with a healthy brain
| has one, including you. If it isn't, then what supernatural
| event caused it to appear specifically in you?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Matter isn't like that though. Consciousness is unique in
| being a phenomenon that is totally singular and unique.
| There are no phenomena in the physical world that aren't
| considered as part of a wider collection of other
| physical phenomena. Eg this atom in relation to that.
| There is no this and that subject, there is only One. Not
| even getting into the fact that mental states are already
| non physical
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| ""Consciousness is unique in being a phenomenon that is
| totally singular and unique""
|
| I think the problem with the argument is that you are
| giving way too much credit to consciousness. You are
| giving an opinion on its uniqueness from the point of
| view of a Conscious entity that itself hasn't grasped
| it's own Consciousness.
|
| The really exciting part of all the latest AI tech, you
| can prove 'state of a neural net' is the 'state of
| experiencing the phenomena'.
|
| For Brains. They can now do an MRI on a brain, and re-
| construct what image it is thinking about.
|
| So, State of Neurons = Phenomenal Experiences.
|
| The Phenomena you are saying is not physical, is really
| the physical state of the brains neurons.
| bowsamic wrote:
| The experience of seeing something is completely
| different from the physical state of the neurons that see
| though. You have to be "in" the physical state in order
| to have the actual experience. Any physical description
| of the neurons does nothing to capture the actual
| experience of _being_ those neurons, and that 's the gap.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I agree with that.
|
| But if you have one person reporting an experience and
| can capture the 'physical state'. And then take someone
| else and have them report an experience, and capture the
| 'physical state'.
|
| And they match, then you can start making the
| relationship.
|
| Then if my mind is captured, and I'm thinking something
| that correlates, then I can 'assume' i'm experiencing
| what the other person is.
|
| It will always be imperfect. I agree the experience of
| each person is unique.
|
| But-> The whole problem of the 'eye-can't-see-the-eye'
| means the eye doesn't exist is also kind of just playing
| with logic.
|
| So just because we can't embody the experience of another
| person, doesn't mean we can't reason about how that
| experience is being generated.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I agree there might be a relationship between the
| physical state and the actual experience of it, but
| ultimately they cannot be bridged. There's only one way
| to bridge that gap and it's to "be" the physical state,
| and that's a concept that has absolutely no analogy in
| physical phenomena.
|
| But it's even worse than you say, because those
| relationships are generated purely within the mind, we
| don't find them outside the mind, so really all
| physicality is an illusion, it's all ultimately internal.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Or even worse, the phenomena doesn't exist internally or
| externally. They are a combination of the processing of
| the sensory inputs and the internal model. So the
| 'phenomena' is really the processing of the inputs, no
| substance at all because it is the processing itself.
|
| Kind of what was described in 'Being You', by Anil Seth.
| Our reality is a 'controlled hallucination'. Though I
| don't like the terminology because it is to easily
| misunderstood.
|
| But. Guess, I fall on side that we can still study how
| Phenomena is generated internally. And still be able to
| understand it. Just because we can't experience the exact
| same phenomena as someone else, shouldn't mean we can't
| figure out how it is generated.
| ta8645 wrote:
| > so really all physicality is an illusion, it's all
| ultimately internal.
|
| You don't really believe that. If you did, you would be
| fine jumping out of an airplane without a parachute, or
| something even more fatal.. because the physical "doesn't
| matter", only the internal.
| bowsamic wrote:
| If I do that I think I will have a negative mental
| experience, therefore it matters. The internal world will
| become undesirable if I jump out of an airplane. There is
| no external reason why I don't want to do that. If I
| could jump out of an airplane without a parachute and not
| expect it will have a negative impact on my internal
| world I would be fine with doing it.
|
| So yes I do really believe it!
| ta8645 wrote:
| Why on earth would doing ANYTHNG in an imaginary,
| unimportant, realm affect your mental internal world?
|
| You don't want to admit it, but you're basically
| confirming that you do understand that you can not stand
| apart from the physical realm. You are playing mental
| gymnastics to pretend you're in touch with some higher
| knowledge and understanding... but you're still
| constrained to the physical world, just like the rest of
| us.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well, a story can also affect my internal world, if
| that's your criteria of reality, yet I doubt you consider
| that as real as the physical world. Basically, according
| to your argument, there is already no distinction between
| physical and mental, which is the very reason I simply
| say it's all mental. The reason I don't call it all
| physical is because physical usually means "out there"
| and not "in here". No, everything, absolutely everything,
| is "in here". There is no "out there". I perceive reality
| in this way. If you touch some outside directly that is
| amazing magic and a contradiction to any Logic I know.
|
| It seems kind of like you can't really accept that this
| is how I understand reality. I have a tip for you:
| others' views will be much clearer to you if you don't
| assume they're lying about believing them. Maybe they
| really do see differently to you
| ta8645 wrote:
| There's a recent video you can search, a woman walking
| out the door of her apartment building. A young man
| sneaks up behind her and puts a bullet in her head. She
| died.
|
| She didn't have to have any thought about the bullet. She
| didn't have to think ANYTHING about the physical world.
| Nothing about her state of mind affected the outcome.
|
| Physical reality is independent of what we think of it.
|
| > Maybe they really do see differently to you
|
| I appreciate you think you see it differently. But your
| actions show you don't believe it as deeply as you think
| you do. You are a prisoner of the physical realm, not an
| inhabitant of a higher, more spiritual, plane. What good
| is it saying something is imaginary, if it affects
| everything you do, and you can't escape it. That sounds
| like something very real indeed.
| bowsamic wrote:
| I can't really infer anything about the internal world of
| the woman. Also according to Buddhism the state of her
| mind would affect into which realm she was reborn after
| death, and arguably getting shot itself was a
| manifestation of her mental state. Yogachara philosophy
| of Buddhism says that all appearances of external reality
| is created by our internal world
| ta8645 wrote:
| > I can't really infer anything
|
| The point of the video, is that she had zero awareness of
| the bullet. It all happened in 2 seconds without
| attracting her attention. I'm sure if you're honest, you
| can think of 1000 other examples as well.
|
| Physical reality proceeds without your thoughts, it will
| continue after you and I die, it doesn't need our
| feelings or thoughts to exists and persist.
|
| > Yogachara philosophy of Buddhism says...
|
| Tony the Tiger says, "They're great!!"
| bowsamic wrote:
| > Physical reality proceeds without your thoughts, it
| will continue after you and I die, it doesn't need our
| feelings or thoughts to exists and persist.
|
| Sorry, I simply don't believe in this.
| ta8645 wrote:
| My belief is it is unfounded and ultimately based in
| narcissism. "I am so important that I create the external
| reality, I really am the center of the universe, it
| wouldn't exist without my mind" It's an appeal to self-
| importance.
|
| It can't account for something like the fossil record,
| that existed before any human was on the planet; other
| than to say, "I dreamed that up in my own special
| imaginary fiction!!"
|
| Perhaps the primal nature of the world isn't physical
| matter, but to pretend that we create reality with our
| mind, is not only silly, it's dangerous and flies in the
| face of how everyone, even those who claim to believe
| otherwise, actually act in the world.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Well, only deluded beings (including myself) act that
| way. Buddhas and bodhisattvas don't. Indeed they can bend
| so called "physical reality" to their will, manifesting
| physical bodies and appearances in the minds of others.
| It's just simply the following: form is emptiness,
| emptiness is form
| ta8645 wrote:
| Well, we'll have to agree to disagree on this one; time
| will tell. Wish you all the best. Thank you for talking
| with me.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| the parent, bowsamic, is incorrect.
|
| This is not what Buddhism teaches.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| That is NOT what the Buddha taught. It is expressly the
| opposite.
|
| Promoting these types of wrong understandings really
| distract people from further learning.
|
| This turns people away from further investigations that
| might help them.
|
| People that might be aided in their suffering by learning
| more about buddhism, read some weirdness posted about
| "buddha can earth bend, whoooo, I learned about buddhism
| from watching Avatar, I'm a bender", and are completely
| turned away.
