[HN Gopher] Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from...
___________________________________________________________________
Is artificial consciousness achievable? Lessons from the human
brain
Author : wonderlandcal
Score : 159 points
Date : 2024-05-19 03:18 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
| rvikmanis wrote:
| No
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Y
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious, man.
|
| The only thing which we might say with much certainty is that
| things which are more "like us" along some metric are more likely
| to be actually conscious, and things which are less "like us" are
| less likely to be so. Maybe everything is conscious. Maybe
| nothing except one's own self. But you'll never truly know one
| way or another, even if humanity invented some kind of Freaky
| Friday body swap thing.
| ben_w wrote:
| I know that at least one other human is conscious, otherwise
| the term would never have been invented.
|
| But you have no way to tell if I am as conscious as I claim to
| be, or if I'm just a large language model trained by humanity
| :P
| golf_mike wrote:
| Can you provide proof for the first claim?
| ben_w wrote:
| Which part exactly are you seeking proof of, and to what
| standard?
|
| "I know" is unprovable to others, unless you examine the
| wiring of my brain. (But then, what is "knowledge"?)
|
| "at least one other human is conscious, otherwise the term
| would never have been invented." -- it's always possible
| that I'm a Bolzmann brain and this was just luck.
|
| I don't see how the term could have been invented by a mind
| that didn't actually have it, except with astronomical low
| probably random events.
| vixen99 wrote:
| In thinking about this perennial problem it's worth bearing
| in mind that human beings pick up and process an immense
| amount of data on a continuous basis, that is currently
| unavailable to any LLM.
| elicksaur wrote:
| And all on an estimated 100 watts!
| ben_w wrote:
| 20 for the brain, 60-125 for the whole body depending on
| if you mean "normally" or "metabolic minimum".
| vidarh wrote:
| No, we don't. We don't even know if existence has an extent
| in time, because our only way of "interfacing" with time is
| our experience of memory we can't prove is real.
|
| For what you know, you're a lone entity confined to an
| infinitely short period of time, and all else is an illusion.
|
| But of course this isn't a _useful_ assumption in most
| respects.
| ben_w wrote:
| Ah, I see you're more of an A. J. Ayer fan than a Descartes
| fan.
|
| I think that if an LLM has any consciousness, it would be
| an experience like this -- one where the past was a fiction
| it invented to fit the prompt, and the "now" was the only
| moment before the mind was reset.
|
| But I'd put that in the same basket as my... ah, nephew
| comment? Cousin comment? I guess you'd call it that if we
| have parent comments etc.?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40406398
|
| What you say is not wrong in principle, but it's in the
| same "cognitively unstable" basket as a Boltzmann brain,
| where to accept it would mean I couldn't trust my own
| reason to believe it.
| pas wrote:
| Joscha Bach's model of "evolution of a shared consciousness,
| but compartmentalized into separate bodies" seems to be the one
| that makes the most sense currently
| smokel wrote:
| Consciousness might be overrated. It could simply be a short-
| term memory of the state you were in.
| a_random_canuck wrote:
| This is my take. Consciousness is overrated and probably just
| an emergent phenomena of the brain processing external
| stimuli into memory, moving memories around, etc etc, in a
| continuous and never ending flow. Free will is just an
| illusion of our deterministic but fundamentally random
| reality.
|
| There isn't even an agreed upon definition for what
| consciousness is from a scientific perspective.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| And the reason that it is overrated, is because it has to
| feel special for the bearers because it makes them
| prioritise their survival.
|
| Consciousness is largely a way to have a reward function
| for set of behaviours that keep you alive through reason.
|
| It appears at a level where reasoning is intelligent enough
| that you need a more complex reward function.
| everdrive wrote:
| Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined. You
| see this a lot, and one of the more popular instances are
| questions like "is cereal a salad?" It plays on the fact that
| the definition of a salad is relatively loose, and because it's
| loose items which aren't usually associated with the word do
| actually fit the definition.
|
| Consciousness feels much the same way: there's a very loose
| definition which is colloquially understood by almost everyone.
| Asking whether humans are conscious (and I know you were being
| somewhat facetious) feels like it fits into this frame of
| thought. Consciousness, as most people understand it, is
| something which almost all people possess and something like a
| rock cannot possess. I think it's perfectly fine to argue that
| a rock or a tree can be conscious in some way. However, this
| does require a precise definition of consciousness in order to
| clearly differentiate it from the loose colloquial notion that
| most people hold.
| whoitwas wrote:
| There's no definition because we haven't been able to
| quantify it.
| ben_w wrote:
| That's not the problem.
|
| There are 40 different definitions of consciousness, some
| of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on which
| one we mean in any given context and indeed sometimes
| conflate them without realising it in the middle of a
| sentence.
| anon291 wrote:
| > There are 40 different definitions of consciousness,
| some of which we can quantify, we just don't all agree on
| which one we mean in any given context and indeed
| sometimes conflate them without realising it in the
| middle of a sentence.
|
| When a word has a myriad meanings, none of which are
| generally accepted, we typically say the word has no
| definition. Sure, particular senses of its meaning may be
| well-defined, but the word itself is elusive.
| ben_w wrote:
| > none of which are generally accepted
|
| It's not "none", though. A paramedic will absolutely know
| exactly what they mean when they're performing a test for
| consciousness, it's just that test isn't useful in this
| context.
|
| "Awareness of internal and external existence" is
| another, and I think Claude 3 demonstrates behaviour
| which fits this meaning of the term.
|
| Qualia is a huge open question because nobody knows what
| that one would mean or imply or how to test for it.
|
| And so on.
| lumb63 wrote:
| But how do you know another human is "conscious"? Certainly
| there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very
| difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the
| matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to
| peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced
| computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions,
| words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn't
| be able to tell the difference.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I think mnay people believe that consciousness is what
| consciousness does. That is,
|
| > Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to
| peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently
| advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact
| motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you
| wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
|
| Makes no sense, in this conception of consciousness, any
| more than you can fake intelligence. Basically
| consciousness might just be what we call the inner workings
| of the mind of a sufficiently advanced agent, one capable
| at least of meaningfully interacting with other agents
| around it.
|
| I'm not saying this is the correct theory, but it's a
| perfectly valid theory of consciousness, just like all the
| others.
| dkz999 wrote:
| I really like equating faking intelligence to
| consciousness. Its intuitive because we have all seen
| that, yet so complex its nearly futile to give meaningful
| predictive criteria for when an agent is 'being
| intelligent'.
|
| In addition to having meaningful interactions with
| others, i would add consciousness also requires
| meaningful interaction with its-self.
|
| What is 'meaninful' also comes down to language, which,
| personally, leads me back to the idea that consciousness
| is essentially a linguistic product/phenomenon. Duck-
| typed.
|
| And at the end of the day, if you enjoy spending time
| asking "is this thing really x" where x lies on a vector
| you can't even begin measure, I got this deal on a bridge
| you can get in on, real cheap...
| Scarblac wrote:
| Bit it's useless,its circular. The definition must have
| something to do with the experience of qualia, that's the
| hard to explain part.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I somewhat disagree, I feel that the prevailing position
| is that unlike intelligence (e.g. Legg&Hutter
| definitions) consciousness can _not_ be easily assumed
| from mere behavior and relies on certain things happening
| (or not happening) inside the agent.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This may be a common position among philosophers, or more
| specifically among philosophers who think concepts like
| "p-zombies" make any sense. But I think most people in
| general view any being whose behavior is human-like
| enough as having some form of consciousness.
|
| For most people, being conscious is proved by things like
| mourning dead companions, like caring for your babies and
| showing distress if they are missing/hurt, like being
| friendly and playful. That's why most people feel that
| certain animals they interact with more or have seen on
| TV are conscious (dogs, cats, elephants, whales, chimps
| and other primates), but that other animals are not
| (insects, rats, fish). Note that I am not saying that
| rats are objectively less conscious than dogs by these
| criteria, just that this is what many people base their
| beliefs on, and that it of course depends on their
| knowledge as well.
| amenhotep wrote:
| You don't. But it's solipsism to think otherwise, and while
| solipsism is hard to argue against logically it's not a
| very interesting or useful way of navigating the world we
| experience. We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies
| but the value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in
| every other way, they also experience like us.
| majikaja wrote:
| > We can't prove other people aren't p-zombies but the
| value bet is definitely that, appearing like us in every
| other way, they also experience like us.
|
| Logic doesn't need to be binary. There is no need for the
| answer to such a question to even be defined.
| Scarblac wrote:
| It doesn't need to be solipsism - for instance, maybe
| half of us are conscious.
|
| But if we can't even know that, if we don't even have a
| test to see whether some human or animal is conscious or
| not, how can we start trying to figure out what makes
| them conscious? It seems it's impossible to get to
| something falsifiable without such a test.
|
| Like, you say a rock isn't conscious. But what about a
| sponge? An amoeba? How can you answer that if you can
| only guess answer whether your neighbour is?
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Solipsism is incoherent because it's not radical
| skepticism. All of the critique of the external world
| also apply to belief in the primacy on internal
| experience. Any good solipsist should just accept the
| "evil demon" of descartes, embrace radical doubt, and say
| "I don't even know if I truly exist or not".
|
| "I don't know if I'm a P zombie, and I don't know if I'm
| a replicant or not, Deckard!"
| vereis wrote:
| well doesn't the argument suggest the only thing you can
| be certain of is I, or at least some 'experiencing agent'
| exist, otherwise there would be no subject to do the
| experiencing
| dpig_ wrote:
| Yeah the first-person subjectivity has to arise before
| second and third persons can arise. But with some further
| investigation, one can find that the things they take to
| be their subject are in fact object to them, too.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It is very relevant to keep analyzing and keep trying to
| get any other answer to this question, because while
| "appearing like us in every other way, they also
| experience like us" applies to other humans, as soon as
| we want to talk about the consciousness (or lack of it)
| of other actors, this argument can not be applied and we
| would very much like to get to any other criteria of
| consciousness which could be applicable to arbitrary non-
| human agents.
|
| Even if we axiomatically assume that everyone else is not
| a p-zombie, trying to find any evidence towards your/mine
| consciousness _other_ than that axiom is helpful as a
| candidate for such criteria which can be tested and
| validated.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| We define ourselves to be conscious (even if we don't know
| exactly what that means). We assume that other humans are
| similar to ourselves, and we (at least sometimes) see
| mental activity in other humans that we recognize as being
| similar to our own. Therefore we conclude that other humans
| are conscious.
| goatlover wrote:
| It's well defined in the philosophical literature as the felt
| experience of colors, sounds, pains, etc which make up our
| subjective experiences of perception, imagination, dreams,
| etc, Qualia is the technical word, but it's also
| controversial, depending on the philosopher's position on the
| hard problem and their views on perception (they might
| replace qualia with representational or relational
| properties).
|
| Another way of putting it is to use the primary versus
| secondary qualities. Primary qualities belong to properties
| of things we perceive. Secondary are properties that are part
| of the perceiving or experiencing subject. Shape, number,
| composition are properties of things. Sounds, colors, pains
| are properties of a perceiver.
| anon291 wrote:
| Well-defined in the philosophical sense, perhaps (though I
| think some would disagree). It is not well-defined in the
| scientific sense. There is no way to quantify or classify
| something as conscious.
| unconsciousrais wrote:
| What if the distinction we are all groping for is immortality
| at the cost of determinism? A machine can be powered down and
| dismantled. A new machine can be built and fed the exact same
| training data, or run the same model, and presumably it would
| behave the exact same way. Any entity whose behaviors are
| that regeneratable and that replicable is perhaps less
| "conscious" than entities which are not.
| telmo wrote:
| > Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined.
|
| I will give you my favorite definition, given to me by my
| friend Bruno Marchal, a brilliant mathematician from Brussels
| who spent his life thinking about such topics:
|
| "Consciousness is that which cannot be doubted."
|
| It felt insufficient when he told me, but now I am convinced.
| It may require some introspection to "get it". It did for me.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| That's just objectivity, and I don't think consciousness is
| synonymous with objectivity at all!
|
| Cogitoist propaganda. The appearance of thought is not
| necessarily the same as thought, so you don't actually know
| you think just because you believe you think. The cogito (I
| think therefor I am), like your statement, is incoherent.
|
| LLMs will swear up and down (with a prompt) that they are
| thinking beings, therefor "they are". They are not
| ontological actors because of their appearance of doubting
| their own existence. That's not thought!
| captainclam wrote:
| Addressing your first thought...anything that you would
| call "objective" can be "doubted" by ceding the tiny tiny
| possibility that you are a simulation or Boltzmann brain
| or brain in a vat. The evidence before you may not
| actually be representative of the "objective" reality.
|
| The fact that there is experience at all, the contents of
| which may be "doubted", cannot be doubted.