|
| Read and meditate further before promoting something that
| is incorrect.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yes he did, it's in the Lotus sutra and Lankavatara
| sutras, to name two. Perhaps you're a Pali canon
| fundamentalist or something but thats not my problem,
| what I'm saying is orthodox Mahayana: Buddhas can create
| bodies and are basically omnipotent in the Mahayana. The
| lotus sutra even says that the Buddha faked his
| appearance on this Earth so that the sravakas would have
| a nice narrative to believe in
|
| Also the fact you said meditate makes me think you are
| quite ignorant about Buddhism. Most Buddhists don't
| meditate, the idea that most do is a western
| misconception. I'm a pure land Buddhist, which is the
| most popular in the world, and we mainly engage in
| recitation and offerings and bowing
|
| EDIT and I understand it may just be ignorance but it's
| highly offensive to characterise traditional Mahayana
| Buddhist beliefs as some kind of children's show. This is
| effectively slandering the Dharma
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| 'fundamentalist'? Frankly, that is how you sound.
|
| To tell people that buddhas have supernatural powers, and
| take that literally, is turning people away from the
| teaching.
|
| 'Faking' his appearance? Being omnipotent in this
| physical world? Able to manipulate this world?
|
| You are supposed to understand that those are metaphors.
| Stories, not truth.
|
| Language is imperfect and only points the way, not to be
| taken literally. A core teaching is how imperfect
| language is, and that even the sutras should be only
| taken as a rough guide and eventually abandoned when they
| no longer serve a purpose.
|
| You can cite sutras, that doesn't mean you understand
| them. I fear that publishing these concepts as if an
| authority is damaging to people.
|
| Meditate, prayer, recitation/mantras. Call it what you
| want.
|
| Concentration/Samadhi is part of the 8-fold path.
|
| That you would say that is not part of Buddhism is
| frankly making me think this whole thing is a Troll.
| Maybe you can make some argument that concentration in
| every moment is meditation, so you don't need to sit. But
| to say most Buddhist don't? Come on.
|
| You know enough Buddhist terms to Troll someone on the
| internet. But this is damaging. Someone could read what
| you say and think that is Buddhism and be turned away or
| mislead.
|
| Also, there is no such thing as slander to Buddhist, like
| there is some god in a Church that is taking offense. I
| guess we all get offended by things, and what I said was
| offensive, wrong speech. Just not technically 'slander'.
| bowsamic wrote:
| > To tell people that buddhas have supernatural powers,
| and take that literally, is turning people away from the
| teaching.
|
| No it isn't, it's literally the sutras say and what a
| vast majority of Buddhists actually believe.
|
| > You are supposed to understand that those are
| metaphors. Stories, not truth.
|
| Then why don't we see this reflected in traditional
| teachings? This is a modern western reinterpretation, so
| called "secular Buddhism". Supernatural powers are well
| documented in Buddhism and even today in Tibetan
| Buddhism.
|
| > Concentration/Samadhi is part of the 8-fold path.
|
| A vast majority of Buddhists are relying on Amida's path
| for salvation through the Pure Land and/or producing
| merit for a better rebirth though, they don't practise
| such things in this lifetime.
|
| > You know enough Buddhist terms to Troll someone on the
| internet. But this is damaging. Someone could read what
| you say and think that is Buddhism and be turned away or
| mislead.
|
| Well, I'm right, and it sounds like I've actually
| researched, studied, and practised Buddhism more than
| you.
|
| > Also, there is no such thing as slander to Buddhist
|
| Yes there is, it's even included in Amida's 18th vow:
|
| > Excluded, however, are those who commit the Five
| Gravest Transgressions and slander the right Dharma.
|
| and is mentioned throughout the Lotus sutra. For example
| the whole basis of Nichiren's theology is that those who
| slander the Buddhadharma will be reborn in avicci hell.
|
| What you are presenting is a very inaccurate view of the
| Buddhadharma. Let me set some facts in order:
|
| * The sutras do teach extensively of supernatural powers
|
| * The sutras do teach extensively of both mind-only
| philosophy and anti-physicalism (in both the sravakayana
| and the Mahayana!)
|
| * There is no evidence that those aspects of the sutras
| should not be taken literally
|
| * Those aspects of the sutras are indeed taken literally
| by most Buddhists historically
|
| * Most Buddhists in the world follow paths that don't
| involve meditation/samadhi/concentration
|
| * Buddhism ultimately even has no concept of metaphor vs.
| literal, since everything is emptiness anyway, so already
| it denies the fundamental reality of anything
|
| If you are actually willing to learn about Buddhism, not
| just some western misconception of it, I am willing to
| point you to resources...
|
| however from what you say I have a feeling you will just
| abuse the teaching, and likely be reborn in Hell, due to
| your fundamentalist religious belief, therefore I will
| not pass on any resources to you beyond what I did unless
| you can somehow prove to me that you won't abuse it
|
| It's okay if YOU don't want to believe those things, but
| going around and telling others that they are wrong for
| accurately portraying the Dharma is unwise. Please do
| more research, ideally with an actual teacher
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Well. I certainly agree that arguing on the internet
| about who is a Buddhist, and who is not, is hurtful and
| not helping anyone. I just happen to think you are the
| one leading people down the wrong path. But so do you, of
| me.
|
| Seems like we understand words differently. Have
| different definitions of same words.
|
| You say I'm 'fundamentalist' even to point of going to
| Hell, then in return say the most scary extreme
| 'fundamentalist' things. Maybe we just mean different
| things by that word 'fundamentalist'.
|
| You say you are Mahayana, then say things that are not
| very Mahayana.
|
| Then you say for me to get a teacher. And I'm thinking,
| man your teacher isn't doing you any favors, you should
| find another.
|
| Who is right? No way to know?
|
| So. Guess there is nothing else. I think you are wrong,
| you think I am wrong.
|
| We can quote the same sutras endlessly and both have
| opposite interpretations. Can quote demographics, and
| 'who meditates', 'who doesn't', what is it, what is it
| not, as some kind of proof. Using sutras to disprove
| sutras, then cling to them, is kind of blowing me away. I
| haven't encountered something like this.
|
| I guess I just have to say, to try and help. Try to
| understand the sutras a bit more and less.
|
| You are very wound up in conceptual thought. And it seems
| to be blinding you. Sutras are to be abandoned when their
| purpose is done, not clung to.
|
| ""Though others may talk of the Way of the Buddhas as
| something to be reached by various pious practices and by
| sutra-study, you must have nothing to do with such ideas.
| "" - Huang Po
| bowsamic wrote:
| Ultimately, I am actually saying things that are in line
| with the traditional teachings and is what Buddhism
| actually is among most people in the world today. You
| said I was perpetuating falsehoods, and all I care about
| right now is stating that actually I am not. All this
| stuff about "conceptualisation is a barrier on the path"
| is not really relevant. We don't even believe it is in my
| tradition, in fact.
|
| Next time just think a little before you accuse someone
| of what you did. You are the one that insisted I was
| wrong about the concepts of Buddhism, that's why I called
| you a fundamentalist. The previous comments are still
| there, you know? We can actually just go back and check
| this.
|
| Now, what do we plan to achieve in this discussion? You
| accused me of perpetuating falsehoods, I showed that I'm
| not, now you are upset. Why? I guess it's just human to
| not be able to accept when you are wrong. Quite sad but
| that's just how it is I guess. I won't reply again, for
| your sake. I don't want you to hurt yourself even more. I
| hope you have taken some education from my information at
| least, and have dispelled some ignorance for you.
|
| > I think you are wrong, you think I am wrong.
|
| I've proven that you are objectively wrong.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| LOL
|
| ""All this stuff about "conceptualization is a barrier on
| the path" is not really relevant. We don't even believe
| it is in my tradition, in fact.""
|
| You just re-iterated a falsehood.
|
| That is a fundamental Teaching. That is part of Mahayana.
| Your claimed tradition. One of you're arguments was just
| "man everything is emptiness", but I mention 'concepts',
| and suddenly it isn't part of the tradition. You are
| going in circles.
|
| You haven't proven a single thing. You simply listed
| sutras and gave your own opinion.
|
| I can't believe I'm falling for a Troll.
|
| Please, if you are for real, continue studying. Maybe
| some clarity will arrive. But stop posting misleading
| statements. It can turn people away from a path that can
| help them.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Good luck on your path
| naasking wrote:
| > Not even getting into the fact that mental states are
| already non physical
|
| Conjecture, at best. All thought experiments purporting
| to show this non-physicality are deeply flawed. We
| literally have no reason to conclude that mental states
| are non-physical.
| bowsamic wrote:
| To me it's a self evident truth but unfortunately I can't
| demonstrate it
| naasking wrote:
| Is it as self-evident as the absence of an object placed
| in your blind spot?
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yes
| naasking wrote:
| Then I agree that it _appears_ self-evident, but then we
| must admit that it then doesn 't follow that it must be
| true!
| foldr wrote:
| You're saying that people shouldn't be surprised that
| they're conscious. That may be true, but it's irrelevant
| to the argument I was talking about. The relevant fact
| there isn't merely that you're conscious, but that you
| are (consciously) the particular person that you are.
|
| Bowsamic orignally posed a question that gets at the
| relevant fact: "Why am I me and not someone or something
| else?" However, the argument here doesn't rest on this
| question being puzzling. The argument is simply that the
| relevant fact of personal identity (whether puzzling or
| not) does not seem to reduce to any specifiable set of
| physical facts.
|
| The form of the argument is exactly like a Platonist
| argument against physicalism: "2+2=4" is a fact and does
| not reduce to any set of physical facts; therefore not
| all facts are physical facts. This argument does not
| require the assumption that truths of arithmetic are
| surprising or difficult to explain. However, I think the
| irreducibility claim is more compelling in the case of
| personal identity than for mathematical truths.
| bsza wrote:
| To a physicalist, the only way to interpret the question
| "why am I me and not someone else?" is "why is my
| physical body identical to my physical body and not
| identical to another physical body?". The framework
| simply doesn't allow alternative interpretations. This
| interpretation is a tautology, because in the universe,
| things are identical to themselves, and only to
| themselves.
|
| If you are using an abstract definition of "yourself"
| (such as your brain's internal representation of you),
| you are no longer talking about physical objects, so of
| course your question can't be answered using physical
| facts alone. Similarly, "2+2=4" is a statement about our
| abstract representation of the world, not the real world
| itself. That we can reason about integers without relying
| on facts about the real world doesn't mean that integers
| are any more "real" than unicorns - or for that matter,
| your concept of "self".
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's why it's a good argument against physicalism.
| According to what you just said, everything we ever
| experience is talking about "not the real world itself"
| according to physicalism, therefore why does it ever make
| sense to assert the "real world itself" _over_ what we
| actually experience? It 's like watching a movie and
| believing in the movie more than the fact you are sitting
| watching a screen.
| bsza wrote:
| > According to what you just said, everything we ever
| experience is talking about "not the real world itself"
|
| I don't know how that follows from what I said. When
| someone says "the floor is slippery", that refers to a
| very much real physical property of a very much real
| thing. When someone says "the floor is lava", that means
| we're playing a game. We have no problem distinguishing
| between the two.
|
| If you define yourself as the set of atoms that currently
| make you up, you are talking about the real world. If you
| define yourself as the set of your memories and
| experiences, you are not. The former definition has a lot
| less issues than the latter - firstly because you don't
| have to define anything further, you can just point at
| yourself; and secondly because a perfect clone of you
| would have the same set of memories and experiences, and
| that doesn't make them you. This is why "Why am I
| myself?" is much easier to answer when we're talking
| about your atoms. Now, if a theory can answer a question
| _with ease_ , how is that question an argument _against_
| it? I 've certainly never heard anyone say "If global
| warming is real, why are my car tires melting into the
| asphalt?".
| foldr wrote:
| > Now, if a theory can answer a question with ease, how
| is that question an argument against it?
|
| Bowsamic may have a different take on this, but in my
| version of the argument, the point is not to answer the
| 'why' question. The 'why' question is just used to
| gesture at the relevant non-tautologous and apparently
| non-physical fact. So it doesn't really help with
| anything to redefine the terms of the question until it
| becomes a tautologous statement about atoms. All that
| shows is that physicalism doesn't have a problem with the
| concept of two physical things being the same thing -
| which isn't in dispute.
|
| >If you define yourself as the set of atoms that
| currently make you up [...]
|
| I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior
| notion of who I am. Otherwise, one set of atoms is as
| good as any other.
| bsza wrote:
| > The 'why' question is just used to gesture at the
| relevant non-tautologous and apparently non-physical fact
|
| Yeah, but to clearly define what that fact means, you'd
| have to introduce a bunch of intermediate definitions,
| and eventually you might just end up in physics-land
| again. It isn't physics' fault that the human brain is
| complicated.
|
| > I don't see how I'm going to do this without some prior
| notion of who I am
|
| Protip: if you pinch it and it hurts, it's probably yours
| :) Well, that or a very angry cat.
|
| To be more serious: having prior notions of things is
| fine. Required, even. We can't reason about things
| without having at least a vague understanding of the
| language. It can't be turtles all the way down.
| foldr wrote:
| >and eventually you might just end up in physics-land
| again.
|
| Sure, anything might turn out to be explicable by future
| physics (or indeed, future astrology, future phrenology,
| or any possible future knowledge). There are no knock-
| down arguments in this domain. The point is that the fact
| of your personal conscious identity is _apparently_ not a
| physical fact, which is a prima facie argument against
| some of the stronger forms of physicalism.
|
| >To be more serious: having prior notions of things is
| fine.
|
| You can't use the physical definition to dispense with
| other notions of personal identity if you need those very
| notions to bootstrap the physical definition (and
| maintain it over time, as your 'set of atoms' is
| constantly changing). To point out that your informal
| notion of self is connected somehow with a loosely-
| defined lump of physical stuff isn't really to succeed in
| reducing anything to physics. It's just to say what
| pretty much everyone agrees with: that humans have
| physical bodies.
| bsza wrote:
| > You can't use the physical definition to dispense with
| other notions of personal identity if you need those very
| notions to bootstrap the physical definition
|
| Now that you mention, I don't need to. "I" simply means
| "the person who is currently speaking" (or in this case,
| writing). This already determines, beyond reasonable
| doubt, which physical body we're talking about. No other
| definition needed, since you can't say "I" without
| speaking. QED. Sorry, I should have noticed this 4
| comments earlier.
|
| (Caveat: this definition _doesn't feel satisfying,_ which
| might be the source of our disagreement, but I can't put
| my finger on why - perhaps you can)
|
| > the fact of your personal conscious identity is
| apparently not a physical fact
|
| The human brain is astonishingly good at BS-ing itself,
| so I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel
| about your own conscious self. To me, this smells like a
| more abstract and philosophical version of the puddle
| analogy.
| foldr wrote:
| > "I" simply means "the person who is currently speaking"
|
| But on this definition you can raise the question of why
| the person who is currently speaking is the person who is
| currently speaking (which by alternating _de re_ and _de
| dicto_ interpretations can be understood in the same non-
| tautologous ways as e.g. "Why is the person who is
| currently the President the person who is currently the
| President?") So this linguistic analysis doesn't succeed
| in dissolving facts about personal identity into nothing.
| You still have the fact that you are who you are and not
| someone else. And the intuitive notion of personhood (on
| which your definition depends and which you haven't in
| any way reduced to physics) is intimately connected with
| the idea of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-
| person conscious experience.
|
| > I wouldn't attribute much to how you intuitively feel
| about your own conscious self.
|
| If we set 'intuitive feelings' aside, then of course the
| whole problem of conscious experience disappears
| immediately.
| bsza wrote:
| > And the intuitive notion of personhood (on which your
| definition depends and which you haven't in any way
| reduced to physics) is intimately connected with the idea
| of a more-or-less uninterrupted stream of first-person
| conscious experience.
|
| "person": a member of the genus Homo
|
| "speaking": phenomenon wherein the previous object
| vibrates its own vocal chords and moves its own mouth to
| produce sound waves
|
| "currently": a point in time in which the aforementioned
| act occurs
|
| Notably missing are: any references to continuity of
| experience, conscious action, or even thought.
| Suggestion: I have, in fact, completely reduced it to
| physics.
|
| > You still have the fact that you are who you are and
| not someone else
|
| Please describe to me a hypothetical universe where that
| statement doesn't hold true. If there is none, then we
| must accept that this "fact" does not require any
| explanation, and therefore can be dismissed as trivial.
| foldr wrote:
| Your linguistic analysis of 'I' doesn't work if
| understood in purely physical terms. Lots of people are
| speaking at any given moment, but I don't refer to all of
| them if I say 'I'.
|
| Consider the absurdity of the question "who am I?",
| uttered by an amnesiac, if it means simply "Which lump of
| physical stuff is currently speaking?" Even if we ignore
| the problem mentioned in the first paragraph, the answer
| is trivial - the same lump that's making the noises. But
| it's difficult to accept that the amnesiac is confused
| over a triviality: they really don't know who they are;
| they lack a key piece of non-trivial, non-tautologous
| knowledge.