|
| I'm not unequivocally claiming this but that's the thrust
| of the argument.
| zero-sharp wrote:
| I'm sorry, but this makes me cringe. When we learn science,
| there's always some level of rigor with the ideas. Maybe
| there's some kind of justification with math, or some kind
| of experiment we can perform to remove doubt. The important
| features are reductionism and verifiability. It's not a
| weird introspection riddle.
|
| I'm sure Bruno is brilliant. But I still don't know what
| consciousness is. And I think that "definition" doesn't
| meet the modern scientific standard. And I strongly oppose
| the idea that in order to learn science I should have to
| spend time introspecting.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Think about what things "cannot be doubted", with all the
| brain-in-a-vat types of caveats. It's not trying to be a
| scientific definition. It operates earlier on the
| epistemological ladder than science can be meaningfully
| applied, and that might well be the only reasonable place
| to define consciousness. (I still can't call it a _great_
| definition, even if it did perfectly correspond with the
| concept. Too indirect.)
| zero-sharp wrote:
| There are lots of statements we can form that "make
| sense" on a linguistic level. It's easy to convince
| yourself of something when the only standard is
| "linguistic plausibility." Consciousness is presumably a
| physical process. When you say "It operates earlier on
| the epistemological ladder than science can be
| meaningfully applied", I just don't know what that means.
| You're going to have to give me examples of what other
| beliefs we hold that occupy that space. Justified belief
| about reality has to be based on measurement (science).
|
| If consciousness isn't a physical process, then you've
| lost me again. People have discussed these things for
| hundreds of years.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| > You're going to have to give me examples of what other
| beliefs we hold that occupy that space.
|
| Yeah, there's not a lot down there, mostly your
| assumptions about your sense inputs corresponding to some
| kind of causally consistent external reality. It's the
| same region as the lead up to what you seem to take as an
| axiom, "Justified belief about reality has to be based on
| measurement".
| telmo wrote:
| Introspection is "looking within". Why should science not
| be interested in that? It is an aspect of reality. It is
| not more or less real than galaxies or atoms. I know that
| it is a very perplexing one when one holds a physicalist
| metaphysical commitment, which is easy to confuse with
| some notion of "no-nonsense modern scientific standard",
| and so there is a temptation to pretend the undeniable is
| not there, or that it is "ill defined" in some way.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Consciousness seems to be a word that is poorly defined_
|
| That's because it's not some foreign thing or theory that we
| need a good definition of to understand what we're talking
| about. For us humans it's not a loose colloquial notion -
| it's concrete in a way that even the most well defined things
| aren't, because it's directly experienced.
| wouldbecouldbe wrote:
| To be fair, that's all we know. That's all we are. That's all
| we can truly say exists in our world.
|
| All the theories, names & everything we have are mental models
| around what we call objective reality.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious,
| man.
|
| This isnt an interesting path outside the paradox of proof. We
| are fine disregarding that there are truths that are unprovable
| in math... I think we need to make that leap in this realm as
| well.
|
| Concisousness is also probably a bad term, concepts like
| sentience and sapience need to be the ones we are talking
| about. We might get to one, long before the other...
| vidarh wrote:
| It is relevant here because it goes to the very core of what
| we're talking about, though.
| foobarian wrote:
| > We don't even know whether other human beings are conscious,
| man.
|
| This is why so far the Kantian philosophy makes the most sense
| to me. I can tell that something is there because I am thinking
| it, but can't tell about any others.
|
| The really scary thing is the question of why this particular
| body at this particular time. It's like when born, organisms
| generate a "consciousness vortex/attractor" that binds to a
| particular identity.
|
| It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the
| consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body (unless
| it's like coroutines and it doesn't matter which identity ends
| up in the body).
|
| We also know that removing parts of the brain can cause
| memories and certain features to go away.
| 9dev wrote:
| > It's also interesting that sleeping or fainting pauses the
| consciousness, and later still ends up in the same body
|
| I always found it even more interesting how your body can
| switch off the consciousness if it gets in the way. Try
| holding your breath for example--do it too long, and your
| body will kill the faulty process and restore the system to a
| working state before attempting a new deployment.
| holoduke wrote:
| Unless you can be conscious in multiple places at the same
| time. Theoretically it must be possible by dissecting the brain
| piece by piece and restoring it to one afterwards.
| shmerl wrote:
| Artificial consciousness is a better term for what's often called
| AI in science fiction.
| whoitwas wrote:
| Oracle, human agent maybe?
| gokuldas011011 wrote:
| Yes, the beauty of nature is, there is no magic. Everything is
| governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can replicate it.
| MyFirstSass wrote:
| The more i've studied i've come to the opposite conclusion.
|
| Nature is >99% magic and though some tiny slices of human
| friendly interfaces of reality are replicable much more is
| chaos, weird emergence, fields, probabilities and stuff so
| bizarre to our mammalian logic that we might as well call it
| magic, god, the simulation or just bleeding edge physics as the
| whole field is getting weirder and weirder.
|
| The whole notion of natures beauty stemming from some
| replicable, controllable and "no magic" scenario is a very
| "homo sapiens" desire for order and control.
|
| We know close to nothing, and therein lies the beauty in my
| eyes.
| throwaway5371 wrote:
| i have moved to this camp as well, and i don't mean in the
| "we don't understand it so we call it magic", i mean it seems
| more and more like actual magic.
|
| people are talking about timing attacks on state updates in
| the universe, hopefully we can exploit it
| sdiupIGPWEfh wrote:
| > people are talking about timing attacks on state updates
| in the universe, hopefully we can exploit it
|
| If the universe did happen to be a simulation (as opposed
| to just naturally holographic), I imagine exploiting it
| might be the only way to conclusively prove so. As an
| actual simulation, there would be a risk of someone and/or
| something observing it. If intelligence in our universe
| tends to eventually discover exploits and if the observers
| aren't fond of simulation errors, we might have ourselves
| an unexpected answer to the Fermi paradox.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| At the lowest levels, with quantum weirdness (to our way of
| thinking), yes, we can only create metaphors to try and don't
| really understand it. Same at the extreme other end where
| relativistic effects can't be ignored.
|
| But we don't live at those levels. That low-level
| unpredictability usually is statistically predictable at the
| macro level where we live. "Coloric" doesn't exist, but it is
| a perfectly usable concept. There is no need to actually
| measure the position and velocity of every molecule of gas an
| a balloon to understand its temperature.
|
| So, to us, the world is 99% magic at the extremes, but <1%
| where we actually live; we can understand this regime fairly
| well.
| Horffupolde wrote:
| The opposite. Laws are just conceptual representations of
| underlying intractable processes.
| MaxPock wrote:
| The "maths is discovered not invented " camp
| Horffupolde wrote:
| When you go even further, math is again invented to
| represent The Underlying. If it were discovered, math would
| be it.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| Plot twist, there are no laws except those that we collectively
| imagine.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| This assumes we have the capability of uncovering those laws.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Everything is governed by laws, when we uncover it, we can
| replicate it
|
| Sure, but it's precisely because everything is governend by
| laws that you can't make it how you want. It's perfectly
| possible that consciousness is a specific property of organic
| brains rather than digital computers. I can understand the laws
| that govern the properties of the Golden Gate Bridge, doesn't
| mean I can build it out of jello.
|
| That was precisely the misunderstood point of Searle's Chinese
| room by the way, that a digital algorithmic computer can
| emulate the work that a human mind can do even the point of
| being indistinguishable from it, but need not understand any of
| it (i.e. being conscious of it) while doing so. Or put
| differently that manipulation of syntax and semantics are
| completely orthogonal.
|
| That's in fact very relevant in LLMs. An LLM can talk about how
| strawberries taste as if it was conscious, but by definition it
| can't genuinely have experienced it.
| PeterisP wrote:
| But organic brains aren't some magic unknowable mush, we know
| how they work on a low level, we can trace how visual
| processing is done, etc, etc. As far as we see, the raw
| computing capabilities of biological neurons that we
| understand are sufficient to explain the behavior of animals,
| and as far as we see, biological brains don't do anything
| that can't be replicated with sufficiently powerful digital
| computers. So while it's technically possible that
| consciousness is a specific property of organic brains, we
| have no evidence at all that it would be the case and some
| (although not conclusive) evidence that there's nothing
| special, so unless we identify some difference, those
| hypotheses are not comparable and we should assume that
| according to our best current knowledge there aren't any
| specific properties of organic brains.
| anon291 wrote:
| In the sense that science is ultimately a religious enterprise
| expressing our belief in a constant, unseen, unchanging reality
| (which is not a universal belief by any means, and is utterly
| religious in nature), then yes, this is true. On the other
| hand, if we take an irreligious look at things and try to keep
| focus on just what we observe, one is forced to make the
| opposite conclusion, as the very basic building blocks of
| reality are not uncoverable, non-replicable, and seemingly not
| governed by anything but randomness.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| That's not what science is at all. If reality changes science
| will adapt.
| mistermann wrote:
| You are declaring it to be a fact that science is flawless.
| Defining something to be true by definition can certainly
| cause it to be appear to be true (read some forum
| discussions among even smart people on the internet if you
| do not believe this), but it doesn't guarantee that it will
| be.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I have no idea what you're talking about. And I'm not
| sure how you're getting "science is flawless" from what I
| said, or what that's supposed to mean.
| tomrod wrote:
| Science is adaptable to reality -- therefore, it reflects
| reality as it is presented.
|
| Esoteric arguments portraying an ineffable, unobservable
| stream of will that never interacts with reality is not
| observable by definition; since it doesn't interact with
| reality, it can be safely ignored. Roko's basilisk be
| damned!
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| I think some people think science rejects mystical
| explanations because science is rigid and stubborn and
| has it's head buried in the sand.
|
| But no, it's because there's no proof. If we had evidence
| that something mystical was happening then it would be a
| huge breakthrough and it would eventually become science.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| What do you mean by the basic building blocks of reality? The
| very machine you are posting your comment from can only be
| manufactured because the laws of physics don't change, and
| these machines and their manufacturing process operate on the
| atomic level. Similarly, do you have an example of a well
| defined experiment that would not produce the same result
| consistently? You can win a noble prize easily by publishing
| such an experiment. Lastly, if someone _did_ produce an
| experiment that did not produce consistent results, that is,
| an experiment performed twice with all variables staying the
| same, but the result of the experiment being different, then
| the theory that all well defined experiments are reproducible
| would be wrong. It isn 't axiomatic.
|
| >try to keep focus on just what we observe
|
| That's all science is though - making observations. Writing
| hypothesis and making experiments are etc. are just a means
| to creating things to observe. I'm curious, what did you
| observe that you felt was not bounded by some static law of
| nature?
| xvector wrote:
| I really do hope ASI gets us to gradual replacement-based
| uploading. Having something as glorious as sapience trapped in a
| delicate and temporary bag of flesh kinda sucks.
| seydor wrote:
| I m still conflicted what we do with the bag of flesh after the
| fact. Are we bag holding forever?
| alex_duf wrote:
| Something tells me the bag might change its mind about the
| whole operation once the upload is finished and it realises
| what's up next.
|
| So yeah not sure I like the idea.
| thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote:
| So far the only idea that I've read about and might
| feasibly result in uploading instead of copying is gradual
| replacement of each cell by a nanobot simulating that cell.
| So at the end of it, there'd be no bag to change its mind.
| xvector wrote:
| You can simplify it a bit. Yes, gradual replacement is
| likely the way to go, but you probably don't need to
| replace individual neurons one at a time. Individual
| neurons don't really matter or meaningfully contribute to
| our consciousness.
|
| You can likely replace the large "functional groups" of
| neurons instead, with the group size threshold being the
| maximum that doesn't meaningfully affect our
| consciousness. This might well be many billions of
| neurons at a time.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Greg Egan's Sci-Fi jewel (dual) idea:
| https://philosophy.williams.edu/files/Egan-Learning-to-
| Be-Me...
| xvector wrote:
| Hence the "gradual replacement" part of my comment :)
|
| Scan and copy never made sense to begin with, as you point
| out. Not sure why it's the default when people think of
| mind uploading.
| thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote:
| People seem to imagine it like plugging a cable or
| getting an EEG cap and then they can't imagine the next
| step. Gradual replacement is a very radical idea to most
| people - a friend of mine recently described is as a
| horror movie.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| In this book, I think:
| https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/393899945799 - 108 Tips for
| Time Travellers by inventor and Professor Peter Cochrane,
| 1999, one of the essays is him asking his wife if she
| would still love him if he had false teeth, a false leg,
| etc. bit by bit until she stops the conversation saying
| "I'm not having you dying by installments!".