|
| >If there is none, then we must accept that this "fact"
| does not require any explanation
|
| As I've tried to emphasise, I do not claim that the fact
| is puzzling or requires an explanation, only that it is a
| fact. By analogy, it is not puzzling that the sum of two
| and two is four, and no non-trivial explanation of this
| fact appears to be required, but it is still a fact. Now
| of course you can try to make such fact dissolve via
| various forms of philosophical therapy. For example,
| there are some philosophers of mathematics who would try
| to argue that all mathematical facts are tautologous. You
| are trying to do something similar with facts of personal
| identity. However, philosophers of mathematics who claim
| that all mathematical truths are disguised tautologies
| can point to lots of actual work that has been done to
| show that this position is more plausible than it might
| first appear.
| bsza wrote:
| > Consider the absurdity of the question "who am I?",
| uttered by an amnesiac
|
| In that context, that question would just mean "what was
| my life like prior to losing my memories?", wouldn't it?
| So in this instance, the missing non-trivial knowledge is
| their long-term memory, not a problem with understanding
| the definition of "I".
|
| > For example, there are some philosophers of mathematics
| who would try to argue that all mathematical facts are
| tautologous. You are trying to do something similar with
| facts of personal identity.
|
| I'm not arguing that the subjective experience of
| personal identity is tautologous, I'm arguing that it's a
| chemical reaction (EDIT: and that the underlying
| objective truth is tautologous). Any feeling about the
| intuitive concept of "myself" having some kind of
| esoteric component above the physical matter (which I
| also share, don't be mistaken) would, presumably, also be
| given voice to by a computer simulation of your brain.
| That would be your brain being caught red-handed in the
| act of lying to itself about how special it is. And if
| this turns out not to be the case, then we have rock
| solid evidence that something is indeed missing from our
| simulation, which gives us an opportunity to measure that
| something, which in turn makes that something physical.
|
| > Your linguistic analysis of 'I' doesn't work if
| understood in purely physical terms. Lots of people are
| speaking at any given moment, but I don't refer to all of
| them if I say 'I'.
|
| Valid point. Refinement: in any speech, "I" refers to the
| person making that speech.
| rodrigosetti wrote:
| Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus the
| multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion. But I
| never really understood why.
|
| My hunch is that this is related to the question of why we are
| experiencing this particular moment in time and not another one
| in the past or in the future, is related. If you believe in the
| many words interpretation of quantum mechanics, one can also
| say why I'm experiencing this particular branch.
| cnity wrote:
| I sometimes wonder if we are all basically the same
| conscious, threading through all of the "antennae" of life
| one after another. But I find this idea painful because it is
| tantamount to an immense cosmic loneliness.
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| Like in "The Egg"?
| cnity wrote:
| Yes, although The Egg ultimately presumes separation of
| consciousness at some "higher level" given that there is
| a dialogue between such consciousnesses. My greater sense
| of loneliness comes from a sense that the very premise of
| a separation of consciousness exists as a deliberate goal
| of our universe, which was made by a "God" who is
| actually all of us, as a means to keep myself/ourself
| company and to introduce love. Sort of like we are all
| branches of the same tree. But people talk about having
| epiphanies about this as if it is a good thing that we
| are all the same, leading to a connectedness. But it also
| leads to loneliness.
|
| Sorry for the dump.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| Loneliness is a human instinct based on our evolutionary
| history as social primates though - if you travel up the
| antennae enough that there's no 'others' there's also no
| evolutionary pressures to make that loneliness a source
| of danger.
|
| But what I find cool is that the lonely social ape can
| also look up the antenna and find all the security it
| could want - where I think some religions err is that
| when this happens, if you keep identifying with the
| insecure social ape rather than the many-antannaed-
| deiform it can interfere with the smooth communication
| between the two.
| zer0tonin wrote:
| > Buddhism claims that our feeling of separation (and thus
| the multiplicity of subjective experiences) is an illusion.
| But I never really understood why.
|
| They've made a good book to help people get the concept. It's
| called "the gateless gate" and it's a series of seemingly
| non-sensical stories, that you're supposed to think about and
| try to see the meaning behind it.
|
| If you want to give the exercise a try, it's on wikisource:
| https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Gateless_Gate
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| For an intro. I think the old stories have too many
| anachronisms for modern readers. There are too many
| meanings in the phrasing that the readers of the time would
| already know.
|
| Do you know of any modern translations that frame the story
| in actual modern references?
| zer0tonin wrote:
| I think it would make a bad introduction to buddhist
| philosophy in any way, it's meant as a more "advanced"
| text imo. Starting with a plain english intro (like Alan
| Watts, The Way of Zen) or simpler texts (the Dhammapada)
| should be easier.
| stonewhite wrote:
| VS Ramachandran has an interesting talk about mirror neurons,
| which is a subset of motor neurons. They activate when you
| perceive anybody else doing something as opposed to only
| activating during your actions. This is fundamentally a
| built-in empathy/group learning mechanism, but it also has
| some other interesting implications too.
|
| For example, when somebody touches someones hand in your
| view, your mirror neurons activate just like you yourself
| have been touched. Then your nerve endings in your hand send
| a signal to cancel the effect, but sometimes you still get a
| tingling from the neural confusion depending on the strength
| of the signal (e.g. watching someone getting kicked in the
| balls or russian daredevils walking on top of highrises).
| But, if there is no nerve endings there, there is nothing to
| cancel the signal, so you do experience another persons
| feeling of being touched as your own. Therefore, the only
| thing that separates our consciousness is literally our skin
| and our nerve endings on it.
| igleria wrote:
| I don't have an answer to offer, but anecdotal memories of
| reading somewhere that brains could be a sort of antenna for
| consciousness. Then a subsequent comment explaining how if that
| were the case we would fall unconscious in a faraday cage.
|
| so, back to square one...
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I wouldn't take the leap into the Faraday cage so easily,
| that would imply that consciousness is measurable in the
| electromagnetic field. I don't think that's true, otherwise
| we would have measured it already. I don't know where to go
| next on this reasoning, it seems like we don't have the tools
| to measure in which field we are communicating.
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| That line of reasoning seems pretty silly given that
| consciousness is supposed to be much more subtle than
| electromagnetic fluctuations and omnipresent, but it reminds
| me of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition where the most difficult
| practices are only done deep in mountain caves where no light
| can reach the practitioner. I wouldn't be at all surprised if
| minimizing cosmic background radiation was a factor in
| sufficiently subtle inner inquiry.
|
| One of my ancient aliens theories is that the Pyramids are
| artificial mountain caves.
| naasking wrote:
| Brain antennae + consciousness is more complex than just
| brain consciousness. In the former, we still have to answer
| "so... what is consciousness then? where is it? how does it
| couple to the brain? can it be blocked?" In the latter, it's
| just "consciousness is a property of a brain", and we are
| only left with the question of how the brain produces it. The
| antenna theory is just multiplying entities unnecessarily.
| jahnu wrote:
| https://www.lehigh.edu/~mhb0/Dennett-WhereAmI.pdf
| naasking wrote:
| Dennett is always worth a read!
| bsza wrote:
| Experiments done on corpus callosotomy patients [0] give us
| some very interesting insights on how consciousness works. IMO,
| these experiments strongly point towards consciousness being
| mostly, if not entirely, an illusion created by the brain.
|
| [0]: https://youtu.be/ZMLzP1VCANo
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Consciousness is not even really a well defined concept, so
| for something that's already nebulously defined to be an
| illusion doesn't make sense.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept
|
| Built from the same shaky foundation and shared desire for
| it to exist
|
| One hit upside the head and you're a completely different
| person. (Or dietary change with different microbacteria, or
| following heavy psychedelics use, etc...)
| consumer451 wrote:
| > Yeah not far removed from the fungible soul concept
|
| I am with you on this. Today's scientific debate about
| consciousness sounds a lot like the scientific debate
| about the human soul from a century ago.
|
| We just want to be special so badly, meanwhile evidence
| keeps piling up indicating that we are not.
| xcode42 wrote:
| I would love nothing more than to not be special, the
| only solutions that I can conceive of for the hard
| problem of conscience are ones that requires something
| other than the physical. Either there is a soul or
| conscience is just inherent to the universe(the whole
| everything has a conscience theory) neither of these is
| particularly satisfying to me if for no other reason than
| they are both unfalsifiable. I would love for there to be
| an available algorithm that my brain could compute that
| would spit out conscience.