|
| When you replace a heart with a pump, you don't get a
| human heart. When you replace a kidney with a dialysis
| machine, you doon't get a human kidney. Why expect that
| when you replace neurons with simulations you get a human
| brain or a human consciousness, or when you've replaced
| everything, a human?
|
| Biological replacement, your body growing more new
| neurons, maybe, but it won't be mind _uploading_. And it
| won 't get you you-at-age-twenty back.
| thr0w4w4yHNabc wrote:
| Let's assume that the replacements are perfect replicas
| from the outside, only the inside is different. Why would
| it not work?
|
| The examples you listed are current technologies that
| don't remotely approach the primary nor secondary
| functions of the originals.
| ecjhdnc2025 wrote:
| "The equation must be balanced!"
| pas wrote:
| what do you mean? the bag is useful for going around, but
| it's frail and needs replacing every few decades.
| seydor wrote:
| a $1000 drone is much more useful for going around
| vixen99 wrote:
| Nothing particularly glorious about sapience trapped in a
| _permanent_ bag of flesh especially one with a rather fixed
| view about the world about it. Never mind dictators; how about:
|
| 'The President of Global Enterprises Inc. is today 150 years
| old and currently holds the record for the longest serving
| president in the Company's history'.
|
| A cause for celebration?
| xvector wrote:
| I don't really care if stubborn, old leaders live longer if
| it means I don't have to worry about my loved ones dying and
| get to see humanity reach the stars.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Be careful for what you wish for. There's no guarantee
| immortality doesn't result in eternal suffering.
| Filligree wrote:
| Humans generally don't like eternal suffering, and will
| fight against it. That's a reason to think it won't
| happen.
| xvector wrote:
| Wait, where did I say that immortality would be
| mandated!? Of course you'd get to choose when you want to
| shuffle off the mortal coil.
|
| For me, personally, I don't see that being the case for
| many hundreds or even many thousands of years at least.
| I'm nearly 30 and I feel like I've barely lived a blink
| of an eye.
| fwip wrote:
| I feel like that would require society to get pretty
| chill about suicide. In a world where everyone is
| immortal-by-default, I can actually see the opposite
| happening - the fear of death increasing from its
| absence, and becoming an even greater taboo.
| feverzsj wrote:
| If brain is just a transceiver, then it's unprovable.
| Mo3 wrote:
| I subscribe to this theory. In that case it's not necessarily
| unprovable though. We will eventually figure out how to make
| electronic devices resonate with the field just like our brain
| does.
| grishka wrote:
| For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully
| contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as
| well be something that partially exists on another layer of
| reality we have no idea about yet.
| codetrotter wrote:
| True. Which leads one to wonder, could those same kinds of
| consciousness that inhabit us also be capable of inhabit an AI.
| Or even, could there be other kinds of consciousnesses in those
| or other dimensions that are not currently able to exist on
| earth because there doesn't exist anything yet that they are
| able to inhabit. But that our computers would eventually, when
| we arrive at some specific combination of hardware and
| software, enable them to inhabit those. Bringing a new kind of
| consciousness from outside of the universe to earth that is
| unlike all others outside already present here (in us, the
| animals, the plants, etc).
| grishka wrote:
| Is it still an "artificial" intelligence if it's made with
| _real_ consciousness, though?
| T-A wrote:
| Intelligence != consciousness
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Agreed on this to a certain extent. Right here on earth
| in the present day and without taking into account
| innovative technological advances in AI, we have examples
| of highly sophisticated intelligence (at least in a
| functional way) belonging to things that have little or
| no known consciousness.
|
| First example, large hive insect nests, such as those of
| termites and certain ants. Their internal construction is
| extremely complex and often built in useful (to them)
| ways that would challenge even the abilities of smart
| human engineers trying to do the same with similar tools
| (sharp digging instruments, organic cementing liquids,
| raw scavenged building materials and nothing else) Yet
| any individual termite in a nest of millions shows only,
| maybe, the most minuscule and debatable signs of
| consciousness. They instead act like biological, physical
| pieces of an algorithmic process.
|
| Second, obvious example, evolution itself: Here we have a
| process that produces organic, biological systems of such
| complexity and self direction that we with all our
| cognition are barely capable of grasping them robustly
| let alone emulating any major part of them, yet it's
| entirely mindless. Sure, it has billions of years to do
| its thing through the imperatives of brute survival
| mechanisms, but it's still incredible how on a macro
| scale none of it involves the least bit of known
| cognition.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Yeah
| danielbln wrote:
| It might be a pink elefant that lives in the 7th dimension and
| contains every person's consciousness in the shape of a magic
| peanut. Or it may not.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Godel's incompleteness theorem says that pink elephants may
| indeed well exist.
| exe34 wrote:
| no it doesn't.
| strogonoff wrote:
| This is only true if you reject the pink elephant
| argument as straw man in the first place.
|
| As long as you consider it a figure of speech (a
| charitable interpretation indeed), then existence of pink
| elephants (or ghosts, or what have you) is exactly the
| implication of the theory in context of scientific
| method.
| exe34 wrote:
| Godel's theorem deals with the axioms of mathematics. the
| scientific method deals with the physical universe. a
| small part of mathematics is useful in describing the
| universe, but most of it isn't.
| anon291 wrote:
| That's really not what it says. Godel's incompleteness
| theorem applied to AI would say something like 'There are
| statements about the model's behavior we cannot prove
| without relying on statements that cannot to be proven'
| (this is because obviously the AI algorithms are based on
| elementary arithmetic).
| Helmut10001 wrote:
| Once I asked a KI and this was the answer:
|
| > In a parallel universe where pineapples are the dominant
| species, intergalactic pizza deliveries are made by flying
| spaghetti monsters riding unicycles made of marshmallows.
| Meanwhile, sentient clouds debate the meaning of life with
| philosophical penguins on top of rainbow-colored mountains
| made of bubblegum.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Legitimately made me lol. Thank you for being the rational
| one. When topics of the mind come up even people who are
| normally smart and rational can turn into quacks.
| tomrod wrote:
| I saw that pink elefant once after a lewd night of heavy
| drinking and potential hallucinogenics. His name is Frank,
| and he says hello!
|
| /s
| tacocataco wrote:
| Soul fracture theory?
| visarga wrote:
| > For all we know, it might be that consciousness is not fully
| contained in the physical structure of the brain. It might as
| well be something that partially exists on another layer of
| reality we have no idea about yet.
|
| Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us -
| physical and social. Every sensation comes from the
| environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream,
| every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect
| it, language and society are part of the environment, we base
| our thoughts on language and our actions on other people. Our
| brain is made from environment signals, just like GPT-4 is made
| from its language corpus.
|
| The unsung hero of consciousness is actually the environment
| with its reach data stream and feedback. Consciousness,
| language, genes, internet, LLMs and the evolution of
| intelligence are all social processes. They don't make sense
| individually, only as part of an evolutionary population. They
| can only evolve if there are many agents.
|
| Now, I know this doesn't sound as sexy as quantum
| consciousness, but it is a more parsimonious and better
| grounded position. It accounts for the data engine that
| actually creates consciousness. Don't be looking for
| consciousness inside the brain or in exotic physics when the
| magical ingredient is outside.
| danans wrote:
| > Yes, but not another layer. Just the environment around us
| - physical and social. Every sensation comes from the
| environment, our perceptions are trained on this data stream,
| every value is dependent on environment, our emotions reflect
| it, language and society are part of the environment, we base
| our thoughts on language and our actions on other people.
|
| This is also my understanding of consciousness. We are overly
| focused on the human brain's capabilities as a generic
| information processing mechanism (because of its remarkable
| adaptability), that we ignore how fundamentally dependent it
| is on its environment, leading us to seek a metaphysical
| explanation for its functioning, when it's actually all
| around us.
|
| Language, culture, and abstract thought capabilities that we
| use to describe consciousness are symbolic overlays upon the
| physical environment, but ultimately emerge from it, and
| their objectives ultimately tie back to it.
|
| Human consciousness - especially its group/cultural aspects -
| has been a tremendous advantage to the species, which is why
| we are even in a position to be fascinated by it today.
| whoitwas wrote:
| I thought we did know this now. I can't quote exactly what
| science I read, but the science latest I saw showed
| consciousness arrises in the nerves outside the brain.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Human consciousness has logically to be a product of the
| physical structure of human beings.
| grishka wrote:
| Except the "physical structure" might extend into dimensions
| we don't know about.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| How about energy that's associated with the physical
| structure?
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Then this is either general physics theories about extra
| dimensions that apply to the universe as a whole probably
| applied to quantum physics in this case, or it is random
| quackery.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| To be fair, there is absolutely nothing within known physics
| that would explain why we're more than a complex biological
| computer and how subjective experience and qualia arise from
| it.
|
| So we genuinely cannot even begin to guess as to what
| actually imbues consciousness into our neural processes. It
| could be anything from "it's actually just the physical
| processes" through "there's a soul piloting our brains by
| influencing quantum noise" to "the brain is basically an
| antenna for our metaphysical self and death/disability is the
| loss of connection"
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| > _why we 're more than a complex biological computer_
|
| Are we more than biological "computers"?
|
| I think we are complex biological systems that we do not
| fully understand yet but that does not mean anything
| supernatural or beyond our understanding of physics is at
| play.
| PeterisP wrote:
| There's currently no reason to assume that we're more than
| a complex biological computer - while it's indeed
| interesting to explain how subjective experience and qualia
| arise, it's certainly plausible that this can arise as
| emergent behavior once a specific type of computer is doing
| a specific type of computation, and we 'just' need to study
| that complex computation.
|
| Unless we obtain any evidence whatsoever that this can't be
| the case, Occam's razor would suggest that this is the
| hypothesis to explore, without looking for new physics or
| other unlikely assumptions.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| I've heard reliable reports of Jeffrey A. Martin and his fellow
| research participants moving visual perception out of the eyes
| and the rest of the body into the surrounding environment.
| Literally seeing behind him. I don't think his eyes stopped
| working, he just moved his subjective awareness outside of his
| body.
|
| I found it hard to believe until I used his techniques to
| contain 'all of reality' into a small space (the visual field)
| and then 'move' it to my chest. Feeling like music, sight, and
| body sensations are all happening within a tiny space-contained
| field is a very startling experience.
| harha_ wrote:
| You've heard "reliable records"? Can you link it/them? I
| can't find via search engines, I tried.
| vinceguidry wrote:
| Reports, not records. People who I know who know him
| sharing privately. Jeffrey doesn't and can't publish
| everything that he comes across and has to be very
| circumspect with the stuff he does.
| hovering_nox wrote:
| ROFL
| tomhoward wrote:
| I'm writing this comment so that people who want to know more
| about alternative theories of consciousness (to
| materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find well-
| argued positions on the topic.
|
| (To be clear, I'm not here to argue about the topic or try to
| persuade anyone of any position - that's a waste of everyone's
| time).
|
| I recommend seeking out discussions involving:
|
| - Federico Faggin: inventor of silicon-gate technology and
| developer of the earliest microprocessors;
|
| - Bernardo Kastrup: Ph.D. in computer engineering (reconfigurable
| computing, artificial intelligence), former CERN engineer at the
| LHC;
|
| - Donald D. Hoffman: Ph.D. in computational psychology, professor
| in Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine.
|
| On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions involving these
| figures, some with each other, and plenty more with others.
|
| I'd suggest it's particularly important to explore these
| discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard
| materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific
| credibility or validity.
|
| As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary oration on
| John Stuart Mill and free speech [2], it's only by thoroughly
| understanding the opposing view that we can thoroughly understand
| our own position on any topic.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
|
| [2] https://youtu.be/zDap-K6GmL0?t=120
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Frederico Faggin: inventor of the silicon gate which led to
| the development of microprocessors;_
|
| And who, by the way, has a new book coming out shortly:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Consciousness-Computers-H...
| strogonoff wrote:
| A philosophical framework in which creating an artificial
| entity that is conscious and self-aware in a human-like manner
| is as straightforward as modeling the human brain is monistic
| materialism.
|
| Of course, it's not the only framework available. Among the
| modern takes, Donald Hoffman's interface theory of perception
| (explored in, say, his Objects of Consciousness paper[0]) is an
| interesting one that appears to align with monistic idealism,
| for example.
|
| Being wrong about this is generally not that impactful, until
| it concerns policies around ML. Adopting the former means we
| may have conscious software, which presumably should be granted
| human rights. However, if we hold the latter, manufacturing a
| "true" artificial consciousness may be unachievable using the
| means we employ (it might be just a philosophical zombie).
|
| [0] I don't personally endorse the paper or his views, but they
| can be an acceptable starting point for a technical person
| interested in exploring monistic idealism:
| https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....
| smokel wrote:
| _> we may have conscious software, which presumably should be
| granted human rights_
|
| A dog (most likely) has consciousness, but no human rights.
| tomhoward wrote:
| It has animal rights, which are broadly commensurate with
| the level of consciousness and agency it's deemed to have.
|
| Mammals and other animals have legal protections not
| afforded to fish and insects.
| mc32 wrote:
| In some countries... some countries hardly observe basic
| human rights much less any animal rights. Some have none
| on the books.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Sure but this is nitpicking, as is your GP comment, and
| neither refute the point that the original commenter was
| making: modern/advanced societies have laws to protect
| conscious beings from exploitation and cruelty.
|
| (As I was writing the comment I thought "ugh will someone
| chime in and point out that not all countries have strong
| animal protection laws? Do I really need to preempt that
| in my comment?")
| smokel wrote:
| I was not nitpicking, but I could have spent more time on
| my reply.
|
| What I was hinting at is that it is not simply
| consciousness that gets us these laws. Laws have been
| around for a long time, and have many different reasons
| for existing and persisting to exist. The most rational
| reason for laws is probably that it helps us to thrive as
| a species.
|
| IMHO laws do not easily extend to animals or other
| organisms, let alone AI systems. What is the use of
| animal rights laws if you can simply get killed to be
| eaten (cows, pigs), or if you are considered a nuisance
| (bugs). What would be the reason to provide AIs with
| protection laws if they have no memory, no emotion, and
| no pain?