|
| But I don't see how, it seems intractable to me. The
| brain could theoretically do anything it does from
| information processing, problem solving, planning or even
| develop a theory of the mind without a conscience, it's
| computation all the way down. But why and goddamned how
| does a human brain go from perceiving and processing the
| visual information of red light hitting your eyes to
| "feeling" red, how does it "feel" anything at all, heck
| what is this "observer" that does all the "feeling" even
| made of? if you could break "him" down into constituent
| parts(theoretically computable sub-problems) at all that
| would be nice, it would be more progress than I've done
| over years of thinking about this bullshit problem.
|
| The "observer" seems indivisible to me, heck it seems
| made of nothing at all, it just is. Sure it being
| indivisible might be an illusion made up by the brain,
| but, if so, it's an illusion that still needs to be fed
| to "something", and I haven't heard any working theories
| that I actually buy that explain how the brain comes up
| with that "something".
| yieldcrv wrote:
| the other way of thinking about it is that we don't know
| if we share a sense of "red", aside from merely being
| consistent with other compatible nodes (other humans) in
| a network. the other node simply can distinguish "red"
| from "green" just like I can, but we don't know if they
| are perceiving that color the same way I am. whether it
| is a hardware difference in the rods, cones, other aspect
| of the eye, or computational aspect in the brain, we
| don't know.
|
| your supposition still relies on their being a separate
| entity to imagine, quantify or figure out, when that is
| not necessary. a tribunal of processes is enough for this
| "observer" phenomenon.
| svieira wrote:
| Have you read anything by Peter Kreeft?
| https://www.peterkreeft.com/topics-more/case-for-life-
| after-... might be of some interest to you.
| moffkalast wrote:
| This is why I always put my soul on a blockchain.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| EIP-4671 format or EIP-6239 format or other?
| moffkalast wrote:
| It would have to be EIP-623, hahah
| gnz11 wrote:
| Indeed, and would not an illusion be contingent on an
| observer?
| bsza wrote:
| Perhaps it isn't well-defined, but I initially thought of
| it as something atomic and immutable (even in the face of
| brain damage), and now I no longer do.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I knew about similar split brain experiments, and although I
| agree to the illusory component of consciousness, these
| nonetheless do not answer my original question on the
| observing component of it. Thank you for sharing!
| bsza wrote:
| I was referring to the observing component itself being an
| illusion (as a split-brain patient seemingly has two of
| those). If that component is also a byproduct of physical
| processes, then your "observer" being attached to your body
| is self-evident.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| If I stand up too quickly or hold my breath, it's
| consciousness that I start to lose, not my consciousness's
| control of my body. It seems to me that implies consciousness
| comes from the brain.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| An illusion for who? ;)
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Maybe your consciousness does sometimes occupy other bodies. Of
| course you don't remember it, because memory and working memory
| are tied to brains. When consciousness is in another body, it
| feels that it is another person with his memories and context
| and none of yours.
|
| Another way of saying this is that there's no need to postulate
| separate consciousness for separate people, one is enough.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| I know this is a disliked point of view, but for me the yogic
| point of view really gave me a mental picture in which this all
| makes perfect sense and which is quite consistent in itself
| (even though there is an unexplained axiom which is:
| "Intelligent-Awareness just is")
|
| I feel that is what was termed the dreadful g-o-d word by many
| cultures but if we can understand this under that light, the
| readings of the second ever yogi that came to the west called
| Paramhansa Yogananda are highly recommended. His Autobiography
| of a Yogi was Steve Jobs favorite book and he made everyone
| that attended his funeral to get a copy of it. Not that that
| means a whole lot, as he was by far not an embodiment of love,
| but I feel he had the capacity to see the brilliance in this
| undestanding.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Don't worry, this has been the central question of humanity
| forever. It's also likely unanswerable by the scientific
| method.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| I feel that if one does not have the patience to wait, one
| may just go and selfexperiment. It is not, that Consciousness
| is in a lab somewhere where only some scientists have access,
| no it is right here! It is so much in our faces that we do
| not explore it ourselves, but rather wait for some
| "authorities" to explore that for us.
|
| No! We can explore it by calming our mind and our senses with
| well established methods which are known for thousands of
| years (the ancient tradition of yoga for example, an do not
| think twisting and bending, no this goes MUCH further!!)
|
| And then, when the senses are turned of (by practice or
| "outside help" e.g. think tank) and the mind is silenced,
| then we start to explore what lies beneath!!
|
| They say: "When all the movements in the mind have ceased to
| exist, the knower dwells in his real nature" (or something
| along the lines, in the Yoga Sutras, roughly 1500 to 2000
| years old )
| suoduandao3 wrote:
| I quite like Penrose-Hameroff's theory
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGbgDf4HCHU
|
| My best summary of it: consciousness is primal, every bit of
| matter has perspective, every interaction has experience, the
| body you're 'occupying' is having a particularly complex and
| long-lived experience.
|
| As for your question of why this one, well, someone's got to be
| having this one. As for why not another, there's no saying
| 'you' won't have another 'after' this experience ends, but if
| 'you' had them in a perfectly undifferentiated way that'd be a
| different experience again, and as stated, someone's got to be
| having this one.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| This!! It all comes together. What the mystics have figured
| out through deepest self-introspection and meditation comes
| so close to our modern understanding derived by physics,
| biology and neuroscience. It is fascinating to see how these
| understandings converge.
| Vox_Leone wrote:
| The question you raise is fascinating. I ask the same questions
| when I think about the many-worlds interpretation in QM.
|
| As for the research in focus in this thread, It seems that we
| are facing another Great Humiliation[0], with the potential to
| affect the course of development in so many other areas.
|
| It will be interesting to see what developments this research
| will inspire in the cultural/anthropological field: so were the
| tree-huggers right all along? So is there really a harmony and
| connection between all the "children of Gaia"? :)
|
| [0]https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-
| check/copernicus-...
| naasking wrote:
| > why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an
| observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.
|
| Are you sure this is a well-formed question? To be clear, this
| isn't what the hard problem of consciousness is about, although
| perhaps that's what you meant by "none".
| chronofar wrote:
| Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going
| for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your
| experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not
| another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains.
|
| This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite
| mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings
| become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder
| the particular questions you asked there.
| wry_discontent wrote:
| This seems like a common way that to me completely side steps
| the actual question. Sure, your brain powers intelligence,
| but nothing we have nothing on how it could create awareness,
| which seems qualitatively different.
| chronofar wrote:
| Completely sidesteps which question?
|
| It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person
| I was responding to:
|
| > why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an
| observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.
|
| It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of
| consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I
| specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| I referred to the hard question in my OP, and I don't
| think that materialism answers either of _the_ question's
| formulation. Materialism may answer it at one point, and
| I would be very impressed if it does, because it is going
| to require perhaps new mathematics, geometry, and physics
| for us to get there. So far, none of our tools for
| measurement of any form of field has led us any closer to
| answering the hard question.
| chronofar wrote:
| Yes I noted it doesn't answer the "hard" problem
| explicitly in both of my replies here on this thread.
| Indeed, the very reason it is called the "hard" problem
| is b/c it very well seems perhaps unsolvable (though this
| is certainly debatable, but this is the very etymology of
| the term).
|
| Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone
| else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's
| formulation, and are indeed easily answered by
| materialism as I noted.
|
| Perhaps take a look at the wiki article on the hard
| problem:
| https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
| exitb wrote:
| If you assume that the observer can "occupy" a body, rather
| than be a body, you have to conclude that the memories are part
| of the body, not the observer. You assume that you occupy the
| "correct" body, because your present experience matches your
| memories, but that'd be true even if you moved to occupy
| another body. Moreover, how do you know that there isn't more
| than one observer in your body? Or maybe there's just one
| observer sharing all the bodies?
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| To answer your last to questions: I don't know! And those
| formulations are simply, in my opinion, rhetorical variations
| of the hard questions too. One observer many bodies or many
| observers one body are equally valid possibilities, as far as
| I can tell, and I am not referring to split personality
| disorders or a collective external memory for that matter.
| It's genuinely one of the most fascinating questions out
| there for me right now!
| zackmorris wrote:
| The only "scientific" explanation that makes sense to me is
| that consciousness spans time and space, where each focal point
| of attention is an aspect of a central whole, like a lifetime
| within a fractal of lifetimes stemming from when source (God)
| consciousness fractured itself to experience every viewpoint
| within the universe to avoid an eternity alone. It created what
| we experience as the shared (objective) reality from the
| original singularity that came into existence from the number
| line via the long tail of the quantum probability distribution.
| The concept of something from nothing is maybe the foundation
| of consciousness itself, since science may never be able to
| explain the subjective experience of conscious awareness or how
| it came to be.
|
| As a thought experiment, imagine we could emulate the corpus
| callosum between brain hemispheres through a computer chip, and
| had the medical technology to split someone in half. There have
| been cases where people have lost a brain hemisphere before
| birth or due to an accident but continued leading relatively
| normal lives, so we know that such a division is plausible.
|
| Before separation, we'd experience being an individual.
|
| At the moment of separation, our consciousness would anchor to
| one of the hemispheres we'll call "A". We'd see our other half
| "B" pull away and look back at us in curiosity as it continues
| experiencing its own consciousness. The other half B is still
| our consciousness, but anchored to a different point in
| spacetime. The halves would begin accruing their own memories
| independently, but act like the original individual for quite
| some time or even a lifetime.
|
| At the moment of reunification, we'd see B approaching and then
| experience a download where our memories suddenly contain more
| than they did a moment ago. We might even experience "hearing"
| the other half as another person until the merging is complete.
| But afterwards we'd still be the same individual we always
| were, just with new narratives running in the code of our
| mental model, built from the memories acquired while separated.
| This experience is identical for the other half, except seen
| from its own context.
|
| Warning (spoilers): This is analogous to a Vulcan mind meld,
| although it's unclear from Star Trek whether minds maintain
| their individuality or become a single consciousness. Because
| Spock's consciousness existed separately within McCoy until he
| was reincarnated, I tend to think that the show took the
| society of mind approach where our thoughts maybe come from a
| collection of simpler agents, meaning that Spock's anchor
| transferred to McCoy when they separated, so both their anchors
| shared one mind for a time, and Spock would have been in McCoy
| while he was asleep and his partial (a term borrowed from Eon
| by Greg Bear) B died in the warp chamber.
|
| But I think the hemisphere splitting thought experiment is more
| useful because it sheds insight on reincarnation and the
| multiverse. It also helps us step up to 4D/5D and consider what
| it subjectively feels like to straddle realities as we shift
| laterally through spacetime rather than waiting for events to
| unfold in forward (linear) time. Insight and downloads might
| come from our consciousness constantly splitting and reuniting
| from other timelines as it explores possible future outcomes in
| the quantum probability distribution.
|
| That might shed light on how the inner mind seemingly affects
| outer reality by overcoming the odds to survive via affecting
| probability itself (the principle of manifestation). In other
| words, it's likely that there is always an anchor, since
| quantum reality can't exist without an observer
| (consciousness), so an individual sees unlikely events whose
| odds of happening are so remote that science can only call them
| coincidences (synchronicities).
|
| That would mean that our souls always continue, even if our
| physical bodies die, by straddling another reality where a body
| for us still exists. We may experience an infinite, continuous,
| individual timeline spanning countless lifetimes over billions
| of years, interspersed with long periods of nonexistence that
| we have no way to remember. And each time we die, the people
| around us can no longer be with us, since our anchor is no
| longer in their reality.
|
| And it's unclear whether our soul can reincarnate in simpler
| life forms or if our complexity keeps evolving as our soul
| ascends. Dreams and psychedelic accounts seem to lean towards
| the idea of a lizard brain, where consciousness can exist
| unfiltered. So that it may be that we are allowed to "choose"
| our next incarnation during unconscious periods and "opt in" to
| a 3D experience like here on Earth to experience the novelty of
| suffering.
|
| The main takeaway is that since those around us are aspects of
| ourselves, then egocentric narcisism is a refusal to see the
| big picture. If we act to enrich ourselves by exploiting
| others, we karmically doom ourselves to more suffering in our
| next life. Our old A becomes the resource-hoarding enemy of our
| new B. Making a deal with the devil may feel good, but it's
| like being the top inmate in a prison, starving the soul of
| real connection. So the meek and pious spiral out towards
| peace/connection/heaven while the rich and powerful spiral in
| towards their own violence/loneliness/hell.
|
| I haven't read this, but I think it leans more towards the
| objective side, where multiple consciousnessness would occupy a
| single mind, more like schizophrenia than a fractal split from
| a single source consciousness:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
|
| And of course all of this could be completely wrong. But it's
| all derived from first principles and a collection of insights
| from the spiritual community that seem to keep resonating and
| expanding in this post-pandemic era entering the New Age. We
| may not know until we meet aliens who have performed these
| experiments. But it provides a useful framework to explore the
| idea of consciousness existing in higher dimensions and even
| visiting us through the paranormal/supernatural (magical)
| experiences we all have as conscious aware beings.
|
| Another benefit is that consciousness affecting probablity
| means that time travel is not possible, since any repeat
| scenario is a copy of the original and subject to random
| outcomes. The same events can never be replayed exactly the
| same way twice. Many vocal people in the scientific community
| have arrived at the conclusion that free will doesn't exist,
| which self-evidently defies our subjective experience, but
| they're basing that on the fallacy that time travel is
| possible.
|
| The impossibility of time travel is maybe the best (albiet
| weak) explanation we have for consciousness and free will. It's
| how our timeless nature steps down from 4D/5D to experience a
| timeline, similarly to how a photon doesn't experience time
| since it's moving at the speed of light. There may only be one
| photon in the whole universe, creating a 4D holographic
| "crystal" encoding everything here. The mutable state of our
| consciousness is kind of like the in-between times when pure
| functional programming blocks to wait for new input, with the
| deterministic portion running unconsciously. An android would
| have mutable state, while a robot would mostly run hardcoded
| logic.
|
| Which is why I don't subscribe to the idea that humans are just
| AIs running in complex robots, or that this is a simulation.
| Although if we substitute the word dream instead, then it all
| begins to make sense again. There's no matrix or holodeck that
| created the simulation, it's more like source consciousness
| projects the simulation to give us something to do. And of
| course there's no way to prove any of this, it's just a
| descriptive model that may lead to deeper insights.
| evrimoztamur wrote:
| Thank you for your thoughtful comment, I found myself nodding
| along until the very end. I subscribe, so far, to the idea
| that we might simply be fragments of a fundamental
| consciousness, but it still remains a bit frightening to me
| (despite its lack of effect on my way of living) that we may
| never find the 'root' of it all.
|
| I also agree to the connection between the karmic 'field' and
| our consciousness, and I sometimes feel like I am simply
| guiding an observing vector across all possibilities,
| collapsing the wave functions along time. Other commenters in
| the thread have done a better job articulating that aspect
| than me, however!
| cobber2005 wrote:
| I like the idea of 'individuation'[0] where individual things
| (rocks, living bodies, minds, societies) come into being from
| their preindividual environment. As I understand this idea, it
| is just that a mind individuates within a body, and that mind
| comes to call itself 'I'. So it's not that we existed before a
| mind individuated, but rather we come to find ourself
| recognizing ourself as 'I' after individuating.
|
| [0] https://epochemagazine.org/40/on-psychic-and-collective-
| indi...
| dspillett wrote:
| My reading (caveat: not a biologist, other sort of scientist, nor
| philosopher) is that a brain is required to translate the
| environment and its collection of problems into something (or
| some things) that its simpler structures can "solve" (where
| "solve" could just mean "act usefully in response to" and that
| act/response could be to ignore), and then to translate any
| responses but out to that more complex environment.
|
| Cells can solve problems in their limited context, though that
| context can be less limited than you might first think (consider
| single celled life can have relatively complex interactions).
| Groups of cells can solve more complex problems, by working
| directly together or by some acting as support structures while
| others do the solving. Complex bodies and brains build up in
| parts from there over time.
| mobiuscog wrote:
| So brains are required for multi-modality, but not actual
| 'intelligence' ?
|
| (Herein everyone screams at my misuse of terms and tells me I'm
| wrong - which at least should help explain things)
| agumonkey wrote:
| Interesting to see Levin's zeitgeist spreading (even though
| considering the amount of podcast and discussions he made
| explains that too).
|
| I don't know what the biological/medical field thought about
| single cell and tissue level intelligence before but I found this
| gap in the usual medical thinking (usually things are either
| genetic or biochemical/hormonal) quite mind blowing.
|
| Hopefully this results in new opportunities for finer medical
| therapies.