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| >Modern/advanced societies have laws to protect conscious
| beings from exploitation and cruelty.
|
| I can think of no such society where this is generally
| true. One need only consider that pigs are far smarter
| than dogs and then the median pig's life in said
| societies.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Laws exist that ban practices that are - according to
| those who set and enforce the laws - excessively cruel to
| pigs. That's all this discussion is about.
|
| That pigs are still treated with cruelty is a terrible
| thing, and I'd happily see more done to protect all
| animals against cruelty. But it's a separate argument to
| what's relevant here.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| No, unfortunately, this is goalpost shifting. We've gone
| from "cruelty" to "excessive cruelty," nor are there any
| laws that prevent the common sense understanding of
| either thing from happening to the median pig. One can
| here also point out that we in fact engage in such
| extreme cruelty that they have to make it illegal to
| document it:
|
| https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/11/18176551/ag-
| gag...
| DeathArrow wrote:
| But does a bug have consciousness? What about a bacteria?
| smokel wrote:
| I suppose the bug has, but the bacteria doesn't. I'd
| assume that some kind of memory is required for
| consciousness.
|
| I'd even go so far to say that consciousness is nothing
| more than having a memory of the state you were in.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Bacteria cells absolutely have types of memory. And by
| your definition a Python program written by any random
| undergrad in CS 101 has consciousness.
| smokel wrote:
| In order for my definition to make sense, the organism or
| program must be able to observe the memory of the state.
| In the case of the bacteria and the Python program, I
| doubt they are able to do that in any meaningful way.
|
| But I would not mind if a slightly more involved program,
| or a system of plants for that matter, would be
| considered conscious. The basic definition seems fairly
| irrelevant, and it obviously matters how much the
| specific type of consciousness matches our own experience
| for us humans to actually care.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| Just handwavy nonsense. What counts as "observing"?
| Obviously the bacterial system will "observe" the memory
| when using it determine current behavior. If the basic
| definition is irrelevant, why did you post a comment
| outlining a claim of what consciousness is "nothing more
| than"? This is silly and not worth further engagement.
| smokel wrote:
| Note that I tried to counter the idea that an AI should
| presumably get human rights. In that context, I think a
| definition of consciousness is irrelevant.
| strogonoff wrote:
| If a chatbot obtained from an emulation of a human brain
| behaves in a human-like manner, and is attributed
| consciousness and self-awareness, good luck arguing that
| its consciousness is like that of a dog.
|
| ...and even if you succeed, abusing a dog in the way we
| abuse ML-based products would not be acceptable in any
| developed country.
| chr1 wrote:
| If we abuse a dog we have no way to restore it to its
| previous state. With computer programs we have a perfect
| time machine, so any thing that one may call "horrible"
| can be done and then undone without any moral
| consequences.
|
| This btw also is the answer to the question of evil in
| religion, god can do whatever he wants without being
| evil, because it is effectively all in his imagination,
| and for the people living in our computers we'll be gods.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > creating an artificial entity that is conscious and self-
| aware in a human-like manner is as straightforward as
| modeling the human brain is monistic materialism.
|
| Why then, not modelling such ebtity isn't creating a self-
| aware entity? After all, the outcome of a computation does
| not depend on whether it is actually done.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| There are computations, the outcomes of which are unknown
| unknown until actually done.
| thriftwy wrote:
| What changes when they are known? I believr it affects
| yout consciousness, not the one being simulated. The
| latter does not have "I'm being actually simulated" input
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| "Actually simulated" is such an oxymoron. So which is it?
| Is the consciousness actual, simulated, or actually
| simulated? And does the resulting state of mind change
| the universe, or merely reveal its hidden structure?
|
| It's easy to get lost in these unsolvable paradoxes when
| you try reducing all of creation down to logic. Problem
| is, logic is not all of creation.
|
| Consciousness requires a soul. Otherwise you're confused
| stardust sans mission.
|
| A computer is just a calculator. You might as well ask if
| {addition, subtraction, multiplication, division} is God.
| thriftwy wrote:
| > Consciousness requires a soul.
|
| We don't know if it does. We do know enough to suspect
| that a deterministic simulation does not conjure thing
| into being.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > Consciousness requires a soul
|
| Any actual evidence for this is welcome.
| Scarblac wrote:
| > Consciousness requires a soul
|
| What's a soul? How can you possibly know that's what's
| required?
|
| Maybe it requires a blerpqu.
| hhshhhhjjjd wrote:
| > Consciousness requires a soul
|
| Now define a soul! /s
| AQuantized wrote:
| To be fair 'modelling the brain' might not include things
| like neuron metabolism that probably isn't required for AI
| but is a part of the substrate of our own consciousness.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Julian Jaynes theory of consciousness is very interesting. At a
| high level, his thoery was that consciousness is A) much
| smaller in scope as far as what it actually is than a lot of
| people like to think, and B) it is not actually innate in
| humans, it is something we learn as we grow.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I don't see how we can learn to experience qualia. If the
| author means self awareness instead of consciousness that
| would make more sense.
| amelius wrote:
| I wish the scientific community would get the terminology
| straight.
| photonthug wrote:
| any art or music class that is successful in reaching its
| students will probably change what you think, how you think
| it, and gradually should change what you feel, how deeply
| you feel it, and to what extent you can analyze and
| converse with those feelings you have.
|
| If that sounds like intellectual activity above the level
| of qualia, the same is true for something as simple as the
| taste of food. We learn what apples taste like by tasting
| lots of apples and tasting things that aren't apples and
| reflecting on and focusing our attention on experience of
| apples.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I think learning to mentally analyze sensations that are
| complex into components doesn't refute what I said, as
| you are presupposing the ability to perceive for that
| process to take place. I don't think an art class is
| going to revive a philosophical zombie.
| joeyo wrote:
| I think language acquisition provides a pretty compelling
| example of learning affecting the experience of qualia.
| When someone is learning to speak a foreign language, there
| is often an period where certain sounds are difficult for
| the learner to produce, because those sounds are not
| present or are not distinguished in the learner's native
| tongue. For example, the R and L sounds of English are
| tricky for a native Japanese speaker.
|
| A reason it's so hard to learn to produce these novel
| sounds, I would argue, is because the learner _literally
| cannot hear the differences_ at first. It 's only after
| learning (i.e. when the qualia starts to change) that
| production of the new sounds becomes possible.
|
| One can think of other similar examples in the context of
| expert performance: a sonar operator can hear sounds in his
| headphones that most (at first) cannot; an artist can
| distinguish colors that the novice cannot, etc.
|
| If you buy this argument, that learning can affect
| perception/qualia, then it's a fairly small leap to imagine
| how qualia itself might also be learned _ex nihilo_.
| andrewflnr wrote:
| That's an example of learning changing which qualia you
| experience, not teaching you to experience qualia at all.
| Almost unrelated question.
| belter wrote:
| That is particularly interesting specially in the context of
| the ways we know the human brain works. For example in
| Automatic writing, patients with neurological damage, can
| write coherent text without conscious awareness of the
| content. Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing
| lyrics without consciously understanding the meaning of the
| words.
|
| And finally...who never, when particularly tired or worried
| with something, left home, lost in their own thoughts, and in
| a fog...drove to work...just to realize when arriving its
| weekend? ;-)
| _heimdall wrote:
| > Or in cases of Aphasia where individuals can sing lyrics
| without consciously understanding the meaning of the words.
|
| Hah, well maybe I have aphasia then. My whole life I've
| heard and even remembered lyrics while a singing along with
| the radio but if you asked me immediately after the song
| was over I couldn't tell you the words _or_ the meaning.
|
| I hear the music being played and the sounds of the lyrics,
| but unless I'm trying to pay attention to the words I just
| completely miss them.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| You're being "prompted" by the radio, in real time to
| boot.
|
| Only when you want to, that would be a "conscious"
| effort, maybe not too easily emulated.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| Please stop with the appeal to authority!!
|
| "The argument from authority is a logical fallacy (also known
| as ad verecundiam fallacy), and obtaining knowledge in this way
| is fallible."
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
|
| The meta logical fallacy of treating Wiki itself as an
| authority isn't an intended pun.
| jasonlfunk wrote:
| The author did not commit a logical fallacy. They referenced
| some people worth reading if you wanted some various opinions
| on a controversial subject.
| samatman wrote:
| The meta fallacy on display here is the Fallacy Fallacy.
|
| For every logical fallacy, there is a fallacious application
| of it to a given example of rhetoric. You've committed the
| Argument from Authority Fallacy Fallacy: citing people who
| believe to have worthwhile opinions, and including their
| accomplishments, is not argument from authority. Argument
| from authority is claiming someone is correct _based_ on
| their authority. Which isn 't what GP was doing.
| captainclam wrote:
| Op writes "I'm writing this comment so that people who want
| to know more about alternative theories of consciousness (to
| materialism/physicalism [1]) can know where to go to find
| well-argued positions on the topic."
|
| They very specifically state that these people are good
| points of entry for "well-argued positions on the topic."
| Linking to specific literature would have been better, but
| this isn't "materialism/physicalism is wrong because of these
| people's credentials."
| tomhoward wrote:
| It is precisely because their advocacy for metaphysical
| idealism is unusual for people with their academic
| qualifications that they are worth mentioning, and why its
| worthwhile to listen to them explain their positions at
| length.
|
| Appeal to authority is where you present a person's status or
| credentials as primary evidence that their argument is
| correct. I've done no such thing here.
| eichin wrote:
| The problem is that while the post looks structurally like an
| appeal to authority, the first two appear to be advanced
| qualifications in areas _completely unrelated to the
| question_ and the third is at best vaguely related. (It threw
| me on first reading too...)
| mannykannot wrote:
| > I'd suggest it's particularly important to explore these
| discussions as dispassionately as possible if you regard
| materialism as the only theory of mind that has any scientific
| credibility or validity.
|
| I agree, and similarly for those who feel that materialism
| cannot possibly explain consciousness. Kastrup, for one, seems
| to sometimes behave as though ridicule makes his philosophy
| more correct.
| mekoka wrote:
| > and similarly for those who feel that materialism cannot
| possibly explain consciousness.
|
| Perhaps for some it's indeed a matter of "feelings". But for
| others it's a conviction built from reasoning that leads to
| self-validating and irreducible truths. If you seriously go
| into this, the only possibilities left once you've dug and
| eliminated all mistaken assumptions are not material. It can
| be counter-intuitive and does take a bit of work to reason
| your way to those conclusions, which is why it's admittedly
| not a popular outlook. But once you grok it, you don't go
| back. The fact that materialism is slowly going out of style
| is telling.
|
| Whenever I exchange with someone who makes concessions about
| consciousness possibly being the product of matter, it's due
| to one of two things: either some holes haven't yet been
| covered in their own explorations, or they're still oblivious
| to some of the implications of their current position.
|
| Materialism is fast being eliminated as a possible antecedent
| to consciousness _with reasoning and logic_ , not simply with
| beliefs. Currently, it's being salvaged in popular forms of
| dualism, where it would be a co-primitive of reality with
| consciousness (e.g. panpsychism). But even this position is
| just a short stop-over on the way to idealism, as it creates
| new problems and is just less parsimonious than simply saying
| _consciousness first_.
|
| An example of a relatively elusive and subtle realization to
| get, but that also becomes rather difficult to renounce once
| you grok it, are qualia and how they lead to the hard problem
| of consciousness. Qualia are so enmeshed in our experience
| that people have a hard time first seeing how divorced from
| brain activity they actually are. If you don't get qualia,
| you can't get the hard problem and how it's really an
| _impossible_ problem
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX0xWJpr0FY).
| WhyOhWhyQ wrote:
| Any reason why you don't recommend discussions/lectures with
| Roger Penrose? Or are his theories considered conventional?
| Genuine question.
| tomhoward wrote:
| If I were to mention a fourth it would be him but he's a bit
| embarrassed about all the controversy about his ideas on
| consciousness and doesn't really discuss them in depth in any
| videos I've seen, or wade into heated discussions about the
| nature of reality.
|
| Whereas the three I mentioned all embrace discussions about
| the nature of reality and consciousness and happily engage in
| lengthy discussions and debates about it.
| jpt4 wrote:
| Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic communication
| medium is video rather than text is prima facie suspect. Might
| you please link a written statement of the salient position(s)
| of any one of these gentlemen?
| makk wrote:
| ?