| feverzsj wrote:
| I remember some TED guy talked about consciousness being basic
| substance around us, and the brain just concentrates them to make
| it significant.
| Daniel_sk wrote:
| That's the theory of Panpsychism.
| bdhcuidbebe wrote:
| There's so much nonsense on the TED stage. They even allowed
| Graham Hancock.
| guappa wrote:
| I think they created a brand and now you can just pay, get up
| on stage and say whatever you want.
| zilti wrote:
| and it's even worse with TEDx
| nottorp wrote:
| How is that new? Maybe if you've never heard about evolution :)
|
| All living beings have some kind of nervous system that has the
| control. Some have it concentrated somewhere - we call that a
| 'brain'. Simpler organisms have it everywhere in their body.
| ovi256 wrote:
| He's literally investigating the nuances and limits of what you
| describe in your second paragraph. Yes, the outline you
| described is obvious.
| apienx wrote:
| > "Indeed, the very act of living is by default a cognitive
| state, Lyon says. Every cell needs to be constantly evaluating
| its surroundings, making decisions about what to let in and what
| to keep out and planning its next steps. Cognition didn't arrive
| later in evolution. It's what made life possible."
|
| Yes. Cognition isn't just about solving differential equations
| and the like. It also refers to the most basic
| functions/processes such as perception and evaluation.
| DrStormyDaniels wrote:
| Is perception and evaluation a basic function? By analogy with
| cellular life, maybe. But I think this abstraction hides more
| than it reveals.
| max_ wrote:
| I have a question. Doesn't the complexity of the problems it can
| possibly solve vary from cell to brain.
|
| Or is it like a turing machine where a simple abstraction can
| solve any possible "computable" problem?
| teekert wrote:
| I guess a ("simple") molecular biological mechanism can be
| Turing complete, but if it's as slow as a mechanical ticker
| tape, the mechanism will be too slow to respond to any inputs
| in a relevant time frame. The speed of the response is
| important in an evolutionary context.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| SLime molds!!!!
|
| Slime molds can get very large as a single cell, visible to the
| naked eye weighing in at several pounds large:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myxogastria
|
| It says 44 pounds.... that's pretty chunky for a "cell"
| iandanforth wrote:
| There are a couple traps to be aware of with this article.
|
| 1. "Bioelectricity"
|
| This is a generic term which doesn't capture the nuance of charge
| gradients and chemical gradients in cells. While you can directly
| apply charges to interact with gradient based biological systems,
| this is a brute force method. Cells have chemically selective
| walls. So while applying an external electrical voltage can act
| in a similar manner as causing a neuron to fire, it is far less
| precise than the calcium and sodium channel mediated
| depolarization which implements normal firing. Said another way
| 'bioelectricity' is not simple.
|
| 2. Replacement
|
| This one is a bit more subtle. If you find that you _can_ affect
| a system by one means that is not the same thing as saying the
| means _is_ the cause. Take the example of using RNA to transfer
| memory from one Aplysia to another. Immediately after transfer
| the recipient _does not have the memory_. It takes time for the
| introduced RNA to affect sensory cells so that they become more
| sensitive to stimulation. This is in contrast to a trained animal
| that has already undergone synaptic remodeling. If you have the
| appropriate synapses but were somehow able to remove all the
| relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would continue to
| 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.
|
| In reality there are multiple systems that work together over
| multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some of
| those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other
| interventions. Because of this complexity you can never say 'it's
| really about X', the best you can say is 'X plays a major role'
| or 'X contributes Y percent to this observed phenomenon'.
| generalizations wrote:
| > In reality there are multiple systems that work together over
| multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some
| of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other
| interventions. Because of this complexity you can never say
| 'it's really about X', the best you can say is 'X plays a major
| role' or 'X contributes Y percent to this observed phenomenon'.
|
| You can say the same thing about computer systems - as long as
| you don't understand the underlying logic. If you don't
| understand that the chemistry of transistors doesn't matter as
| much as the C code, you can say exactly the same critique about
| how a thinkpad works: _" So while applying an external
| electrical voltage can act in a similar manner as causing a
| neuron to fire, it is far less precise than the calcium and
| sodium channel mediated depolarization which implements normal
| firing. Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple....In
| reality there are multiple systems that work together over
| multiple timescales to produce the behaviors we observe. Some
| of those systems can have their contributions mimicked by other
| interventions."_
|
| Once you do understand the logic - the 'why' of von neumann
| machines and Javascript and transistors, it's clear that your
| claim isn't true and there is an underlying logic. The trouble
| is, until we positively identify that logic, we can't know if
| it exists or not and we're stuck debating the bioequivalent of
| the fundamental computational significance of the clock cycle
| speed of a CPU.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| I have a very rudimentary understanding of how electricity
| and electronic circuitry and transistor work, but it does
| make me wonder:
|
| We use programming languages like C to create complex
| branching algorithms that are turned a linear machine code
| tape. Programmers generally can not understand assembly even
| if they understand the branching code that is turned into
| assembly. Even if assembly had variables, just the fact that
| if/else's and function calls are turned into jumps is enough
| to make the code too complicated to understand. It might be
| possible to disassemble back to C by resolving the jumps into
| something that is easier to understand.
|
| Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is actually
| a naturally-forming high level "brain language" that is
| turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-level "brain
| assembly," but when we look at it all we see is the assembly.
| That what the brain is actually doing is relatively simple,
| but because we can only observe the output of the compiler
| function it appears to be insanely complex to reverse-
| engineer.
|
| Then again, I don't have the faintest idea of how brains work
| either.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Imagine if brains worked the same way. That there is
| actually a naturally-forming high level "brain language"
| that is turned by a "brain compiler" function into a low-
| level "brain assembly," but when we look at it all we see
| is the assembly._
|
| And then make it analog and full of self-referential hacks.
|
| Though honesty, if nature wanted to screw with us, it would
| make brain properly encrypted, perhaps even running on
| homomorphic encryption. Good luck deciphering that.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| If our brains evolved to be protected against man-in-the-
| middle attacks, that would be extremely scary because it
| would imply the proto-humans that didn't have this
| ability went extinct to some brain-invading predator!
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| If we go far enough back, we may have done common
| ancestor/s that did develop compensatory mechanism/s to
| at least somewhat mitigate specific kinds of attacks,
| like what tarantula hawks can do to tarantulas.
| bagful wrote:
| Imagine this to be the very reason the human mind is
| mostly self-illegible -- that the birth of the
| inscrutable unconscious was a defense mechanism?
| achileas wrote:
| Unconscious behaviors are often conserved across species
| and (lower level brain behaviors) in functionally and
| evolutionarily similar parts of the brain.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| I guess technically true, but the cell channels are vastly
| more complex and much harder to measure. Chemical gradients
| can pass electric currents, but they can also trigger other
| chemical cascades and cause physical changes in the cell that
| may not be reflected when a charge is applied. Logic is also
| fairly consistent across computer systems, where biological
| systems can function differently from person to person, and
| even within the same person at different points in time.
| There are so many more variables with the living system.
| generalizations wrote:
| Honestly, it sounds like what you're saying boils down to
| claiming it's just too complicated for there to _be_ an
| underlying logic.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| Ehhh, I am definitely saying its too complex for us to
| properly figure it out today. I wouldn't categorically
| rule it out, but I do think the logic and rules in
| biological systems are much squishier than physics or
| chemistry.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > there is an underlying logic. The trouble is, until we
| positively identify that logic, we can't know if it exists or
| not
|
| First you exclaim there is an underlying logic, then in the
| next sentence you say we don't know whether it exists, which
| completely contradicts your claim.
| daveguy wrote:
| > Said another way 'bioelectricity' is not simple.
|
| > If you have the appropriate synapses but were somehow able to
| remove all the relevant RNA in an instant, the animal would
| continue to 'remember' its training. Synapses are sufficient.
|
| I'm not sure these two statements are compatible. The first is
| definitely true, and rna does function on a slower timescale.
| We can't be 100% confident that some of the complexity we don't
| understand in the first statement wouldn't have an impact in
| the second scenario, can we?
| eurekin wrote:
| Where one can learn about that in more details?