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| "video is for poseurs", I think.
| MetallicDragon wrote:
| "Any kind of big idea which is spread primarily through
| video instead of text is immediately suspicious. Could you
| please send a link to a written version of the main points
| from any one of those video?"
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Video is not the standard medium of communication in academic
| philosophy. I imagine the GP mentioned youtube because most
| people are more likely to watch a video than read a paper.
|
| Bernardo Kastrup has a bunch of essays/books up for free at
| his website https://www.bernardokastrup.com/p/papers.html?m=1
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| Or GP himself watches these videos. And I would push back
| on the claim that most posters here are more likely to
| watch a Youtube video than read an article.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| I was thinking the same thing, I can't stand how slow
| video is, much easier to read text.
| aydyn wrote:
| Just curious, why do you write like that? Reminds when I was
| 11 and wanted to sound smarter on the internet.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Sidenote a lot of people get triggered by videos as
| information. Cause reading is indexable. I used to be a bit
| like that and ran into a few extremists.
| Scarblac wrote:
| Text is also much more dense. What videos spend 15
| minutes on can be read in a few. You can also skim text
| first and then switch to deeper reading where desired, et
| cetera.
| jpt4 wrote:
| My reply is an attempt to address the original comment with
| precision. To diagram its intended meaning:
|
| > alternative theories of consciousness
|
| "Any body of academic thought" [I accede the scientific
| legitimacy of the domain of discourse, rather than
| dismissing it.]
|
| > know where to go to find well-argued positions on the
| topic.
|
| "whose paradigmatic communication medium" [This is the
| beginning of my challenge to the Original Commenter, by
| granting the information provided authoritative status,
| which they perhaps cannot fully defend.]
|
| > On YouTube you can find plenty of discussions
|
| "is video rather than text"
|
| > it's particularly important to explore these discussions
| as dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as
| the only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility
| or validity.
|
| "is prima facie suspect" [The Original Commenter has
| asserted that discourse and engagement are important, yet
| provided only time consuming, low signal-to-noise sources
| of information.]
|
| > As Christopher Hitchens reminds us in his legendary
| oration on John Stuart Mill and free speech [2]
|
| "Might you please link a written statement of the salient
| position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?" [The only
| written citations are 1) generic and 2) ancillary to the
| core topic. I invite the Original Commenter to further his
| argument more substantively, without demanding exhaustive
| citations.]
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| OK, let me rewrite it:
|
| > Any body of academic thought whose paradigmatic
| communication medium is video rather than text is prima
| facie suspect. Might you please link a written statement
| of the salient position(s) of any one of these gentlemen?
|
| > Academic content is usually in text, not video. Do you
| have links to written work from them?
|
| Shorter and the exact same meaning. Also doesn't sound
| like you've been perusing your thesaurus all day.
| jpt4 wrote:
| At minimum, this does not capture that I _am_ challenging
| the Original Commenter ("prima facie suspect") to more
| rigorously defend his position, but doing so
| respectfully. "One salient" written source is a carefully
| chosen framing: the OC cannot meet it by replying with
| support peripheral or meta to the main argument, but
| neither can he dismiss my request as burdensome,
| demanding multiple links.
|
| The proposed revision suffers from its terseness, losing
| both nuance and completeness.
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| Communication is about being understood. Not about
| crafting the perfect sentence. Even if you craft the
| perfect sentence, that will be the perfect sentence _for
| you_, and it might be completely lost on many people,
| some perhaps even more intelligent than you.
|
| The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text, not
| video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video, not
| text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure, but the
| subtext of your comment is "I opened a thesaurus and
| tried to seem smart", which is why this conversation
| derailed here. You can't ignore the subtext to craft a
| mathematically perfect sentence..
| jpt4 wrote:
| > Communication is about being understood.
|
| > The subtext of "Academic content is usually in text,
| not video" is "I don't trust this because it's in video,
| not text". Now if you say that is not clear, sure
|
| Indeed, relying on the implicit when the explicit is
| sufficient [0] does a disservice to one's readers, in
| whose ability and charity to comprehend my surface text,
| without presuming confounding subtextual meaning, I have
| every confidence.
|
| [0] It is not always; some things can only be gestured
| at, not grasped.
| tomrod wrote:
| Hear hear!
| tomrod wrote:
| > Communication is about being understood.
|
| This assertion is in error. Communication is about
| transmitting information. What happens to that
| information after the transmissions is beyond scope of
| communication.
|
| Don't get me wrong -- we have communication companies and
| classes named "business communication" and fields of
| inquiry titled "communication." Yet, the common trend to
| each of these is wrapping the transmission of information
| up in additional services. Analogous to how OpenAI and
| Mistral wrap up LLMs that you and I and anyone can run on
| our own into well-defined managed services. We use the
| term for these companies "Generative AI" or "LLMs" when
| in reality they too are wrappers around a much simpler
| concept.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _This assertion is in error. Communication is about
| transmitting information._
|
| It seems like you might possibly be leaving out the other
| 50% of communication (hint: it starts with an "r" and
| ends with "eceiving")
| spoiler wrote:
| I suspect you might be arguing with either an LLM, or
| someone using LLM help to write their responses...
| soulofmischief wrote:
| Some notes from the editor...
|
| I do think there is a middle ground. Look at Bukowski as
| a good example of effective terseness.
|
| On one hand, you can indeed rely on the precision of a
| large and unequivocal vocabulary, removing all doubt as
| to your intentions.
|
| On the other hand, you can also rely on context and find
| beauty in conveying advanced meaning within a simpler
| interface. As Antoine de Saint-Exupery says, "Perfection
| is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but
| when there is nothing left to take away".
|
| There is a creative art to compressing meaning. As
| evidenced by the response to your first post, things can
| actually get lost in translation once you stray from the
| common vernacular in an attempt at precision. The more
| you can say with less, the more effective each word
| becomes.
|
| With practice, you can communicate quite profound
| thoughts in a form that even the most uneducated among us
| can understand. Know Your Audience. We may be on Hacker
| News, but we are also on the Web. People encounter and
| digest a massive amount of text every day. Making them
| work a little less in order to understand you can be
| beneficial for everyone.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| To quote the classic:
|
| "Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick"
| verisimi wrote:
| But you're using the word 'perusing'....!! Who's
| swallowed the dictionary now, huh?
| tomrod wrote:
| No, the second approach's meaning is more obtuse. What
| does "usually" mean? Are there acceptable alternatives?
| If content is in an alternative mode of communication, is
| it acceptable?
|
| These vagaries permitted in your revision are clear and
| inherent in the original commenter's motion. Therefore, I
| submit your adjudication of "shorter and the exact same
| meaning" is woefully superficial in it's drive for
| simplicity, to the point there is no thought left that is
| clear in the original garden. Further, exact and
| technical communication is what separates Hacker News
| commenting from the hordes of subreddits that thrive on
| imprecise babble.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Ah, indeed, for nothing epitomizes 'avant-garde scholarly
| dialogue' quite like a prolix disquisition elucidating
| the inherent inferiority of audiovisual mediums.
| Forthcoming: an erudite treatise on the unparalleled
| intellectual profundity of semaphore communication!
| tomrod wrote:
| Stupendous and eloquent amendment to today's compendium
| of literary appreciation.
| potsandpans wrote:
| Here's what I read
|
| I am very smart. I am very smart. I am very very smart. I
| am very smart.
| bgandrew wrote:
| sorry, but it's just common sense
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| There are tons of written books and journals on this topic.
|
| My favorite:
|
| https://global.oup.com/academic/product/shadows-of-the-
| mind-...
| jpt4 wrote:
| Thank you, this is a good resource.
| a1371 wrote:
| I think it's pretty elitist to judge the quality of a content
| via whether it's in a book/journal or not. In fact, the
| recent wave of scientific fraud discovery shows that one can
| hide data manipulation pretty effectively in an academic
| journal. I'd much rather scientists spend their time making
| eli5 videos.
| tomhoward wrote:
| Hi there, my intention was to offer some names of people who
| have intelligent things to say about the topic.
|
| I mentioned YouTube videos because there's a large volume of
| their content there, with many of the videos featuring in-
| depth conversations and debates, which I've found can be a
| particularly good format for discussion of a topic of such
| gravity and complexity.
|
| But between these three figures there are also many books,
| academic papers, blog posts, and written media interviews.
|
| I've long found that this is a topic in which some people are
| going to be standoffish and resistant and that's fine.
|
| My hope is only to help people who are looking to learn about
| the topic to know who I've found worthwhile to learn from.
|
| All the best!
| GolberThorce wrote:
| https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
| foundation/orwel...
|
| required reading @jpt4 u/jpt4
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Thanks! Any links to written word? I just don't do much
| youtubing, especially for scientific or philosophical areas
| where information density can be high and videos are
| infuriatingly inefficient :-(
| mekoka wrote:
| As someone who's been engaged in this topic (the nature of
| reality and consciousness) over the past 3 years, it's very
| surprising to see this comment on HN. As I've suggested in a
| past comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465928),
| this can potentially be one of the most transformative rabbit
| hole anyone can ever hope to enter.
|
| It's been fascinating to observe the dichotomy between
| researchers who work on explaining consciousness, starting from
| a physicalist/materialist perspective, slowly being convinced
| away from that intuition with iron clad arguments, while
| laypeople lean further into it, deluded by what they perceive
| to be signs of it from recent AI progress.
|
| Among former materialist academics that I expect to see
| publications from a more affirmed idealist position in the next
| 5 years, I count David Chalmers and Christof Koch. Perhaps Anil
| Seth too.
| Lerc wrote:
| I hadn't encountered conscious agent theory before. I took a
| quick look and it seemed to be solipsism wearing a disguise.
| Can you elaborate how it distinguishes itself from solipsism
| in its arguments that it might be real?
|
| I found the evolutionary argument rather odd. The disconnect
| between perception and reality is pretty much the standard
| belief these days. Unless I'm reading it wrong it was making
| the claim that 'reality' is a non causal artifact of
| conscious entities but one that was caused by evolution,
| which seems contradictory.
| mekoka wrote:
| Solipsism is skepticism of the existence of anything
| outside the self. I've seen Hoffman address accusations of
| solipsism a few times and I have to admit that it's always
| been unclear to me which part of his theory people tend to
| perceive as such. Perhaps I've just consumed enough of it
| to zoom past this perception.
|
| I'll try to keep things short, as this can get pretty long
| winded fast.
|
| From what I understand of his proposition, it's a take on
| idealism that is very close to eastern thought as inspired
| by nondual traditions like Advaita and Buddhism, but with a
| heavier emphasis on science. Everything in reality is a
| projection in consciousness of consciousness. It's made up
| of interacting conscious agents (you, me, a rock, an atom,
| a particle, etc) which are themselves "projections"
| ultimately stemming from a fundamental, unknowable,
| infinitely distant and unattainable root conscious agent.
| The implication is that space-time, our perceived reality,
| is not fundamental. Hoffman thinks that we might possibly
| have access to at least one, higher, more general dimension
| of reality of which ours is a specialized version (as hint
| of this, he speaks of current work in physics where
| structures outside space-time are being discovered, like
| the amplituhedron).
|
| Space and time not being fundamental creates problems with
| some materialist assumptions in evolutionary biology, where
| consciousness is seen as part of an evolutionary process.
| Hoffman suggests to rethink evolution from scratch instead.
| He uses evolutionary game theory to demonstrate that we can
| have consciousness as fundamental, keep some of the core
| evolution principles and still end up with consistent
| conclusions.
|
| I'll stop here, as I've said, it can get deep rather fast.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Thank you for these recommendations.
| hanrelan wrote:
| Any videos in particular you'd recommend?
| ggpsv wrote:
| I found his first appearance [0] in Rupert Spira's show to be
| a good introduction to his arguments.
|
| For a more thorough examination, his book "The Idea of the
| World".
|
| [0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MQuMzocvmTQ&pp=ygUNa2FzdHJ
| 1cCB...
| corry wrote:
| Not OP but check out Closer to Truth on YouTube. PBS show
| hosted by a former neuroscience PhD, they have tons of recent
| interviews with leading thinkers on consciousness (among
| other fascinating topics).
| moffkalast wrote:
| > it's particularly important to explore these discussions as
| dispassionately as possible if you regard materialism as the
| only theory of mind that has any scientific credibility or
| validity
|
| You're making it sound like I'm about to watch a proverbial
| Giorgio Tsoukalos make bold claims on pure speculation.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| So far, the concept of consciousness is basically metaphysics. It
| doesn't have a role, it can't be measured... If I may suggest a
| starting point to get over this hurdle: let's create a
| "consciousness captcha": some task that is easy for conscious
| beings, but hard for algorithms. Consciousness evolved, therefore
| it must have provided an advantage. We just have to find it.
| neverokay wrote:
| Aren't these things supposed to do automatic feature detection?
| Wouldn't these models figure out consciousness as some hidden
| layer over time?
| V__ wrote:
| > Consciousness evolved, therefore it must have provided an
| advantage
|
| This is also my personal belief, but frankly, consciousness
| might just as well be some emergent 'side-product' property in
| all 'higher' intelligent beings.
| visarga wrote:
| The advantage of consciousness is that it protects the body.
| Consciousness is the inner loop, evolution is the outer loop
| of life. The goal of consciousness is tied to its survival.
| golf_mike wrote:
| How is that different from a turing test?
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > It doesn't have a role ... Consciousness evolved, therefore
| it must have provided an advantage. We just have to find it.
|
| That's a pretty wild claim, considering that the only animal
| proven to have a consciousness is the apex-predator of the
| whole world.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's a pretty out-there idea that we're the only conscious
| animals. Along the lines of "animals don't have feelings"
| which seems to be mostly pushed by Christians.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| I didn't say we're the only one. But that we are the one we
| know for a fact are conscious.
| groestl wrote:
| I know only for a fact that I'm conscious ;)
| anon291 wrote:
| > Along the lines of "animals don't have feelings" which
| seems to be mostly pushed by Christians.
|
| Can you provide any source for this claim? The historical
| Christian belief is that animals have souls and feelings
| and inner experiences.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It stems from the belief that only humans have a soul.
| Here's an example:
|
| https://www.christianforums.com/threads/animals-dont-
| have-fe...
|
| I think that view has changed a lot over the last few
| decades but certainly 30 years ago it was pretty common.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| This is a puzzle with a known solution, although we have
| obviously not found an algorithm that passes. Casually isolate
| the being/algorithm from known conscious beings, put it with a
| bunch of its friends instead, and see if it starts arguing with
| them about qualia. This will of course require creating an AI
| self-training algorithm strong enough to invent language
| independently (otherwise you get LLMs which are likely
| parotting human arguments about qualia), but it shouldn't
| require that much compute compared to training and running an
| AGI for other tasks- humans invent language when you put 30
| children together for 30 years (see Nicaraguan Sign Language).
| This highlights that we have no idea how to train a transformer
| such that 30 copies of it left on a minecraft server and
| started from random weights would begin to meaningfully
| communicate . On the other hand, if 400B parameter versions of
| openAI's hide and seek AI start arguing with each other about
| whether ramps are really phlornge or if phlornge is just a
| property in their heads, we aught to believe that they have
| qualia.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| This might be sufficient, but it wouldn't be necessary. A lot
| of humans (though not all) believe that at least some
| mammals, like dogs or chimps, are conscious, though we know
| for a fact that they don't discuss their qualia.
| QuadmasterXLII wrote:
| Definitely not necessary. I have no idea how to define a
| measurable result that is necessary for consciousness, but
| a thought experiment with a physically measurable outcome
| that is sufficient proves that consciousness can inpact the
| material world
| bondarchuk wrote:
| You're talking about it right now in the physical world,
| though.
| visarga wrote:
| Can't open the PDF, is arXiv bugged?
| ryandvm wrote:
| Consciousness is an evolved information system requirement in all
| life forms that are complex enough to be capable of
| computationally modelling their environment, and importantly,
| their own place in that environment. You cannot model the world
| and your place in it without consciousness.
|
| Also, consciousness is not binary (present or not), it is a
| gradient. I am more conscious than I was this morning when I
| groggily opened my eyes and hadn't yet fully booted up my model
| of the world. I am more conscious than my dog, which is more
| conscious than my goldfish, which is more conscious than a worm,
| etc. A dragonfly has consciousness, but only enough to model, "I
| am here. I want to eat _that_. "
|
| The scary bit about consciousness being a gradient is that we
| kind of consider ourselves the pinnacle of life forms mostly
| because of the complexity of our conscious experience. If
| consciousness is simply an emergent property of sufficiently
| complex information modelling, than assuming continued increases
| in computational capability, we're probably on the brink of
| creating consciousness that is "more conscious" than ourselves.
| And by our own definition of import, this consciousness will
| exceed our own place in the universe.
|
| Will human life be the most important consideration in the
| universe if there is an artificial intelligence (actually, there
| will be nothing artificial about it) that is capable of modelling
| and empathizing with billions of life forms on an individual
| level?
| ffwd wrote:
| There are two types of gradient though, conceptually. If
| consciousness is some state of matter that is unknown still,
| and each neuron, for example, contains "one bit" of
| consciousness, then the gradient is that as you add more
| neurons, you add more complexity to the consciousness, but you
| do not change the fundamental experience of consciousness. You
| add more content but not more experience in itself.
|
| If on the other hand consciousness is this emergent phenomenon
| that depends on neurons and their connections, then the
| gradient (and thus the experience) would be far more diverse
| and there would be a lot of different ways consciousness could
| "feel".
|
| The problem I have is that for example, as far as my brain can
| remember, stimuli has looked the exact same all throughout my
| life. If I saw my a tree when I was 10, and I saw the same tree
| now, the conscious "qualia" of this would look exactly the
| same. To me this is a mystery, that the connections in the
| brain do not change the experience of qualia at all. Red looks
| like red no matter what the neuronal state of your brain is. I
| don't have an answer to this but just something I've been
| thinking about.
| verisimi wrote:
| > "Consciousness _is_ "
|
| So certain, so much knowledge. Where do you get this certainty
| from and can you share with us so we can know too?
| phrotoma wrote:
| > You cannot model the world and your place in it without
| consciousness.
|
| At any high school you can find a robot which models its place
| in the world without consciousness.
| WaltPurvis wrote:
| Not trying to be facetious: is a Roomba conscious?
| anon291 wrote:
| > If consciousness is simply an emergent property of
| sufficiently complex information modelling, than assuming
| continued increases in computational capability, we're probably
| on the brink of creating consciousness that is "more conscious"
| than ourselves. And by our own definition of import, this
| consciousness will exceed our own place in the universe.
|
| You went from 'consciousness exists on a gradient' (makes
| sense) to 'consciousness exists due to information modelling'
| which is a non sequitur.
|
| Consciousness could be due to information modelling.
|
| It could also be due to our brain's reliance on dopamine.
|
| Or maybe it's due to a heretofore unknown enzyme that taps into
| a quantum field.
|
| Or any other explanation.
|
| There is no way to prove that consciousness relies on
| information modelling. That's a major assumption.
| johnaspden wrote:
| Who cares? And how would we tell?
| ben_w wrote:
| I care, because getting it wrong in either direction is bad.
|
| Brain uploads will bring significant benefits regardless of if
| they are conscious.
|
| Thinking "this brain upload is conscious" when it isn't, means
| we'll get an empty future where the lights are on and nobody's
| home.
|
| Thinking "this brain upload isn't conscious" when it is... I've
| not seen most of Black Mirror, but it is the plot summary of
| many episodes given on Wikipedia. Also of the Westworld TV
| show, which I have seen. Some of the characters in the We Are
| Bob series.
|
| How would we tell, is, unfortunately, a complete unknown at
| this point.
| yreg wrote:
| I can accept (and to be honest even like) the idea, that
| consciousness somehow emerges from the complex structures in an
| animal brain, that there is no soul, no other planes of reality,
| no special quantum phenomena needed, etc.
|
| Maybe we could create a synthetic artificial conscious mind. At
| worst we could simulate a full human brain at whatever level is
| necessary. I can accept that.
|
| What's crazy to me is the following: It's not the computer that's
| conscious. Instead, the computation itself is conscious. And the
| computation is obviously matter-independent. As a thought
| experiment it would be possible to compute it on paper _and those
| pen and paper calculations would be conscious_. Or pebbles in a
| desert XKCD style.
|
| https://xkcd.com/505/
|
| Like... what?
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think that probably is the logical conclusion. There are a
| fair number of sci-fi books along those lines, e.g. Permutation
| City.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| The way I think about it is that no neuron is conscious; it is
| the network that is conscious. That is why the "mystery" of
| Searle's Room doesn't seem mysterious at all. Of course the
| human following the directions in the room doing thinking in
| Chinese doesn't understand the language any better than ATP
| (which is what the human is in that thought experiment -- an
| energy source) knows English in my brain.
| dvsfish wrote:
| One thought experiment I always find myself having is that if
| this is the case, does it make any difference if the network is
| physically larger? Not necessarily more complex, just the
| distances signals have to travel is bigger, say planet sized
| instead of brain sized. Would this system be conscious but just
| with a slower tick rate? Faster time perception?
| carra wrote:
| Couldn't you say the same about us? It's not the brain
| (hardware) that is conscious, but the mind (software) running
| on it.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| How could you be deciding what's for dinner, if the decision
| takes so long that all the food has rotted, your body has died,
| and the continent is now in an ice age? How could you be
| learning something about your observations of the night sky, if
| the suns had burned out before you knew they were there at all?
| Our 'conscious awareness' is the awareness of the environment
| around us in a timeframe where it stays approximately the same;
| when something changes too quickly, an explosion, a car crash,
| we have to wait until the environment steadies before we can
| think about it. If an insect zips by too quick to see, we never
| become conscious of it. We can be conscious of sound but not
| radio waves. Is it possible to have a consciousness where
| _everything_ zips by too quickly for it to notice, where it has
| no senses to learn about what 's around it, it's not-conscious
| of _anything_?
|
| At that point, the XKCD person moving the stones on the beach
| is doing a bit of a Searle's Chinese Room; "look, these stones
| I'm setting into positions I chose to represent some knowledge
| I chose, which I'm moving in patterns I chose, are echoing my
| choices back to me in ways I chose to interpret!".
| 13415 wrote:
| I believe that computationalism is by far the best foundational
| explanation of higher cognitive phenomena, as all other
| explanations involve some unscientific form of mysticism at one
| point or another. From this perspective, the answer to the
| question in the paper's headline is trivially true.
| Computationalism implies multiple realizability.
|
| It's worth noting that computationalism is independent from
| physicalism and monist materialism in general. It's not
| surprising that it's always paired with physicalism, but IMHO
| it's also the best foundational explanation for dualists.
| CooCooCaCha wrote:
| Science and math should always be the default hypothesis. It's
| irrational for people to jump to mysticism which is basically
| another form of god-of-the-gaps.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| How can we assess if someone or something has consciousness? It's
| not like we have a defined framework with precise rules to tell
| if something has consciousness. In fact this problem might not be
| solvable.
| somenameforme wrote:
| _Might_ not? One stepping into this sort of philosophy with any
| intent on solving anything is set to be quite disappointed. You
| have no way of knowing nor testing whether you 're the only
| conscience person in existence. There's even reasonable logic
| for such scenarios outside of borderline nihilistic views.
|
| We're all living through one ridiculously unique and critical
| era in humanity - internet, AI, space exploration, and more -
| all packed into a small enough timeframe to experience it all
| in a single human lifetime, which is a tiny minuscule fraction
| of the entire time our species has existed? If and when we ever
| develop the ability to create mind-blanked compelling
| simulations of the past, _this_ moment will damn sure be one of
| the eras people will go back to experience. We 're even the
| first era of widespread massive digital surveillance alongside
| the internet, creating more than enough data to create
| simulations of people like me - to further immerse you in your
| solitary world.
|
| Of course I am conscience and I certainly assume you are too.
| But hey, we'll never know until we get to see what, if
| anything, waits beyond the final curtain.
| neom wrote:
| My mum is a shrink, and very old, and smart, and hates
| technology. I was talking her through how some primitive "AGI"
| could happen with 4o (basically just explained this:
| https://b.h4x.zip/agi)
|
| That got us talking about consciousness, and at the end, she
| thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I can't
| give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not conscious"
| and went back to making her dinner.
| alchemist1e9 wrote:
| > She thought about it for about a minute and then said "if I
| can't give it lysergic acid and make it see god, it's not
| conscious" and went back to making her dinner.