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I also want to know how much of this was replicated by
| independent, skeptical sources looking for alternative
| explanations. One thing I see in "science" reporting is that
| one or a few people make wild claims, it hits the news, and
| people believe their word on faith with no replication. There's
| also many statements about what we know where the claims made
| should have citations, too. Yet, people who have never run
| experiments like that are nodding along saying, "Of course it's
| true."
|
| Or was all this replicated? What strengths and weaknesses did
| they hypothesize in these studies? What did they prove or
| disprove? What's the next steps? And can we already implement
| any of those in simulators?
|
| (Note: I think agents poking and prodding the world can
| definitely be implemented in simulators. Even primitive, game
| engines should be able to model some of that.)
| dekhn wrote:
| I am not sure I would call RNA transferring regulatory programs
| "memory". This looks more like epigenetic transfer than what we
| would call memory (IE, factual recall). My training was before
| the more recent work with Aplysia, but "RNA memory transfer in
| planaria" was presented as an example of "how to make big
| claims with irreproducible experiments" in grad school.
|
| I appreciate that epigenetics is a well-established field at
| this point but I worry people conflate its effects with other
| phenomena.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _This is in contrast to a trained animal that has already
| undergone synaptic remodeling. If you have the appropriate
| synapses but were somehow able to remove all the relevant RNA
| in an instant, the animal would continue to 'remember' its
| training. Synapses are sufficient._
|
| Not if you removed the DNA. Epigenetic changes to the DNA are
| what maintain the synapse at it's "learned" state. Here's a
| link:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584402...
|
| In addition, research has shown neurons communicating via mRNA
| (surrounded by a lipid).
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-00492-w
|
| https://www.inverse.com/article/40113-arc-protein-ancient-mo...
|
| Lots of interesting stuff in this arena.
| kfrzcode wrote:
| Makes me think about Michael Levin et. al, working on
| understanding bioelectromechanics.... Fascinating stuff
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hG6GIzNM0aM
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| This is just incredible! I follow Michael Leavin since quite a
| while now and I am sure that he will earn a Nobel Price for this
| outstanding research! All the other things that he adresses in
| his Presentations and also Interviews are just mindblowing!(the
| one with Lex Fridman is quite in depth, but I prefer others even
| more)
|
| This really has the potential to revolutionize our understanding
| of intelligence, mind and medicine. He may just tell cells to
| grow a new heart without modifying genes. He want to have what he
| calls an 'anatomical compiler' which translates our "designs" to
| electro-magnetic cell stimuli so that they will build this.
|
| For me this is really pointing into a worldview that is much more
| in line with view that the ancient mystics from all cultures
| throughout all the ages have been pointing towards: Intelligence
| is something fundamental to existance, like space and time (maybe
| even more fundamental). It is all a play of intelligence, it is
| phenomenal and it can be tapped into. This is amazing!!!
| saurabhpandit26 wrote:
| Micheal levin is just incredible, he appears on lot of podcasts
| on Youtube. His work on collective intelligence of cells,
| xenobots and regeneration is just mind boggling.
| naasking wrote:
| Brains are not required to solve problems, yes, but they are
| required to think. That's one of their defining characteristics.
| It's not a thought without something like a brain, at best it's a
| pre-programmed/pre-trained behavioural response.
| dimal wrote:
| That's misunderstanding what they're saying. If you watch some
| of Michael Levin's talks on YouTube, he specifically uses
| William James' definition of intelligence (Intelligence is a
| fixed goal with variable means of achieving it) and has
| experimentally shown this capability at cellular scales. He
| shows how it cannot be pre-programmed behavior. There seems to
| be goal directed behavior.
| naasking wrote:
| > (Intelligence is a fixed goal with variable means of
| achieving it) and has experimentally shown this capability at
| cellular scales.
|
| Supposing I accept that, what does this have to do with
| thought, which is the claim that I was specifically
| responding to? Does Levin or James also show that this can
| only be done by having thoughts?
|
| Edit: for instance, as opposed to having some non-thinking
| process like gradient descent, or more plausibly, some kind
| of hill climbing.
| dimal wrote:
| I agree, it's not "thinking" in the way brains think, but I
| was just disagreeing with the assertion that it's "just"
| pre-programmed. He's shown pretty convincingly that these
| phenomena can not be preprogrammed. He's put organisms in
| novel developmental states that never exist in nature and
| shown that the cells work around the problems he gives them
| to build up a working body. I think if you get stuck on
| "thinking", yeah it's not thinking, but it's some sort of
| cognition that is above simple optimization.
|
| I honestly think if you (or anyone) watches one of his
| talks it will blow your mind. Prior to watching his talks,
| I would have said pretty much the same thing as you, but
| his work completely upended my view of biology. He's
| basically breaking down how we get from "just physics" to a
| working organism and finding a lot of surprising things.
| Unfortunately, there's way more information than I can
| condense into a comment.
| thfuran wrote:
| >it's not "thinking" in the way brains think
|
| Are you sure brains aren't doing any of it?
| svieira wrote:
| Which is one of the arguments the ancient Greeks (Aristotle
| in particular) used to argue that God must exist. Things are
| clearly ordered to ends (have goal-directed behavior). Others
| came to the conclusion that all things that are are part of
| one enormous goal-directed-entity, but that conclusion
| involves a bootstrapping problem on the part of that entity
| (which is composed of parts) and so I don't hold with it.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'm not sure I see a bootstrapping issue. Time and chaos
| will remove non teleological agents, doesn't it ? it would
| just emerge out of selection.
| Arjuna144 wrote:
| > "... but they are required to think"
|
| Let me humbly suggest to you to not make such (Truth)
| statements! I dont know of any hard evidence that supports
| this. I know this is what most people believe, but the focus is
| on believe.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Next stage in AI?
|
| > According to Bongard, that's because these AIs are, in a sense,
| too heady. "If you play with these AIs, you can start to see
| where the cracks are. And they tend to be around things like
| common sense and cause and effect, which points toward why you
| need a body. If you have a body, you can learn about cause and
| effect because you can cause effects. But these AI systems can't
| learn about the world by poking at it."
| swayvil wrote:
| Complexity, tho dazzling and impressive, is apparently a small
| trick. Consider the simple algorithms that generate fractals,
| alife and random numbers.
|
| Problem-solving intelligence appears to be similar in that we
| consider it impressive and special, but, in the big scheme, is
| actually rather trivial and common.
|
| Speaking as a person who has spent literally decades
| enthusiastically chewing upon software design riddles, it makes
| me feel a bit insectile.
|
| I mean, the termites in my walls probably feel what I feel, and
| they're just playing with mud and spit.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Water can solve a maze!
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| This is pretty similar to concept in "Children of Time" Adrian
| Tchaikovsky.
|
| I've always thought the concept in the book of 'DNA' memory
| storage, was SCI-FI. Cool concept, but really far out. So this is
| pretty exciting that this Sci-Fi concept could happen.
|
| What if we could drink something to give us the memories of
| someone else. And this would be way to drink a 'degree', and
| learn a ton fast.
|
| "Glanzman was able to transfer a memory of an electric shock from
| one sea slug to another by extracting RNA from the brains of
| shocked slugs and injecting it into the brains of new slugs. The
| recipients then "remembered" to recoil from the touch that
| preceded the shock. If RNA can be a medium of memory storage, any
| cell might have the ability, not just neurons."
| rootusrootus wrote:
| That explains so much about HN.
| aubanel wrote:
| "Brains are not required to think or solve problems" is a perfect
| intro to a Leetcode job interview, for a candidate that already
| grokked 300 of these problems.
| zubairq wrote:
| Makes sense that brains are not required to solve problems. I am
| not brainy but seem to be able to brute force my way to solve
| some complex problems by sheer force of will
| maxglute wrote:
| Feels like Peter Watt's Blindsight, conciousness not needed for
| advanced problem solving, and may actually hinder.
| AlienRobot wrote:
| Interesting. What if the brain is leaving a "footprint" on the
| cells of the nervous system, and it's possible to recover the
| brain by making a mold of this footprint?
| schwarzrules wrote:
| This is reassuring. I never thought I'd be able to think or solve
| problems, but this gives me hope!
| febed wrote:
| Michael Levin is seeking answers to seemingly basic biology
| questions. I'm a layperson but how come mainstream biologists
| didn't pursue this line of thinking as far as he has?
| efitz wrote:
| This is great news given the relative scarcity of brains among
| humans.
| nmstoker wrote:
| This is a little like the 60s experiment teaching what I believe
| were nematodes to arch their backs in response to a light shone
| by the researchers.
|
| Those nematodes were ground up and fed to new untrained nematodes
| which then acquired the back arching response.
|
| Can't find the original paper but it was covered in the 1984 book
| The Science in Science Fiction.
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