|
| That's probably going to be pretty easy, just scramble some
| attention heads randomly in portions of the transformer network
| and the AGI will probably think "it sees god".
| Zambyte wrote:
| You can give it a virtual device as the real time camera input
| to show it things that aren't there. That's not organic acid,
| but the target isn't organic consciousness.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| One uncanny thing is that people have such a diverse
| tolerance for "fake", across a spectrum from absolute
| acceptance to complete rejection.
|
| Or for things like hallucinatory perceptions of reality.
| aeonik wrote:
| A psychologist I know did their PhD in this area (also old and
| smart), and he called this kind of thinking "Neural Chauvanism"
| -> if her explanation actually requires the chemical and neural
| components.
|
| PDF warning:
| https://gwern.net/doc/philosophy/mind/1985-cuda.pdf
| neom wrote:
| It's a good point as i'm sure what she was saying is she
| belives consciousness requires specific neural properties. I
| am aware of the the ideas around neural chauvanists, but that
| paper is now almost 40 years old. We know a lot more about
| the brain since it was written. The idea that the homunculi
| can perfectly replicate the relevant causal powers of neurons
| is... questionable at best. It would says distinctive
| biochemical properties of neurons enable consciousness, which
| homunculi would lack, and then homunculized, I also don't
| like the idea that we must attribute consciousness to the
| homunculized brain unless we accept an implausible cut-off
| point? Consciousness could be requiring a critical mass of
| neurons, which could be reached later without each
| replacement causing incremental fading. The implausibility of
| a single neuron replacement eliminating consciousness is not
| a good reason to consider it conscious. imo It's probably
| still more likley that experiences like an LSD trip require
| specifically neural underpinnings.
| stvltvs wrote:
| That's begging the question of whether inorganic matter can be
| conscious. If you boil it down, she's just said if it's
| inorganic, it's not conscious.
| neom wrote:
| It's funny, I've studied a lot of psychedelics (probably
| because it was an area of research for both my parents), and
| salvia divinorum is a really really stand out plant in it's
| trips, it seems to be a very "technically philosophical"
| plant. Trip reports always go into weird things like "I
| became a book on a shelf for 4,000 years, and now I know
| inanimate objects are conscious", there is also the area of
| panpsychism and animism.
|
| That stuff is all a little too mind bending for me, but
| pretty fun thinking for a Sunday morning. :)
| eaenki wrote:
| well, i tried salvia and I tried shrooms. I don't see how
| it's more philosophical just because it's a dissociative.
| at best, it's more of an ego death than, say, shrooms, if
| during the trip you become an object. It's still a unique
| plant for sure because of it's dissociative effects. To
| thread lightly. AFAIK natives in mexico say that smoking it
| is very bad. and that u're supposed to chew fresh leaves.
| maybe chewing fresh leaves doesn't even cause the same
| dissociative effects which are unpleasant.
| mgdante wrote:
| Raising the temperature is probably a close analog to
| psychedelics.
| boesboes wrote:
| I've read once they determined the mechanism by which a.o lsd
| 'works', is by lowering/disabling a lot of the filtering
| between neurons. This leads us to recognise all kinds of
| patterns that are not really there. Visual hallucinations
| being the obvious form of this, but I suppose the same
| applies to other things like our personalities and self;
| that's neither here nor there anyway.
|
| Now I'm not 100% sure how temperature is implemented, but
| from what i recollect, might be a reasonable analogue indeed!
| neom wrote:
| That's not really correct. default mode network activity is
| somewhat disrupted, but LSD works primarily by interaction
| with the 5-HT2A receptor subtype, this is multiple
| neurotransmitter systems, including serotonin, dopamine,
| and glutamate, and in many examples it's via excitement not
| inhibition/lowering/disabling. Excitatory neurotransmission
| in glutamate is looking like the the most important of the
| work in the 5-HT2A area.
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Does excitatory/inhibitory map cleanly on to the higher
| level abstractions? I'm no neuroscientist, so maybe it
| does, but that seems like a bad assumption to me because
| in digital logic "active when low" is extremely common. A
| spurious-suppression system that caused inhibition when
| low would be perfectly reasonable and compatible with the
| observation that excitation caused an increase in
| spurious behavior.
| neom wrote:
| They don't really map well. The brain obviously operates
| on more continuous principles rather than binary states.
| The relationship between excitation/inhibition and
| emergent effects may be more direct and graded in
| biological neural networks vs to the "active when low".
| Buuuutt stiilll, 5-HT2A receptor and its downstream
| effects on glutamate transmission play a central role in
| mediating the subjective effects of psychedelics. Very
| very many studies have consistently linked 5-HT2A
| activation to the perceptual, cognitive, and emotional
| characteristic of the psychedelic state. Disruption of
| the default mode network and other changes are somewhat
| important maybe, the 5-HT2A receptor appears to be the
| focus of action for producing these effects. The point
| being, neurochemical interactions at the molecular level
| are the most important aspects of the LSD interaction,
| so.., now sure how that works in the context of synthetic
| AI, I don't know much about ML/NN.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Well, this guy is highly proficient at administering an
| artificial lysergic acid to LLMs:
| https://x.com/repligate/status/1792010019744960577
| schmidtleonard wrote:
| Deep Dream is wild:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DaVnriHhPc
| moffkalast wrote:
| And a few drinks too many: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaM
| A/comments/13vv941/tempera...
| bee_rider wrote:
| That seems more like a good natured refusal to engage with the
| question seriously.
|
| Sort of like, if you come to a smart engineer with a design for
| a perpetual motion machine, they might likely tease you a
| little bit and then refer you to a physicist. Smart people from
| applied fields know when the topics are outside their actual
| wheelhouse, but getting close enough that they risk being taken
| seriously, to a misleading extent.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Funny story, but at the same time, got seems fine about
| hallucinating by itself. At least a little.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| You can give LLMs DRuGS though!
|
| https://github.com/EGjoni/DRUGS
| Beijinger wrote:
| No mention of Julian Jaynes "The Origin of Consciousness in the
| Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" here?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Well, mostly because, while an extremely entertaining idea,
| it's pretty clearly bogus science.
| throwaway71271 wrote:
| as opposed to the other non bogus science on the objective
| measurement of consciousness
| Beijinger wrote:
| Any evidence for that?
| filchermcurr wrote:
| I would be remiss if I didn't mention Steve Grand. He's been
| chasing this dream for many, many years. If you remember
| Creatures, it was his first attempt at artificial life. Sadly the
| computing capabilities in 1991 weren't enough to achieve anything
| remotely like consciousness, but he did an admirable job of
| simulating a simple lifeform with a basic adaptive / reactive
| neural network. It also has a simple biology / biochemistry to
| work with the brain. (Incidentally, the Creatures community is
| alive and well if anybody wants to check that out:
| https://creatures.wiki/Discord )
|
| Steve is working on a new project, Grandroids, that hopes to
| imbibe creatures with imagination and forward planning. Exciting
| stuff! (https://creatures.wiki/Grandroids)
| tristor wrote:
| I am far from an expert on cognitive science, however I have
| given a considerable amount of thought around the topic of
| consciousness and AGI, and particularly about what the nature of
| consciousness even is. I would consider myself erudite and well-
| read on the topic, despite having no professional or academic
| credentials on the matter.
|
| The best conclusion I have been able to come to thus far is that
| consciousness is not a manifestation of the physical structures
| of our mind, but rather a reflection or view into the nature of
| our soul. The physical structures of the mind are a prerequisite,
| but not sufficient, to manifest consciousness. To wit, there are
| several other mammals in the world which have similarly complex
| brain structures, and in many cases larger amounts of brain mass,
| but do not exhibit any sort of human-like consciousness.
|
| I saw all this, while being generally agnostic/areligious. I've
| studied this question philosophically from the perspective of the
| theologians and from various religious works, of course, but
| given as I don't myself have a strong religious belief system,
| this is not the primary influence for why I take the above
| position. Simply put, I think a purely materialistic view of
| consciousness is clearly incorrect, however I don't have a better
| alternative that's provable.
|
| Given my conclusions, I do not think it is possible for AGI to
| ever be truly conscious, but it may be possible for it to
| convincingly mimic consciousness.
| danans wrote:
| > consciousness is not a manifestation of the physical
| structures of our mind, but rather a reflection or view into
| the nature of our soul
|
| > To wit, there are several other mammals in the world which
| have similarly complex brain structures, and in many cases
| larger amounts of brain mass, but do not exhibit any sort of
| human-like consciousness.
|
| Per your theory these other mammals do not have "souls",
| otherwise their significant brain mass would reflect their
| soul's nature, and generate consciousness.
|
| So humans have somehow been chosen exclusively to have "souls",
| or at least have brains capable of reflecting them.
|
| When did this choosing happen? Just to homo sapiens sapiens or
| also to neanderthalis and other homo sapiens subspecies?
|
| Taking it back further, under your theory do our closest extant
| genetic relatives, bonobo chimpanzees, have souls, and by
| extension, your definition of consciousness?
| kbrkbr wrote:
| I want to open a side thread about your definitions or
| descriptions of what "consciousness" is. I think that could be
| pretty interesting after reading all the comments, and I think
| there's a lot of knowledge hidden here that we could throw
| together.
|
| Some things that I understood, in my words:
|
| - consciousness is probably not reducible to smaller, non-
| conscious parts of which it is composed. You could maybe say it
| is intrinsically holistic
|
| - consciousness entails being aware of or observing qualities
| that hard science tells us the things don't have (green vs.
| length of lightwave); but "being aware of" or "observing" are so
| closely related to consciousness, that it may not be very
| informative
|
| - consciousness can't be detected from the outside for now, and
| probably by the structure of the process. It is "inner" in a very
| peculiar sense (everything else is outer, and can't get in,
| except as representation)
| XorNot wrote:
| The fact a conscious mind loses capability when brain damage
| happens shows quite clearly that consciousness as a process
| _is_ reducible to smaller non-conscious parts though.
|
| There's also an innate problem in assuming the human experience
| of say, "green" is consistent. What I actually see when I see
| the colour green only appears consistent with the physical
| behaviour of light. Whether any two people really see colours
| the same way is highly questionable.
| mistermann wrote:
| > The fact a conscious mind loses capability when brain
| damage happens shows quite clearly that consciousness as a
| process is reducible to smaller non-conscious parts though.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_and_sufficiency
| PeterisP wrote:
| I think there's a consensus that you _don 't_ assume that the
| human experience of "green" is consistent, only that people
| do have such an experience. We can possibly try to "align"
| those experiences with communication and referring to a
| shared real world, but for that an interesting experiment
| scenario is communication between a person with the common
| trichromatic sight, a person with a tetrachromatic retina,
| and someone with partial color blindness, as the experience
| of "green" for them is not only inconsistent but also likely
| incompatible, without a possibility to align them.
| parsadotsh wrote:
| > The fact a conscious mind loses capability when brain
| damage happens shows quite clearly that consciousness as a
| process is reducible to smaller non-conscious parts though.
|
| This does not follow.
| igiveup wrote:
| Ability to perceive your own thoughts. Access to your own debug
| logs.
|
| I think this is distinct from "ability to perceive green, which
| doesn't exist". A neural network trained to distinguish green
| in the output of a spectroscope will perceive green without
| ever knowing there is something like a "neural network" or
| "thoughts".
|
| Also, this probably _can_ be detected from the outside via
| debugging. What cannot be detected may be the thing that
| distinguishes a hypothetical "philosophical zombie" from a
| truly conscious human, but I don't think anything like a
| philosophical zombie exists. Once it is physically identical to
| the human, it will also be thinking identically.
|
| As a next step, you may observe humans around you and realize
| that the thoughts you perceive seem to be running inside the
| head of one of these humans (which you will call "me").
| However, I don't think knowing what you look like from the
| outside is necessary for consciousness.
| potatoman22 wrote:
| The authors suggest incorporating elements of neuroscience into
| machine learning models. I don't see why the bitter lesson [1]
| doesn't apply here.
|
| 1.
| https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~eunsol/courses/data/bitter_lesson...
| Conlectus wrote:
| Isn't ReLU an element of neuroscience that was incorporated
| into machine learning to great success?
| etiam wrote:
| Not really, no. That's motivated by not getting impractically
| small gradients on the plateaus and spoiling the optimization
| properties when used for deep ANNs. The sigmoids it replaced
| had a bit more neuroscience inspiration, but so
| oversimplified it's just barely.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Regarding that article, not main post,
|
| > Today all this is discarded
|
| I can only comment on the one field where I am intimately
| familiar: computer vision. It is true that when you need a text
| description of the contents of an image, we have discarded
| feature-based approached. But attempts to change vision-based
| tracking, mapping, and navigation into a learned process have
| not performed well in the applications I have worked on. It's
| true that end to end control from raw images to output can do
| very well, but in most systems, the feature based approaches
| are still employed _along side_ CNN for tracking. ML-only
| tracking is subject to a lot of noise because of its lack of
| good history, poor association, and sensitivity to outliers.
|
| So, it's not discarded, it's supplanted by CNN as the primary
| signal, but our old tricks (reassociation, factor graphs, batch
| processing, even plain old homographies and MH-EKF) are still
| very much the scaffolding.
|
| I expect it is the same in other sub fields mentioned - the
| main driver for improvement is no longer human directed
| knowledge-based algorithms, but rather human-designed,
| learning-based, heterogenous pipelines. Even the RAG or Tesla
| autopilot (probably) fits this bill nicely.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| There will always be a set of problems beyond the current (in
| whatever year) computational limits of brute force, and we
| don't know how many of a humans capabilities are in that set.
|
| The delta between a clever algorithm vs brute force in
| computational advancement could be 7 years or it could be 7,000
| years.
| monstertank wrote:
| I never understood this. Evolution basically says humans are
| conscious matter...why would that not be replicatable via an
| intelligent designer (humans)?
|
| Randomness created consciousness from a single cell...why would
| that be the most efficient solution?
| jugg1es wrote:
| We can't replicate something we don't understand. The mechanism
| for consciousness is not understood at all right now and could
| actually be based on quantum effects that we haven't detected
| yet. It's also possible that it is only achievable in an
| organic machine. Until we understand how consciousness actually
| arises, the best we can do is a simulacrum of it.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| We can't replicate it now but it doesn't means it's
| impossible.
|
| Like no one thinks that humans visiting Pluto is impossible,
| it's just not something we can feasibly do right now.
| thethimble wrote:
| The framework of materialism posits that there's a physical
| universe and consciousness is an emergent property of
| physical processes. This view is so prevalent in the
| western world it's hard to imagine how it could be anything
| else.
|
| As an alternative, imagine that consciousness is primary.
| After all, any evidence that you have about the material
| world happens as an appearance within consciousness. (See
| "brain in a vat" and related thought experiments for the
| legitimacy of this idea).
|
| In this alternative model, the concept of replicating
| consciousness with material processes doesn't make any
| sense because consciousness is primary.
|
| To be clear I'm not making any assertions about which model
| is correct. Instead I'm suggesting that the model you
| choose is axiomatic - taken as given as opposed to inferred
| from evidence. And starting with the latter model means
| artificial replication of consciousness isn't even a
| logical proposition.
| fngjdflmdflg wrote:
| >I'm suggesting that the model you choose is axiomatic -
| taken as given as opposed to inferred from evidence
|
| The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is
| material, therefore consciousness is emergent from
| material. My evidence that the brain is the seat of
| consciousness is that when my head hurts it impairs my
| thoughts, and that my eyes are connected to by brain.
|
| Stated a bit differently:
|
| All events must have a cause, therefore consciousness
| must have a cause. The brain is the most likely candidate
| for the cause of consciousness. The brain is material,
| therefore consciousness is emergent from material.
|
| What role do you think the brain plays in consciousness?
| Do you believe that events must have causes?
| thethimble wrote:
| > The brain is the seat of consciousness and the brain is
| material, therefore consciousness is emergent from
| material
|
| This is true from the standpoint of materialism but not
| necessarily fundamentally true.
|
| How do you know you have a brain? As you explore this
| question, you'll realize that the knowledge that you have
| a brain only manifests as appearances within
| consciousness.
|
| It's not necessary true that these appearances are giving
| you a window into an objective material universe. Instead
| it might be possible that your consciousness is a product
| of a simulation where your entire subjectivity -
| including the observation that you have a brain - is a
| manifestation of another mechanism that is outside of
| observability.
|
| The point is that we simply don't know what's at rock
| bottom - an objective universe, a simulation, or an
| alien's dream. Therefore the "arrow" of causality might
| flow from consciousness towards material as opposed to
| the other way around.
| moi2388 wrote:
| Why not? I can replicate a book in a foreign without
| understanding the language?
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| IOW you are hardly conscious at all of what the book is
| about.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| You can copy an existing book, word for word (maybe not
| even that if it uses a different character set, unless
| you're doing photocopies).
|
| Write a _new_ book without understanding the language? No
| way - not one that makes any sense. Not unless you 're
| going with the "million monkeys" approach (and if you did
| try that approach, you wouldn't live long enough to succeed
| in writing one actual coherent book in the foreign
| language).
|
| So, we could think about trying to simulate a human brain,
| neuron by neuron. That's the "making a photocopy" approach.
| But that's not the approach we're pursuing. We're trying to
| write a new book (create a new, non-human intelligence) in
| a language we don't understand (that is, not knowing what
| intelligence/consciousness actually is).
|
| (Side topic: What would happen if you asked GPT-4 to write
| a full-length novel? Or even a story as long as the token
| limit? Would you get anything coherent?)
| davnicwil wrote:
| As a tangent on this, it'd be such an interesting
| experiment to see how far one could go in
| deciphering/understanding a new language and attempting
| to write a new book in that language based on the content
| of a single, probably fairly long, book.
|
| It feels like it should be theoretically possible, but I
| doubt it's ever been tried.
|
| Maybe something like understanding aincent languages from
| limited, fragmented sources is the closest natural
| experiment we have in practice to have tested it, but
| it's hardly the same as a full, substantial text in a
| consistent style.
| hovering_nox wrote:
| Congratulations, you have just invented large language
| models.
| __loam wrote:
| I agree that people who think we can replicate brains on von
| Neumann machines with our current understanding of the brain
| are idiots who don't know what they're talking about, but
| humans build things they don't understand all the time.
| There's always a way to go deeper on a subject. The Romans
| were pretty good architects even without a modern
| understanding of metallurgy and structural engineering. We
| can treat mental illness with medications even if we don't
| fully understand consciousness.
| jacobsimon wrote:
| I agree but even if you take materialism for granted, we've yet
| to uncover the exact biological mechanism. It's entirely
| possible that it is unique to carbon-based and/or analog
| brains.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| That wouldn't really be consistent with the laws of physics
| as we know them. So it would require a significant change in
| our scientific theories (which is possible, but I wouldn't
| bet on it)
| jacobsimon wrote:
| I don't follow you. I'm saying we haven't discovered any
| inorganic consciousness, so it isn't a given that we will
| be able to create it with digital computers. Not sure how
| that breaks the laws of physics.
| __loam wrote:
| Programmers seem to forget about how physics is the
| reason there's np-hard problems.
| Thiez wrote:
| Humans aren't better at solving NP-hard problems so I
| don't really see the connection with consciousness here.
| naasking wrote:
| Some people are convinced by p-zombies and The Knowledge
| Argument that not everything we experience can be reduced to
| matter interactions.
| chrsw wrote:
| How is that different than saying the function of the lungs,
| kidneys and heart can't be reduced to matter interactions?
| How is the brain special?
| ikrenji wrote:
| well the brain is special because it gives rise to
| consciousness. lungs, kidneys and heart don't
| astrange wrote:
| There's a lot of nerves and bacteria in the digestive
| system that might contribute some of it. That and various
| hormonal glands and reproductive systems.
| naasking wrote:
| You have to Google and read those thought experiments to
| see why. You may not be convinced (I'm not), but they give
| good reasons. We have mechanistic explanations for all of
| those organs, and even if we lack some explanation, we know
| one is possible in principle. They argue this isn't the
| case for consciousness.
| card_zero wrote:
| OK.
|
| Philosophical zombies react to external events in exactly
| the same way as normal people, _including internally,_
| but we are told they lack conscious experience. Thus the
| thought experiment is set up from the start to find that
| conscious experience is something non-physical - or else
| the p-zombies don 't really do what they're claimed to
| do, which is to react _identically_ to everyone else.
|
| There's a dubious implication that conscious experience
| is completely cryptic, with no effect on the outside
| world (such as a person speaking the words "I consciously
| experienced that"), or at least that all such effects are
| shallow enough that they can be perfectly faked. If this
| is true, we ought to question why it's such a big deal.
| What's so great about consciousness? Why associate it
| with rights?
|
| The Knowledge Argument is about a scientist who learns
| "everything" about colors intellectually but doesn't see
| them until years later, and seeing a red tomato is a
| revelatory experience even after all that book-learning,
| so it implies that experiences are beyond knowledge, or
| beyond physics, or beyond tomatoes or something. But
| _really_ all it shows is that intellectual learning is
| dry and dusty and limited. Like with the p-zombies, the
| premise is wrong. The scientist didn 't really learn
| everything before having the experience, but could have
| done _in principle_ but for the limits of communication,
| description, and simulation as we know those things
| presently. (And then the real experience would not have
| had any surprising or revelatory quale about it.)
| naasking wrote:
| > Thus the thought experiment is set up from the start to
| find that conscious experience is something non-physical
|
| The point is that if you accept that p-zombies are
| possible, then you accept that consciousness is not
| _necessarily_ physical. If it 's not necessarily
| physical, then physicalism is false.
|
| > really all it shows is that intellectual learning is
| dry and dusty and limited.
|
| What it's attempting to show is the limit of factual
| knowledge. If physicalism is true, then everything that
| can be observed must reduce to objective third person
| facts. But, Mary has all of the objective third person
| facts. So if you find it implausible that Mary would be
| able to infer the experience of red before actually
| observing a rose, even with all of those facts, then
| you're admitting the existence of first person subjective
| facts, which cannot be reduced to objective third person
| facts, not even in theory.
|
| Daniel Dennett has some great responses to these
| challenges.
| annica wrote:
| I think multiple forms of consciousness exist now. ADHD, autism?
|
| I think it's a good thing.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| What is this obsession with making computers human-like?
|
| We can put those machine to better uses than forgetting, having
| biases, making subtle or gross mistakes (hello, ChatGPT) like we
| do.
|
| The AI that some apparently consider top-notch today is only good
| at powering NPCs in video games. The more serious the use-case,
| the more harmful it becomes.
|
| Moreover, achieving artificial consciousness is only good at
| fueling endless debates about whether it fakes it perfectly or it
| is the real thing.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| Agreed. The calculator is not human-like, let's figure out how
| to humanize this! Intelligence comes in a myriad of ways.
| Mimicking humans will just produce a human, what's the point? I
| am not even sure a super intelligent "human" is even a good
| thing. The smartass will probably spend their intelligence
| betting the stock market.
| SJC_Hacker wrote:
| > What is this obsession with making computers human-like?
|
| Replacement of human labor on the cheap, the most capital
| intensive part of many businesses. Alternatively as a
| productivity multiplier of human labor.
| __loam wrote:
| "Cheap"
|
| OpenAI loves to talk revenue but I'd like to hear more about
| their unit economics.
| deepfriedchokes wrote:
| I think humanity is afraid of being alone.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Damn straight. If space travel is so bloody hard, I'll just
| make the damn aliens myself.
|
| Related, but LLMs are the ultimate example of humans
| following the tradition of the Timaeus and imitating the
| demiurgos - the divine crafter, as the gods did when they
| crafted the demigods, as the demigods did when they crafted
| us, and as we do when we craft machine intelligence. Neo-
| platonism engaged with this idea a long time ago.
| PeterisP wrote:
| I think there's practical value to knowing what would make a
| very complex AI system conscious in order to explicitly and
| intentionally avoid it - we want to create powerful artificial
| systems to do all the tasks that humans don't want to do, but
| there's no reason for those systems to have the capability to
| experience suffering by being 'enslaved' to do all these tasks;
| arguably consciousness isn't necessary nor useful for any of
| these tasks[1], and unless it turns out to be an unalienable
| side-effect of some critical mass of capability, we'd rather
| not have these systems be conscious.
|
| [1] I can imagine a few roles with relationship-building where
| _expressing_ consciousness could be useful, but IMHO for all of
| them faking consciousness would be far preferable than actually
| having it.
| __loam wrote:
| We're kind of failing by making AI that automates the things
| humans want to do.
| hsnewman wrote:
| Please deine consciousness.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Are cells conscious? I presume yes. I've seen a video of a white
| blood cell chasing after a bacteria trying to evade, around
| obstacles, and its pretty dramatic.
|
| Since at one point we were just two cell, all that was required
| for us to be conscious must have been already encoded in those
| cells. Unless you want to argue consciousness spontaneously
| arises out of a grouping of specific cells. In which case the
| grouping of those cells was also already encoded in those two
| cells.
| K0balt wrote:
| What is a non-theist argument that dictates we should treat
| synthetic "consciousness" as fundamentally different than
| biologically derived conciousness?
|
| I think this is a valid question Even if the strongest evidence
| for machines having "real"consciousness is its external/utility
| indistinguishability from biological consciousness ?
|
| It would seem to me that a machine that seems to be conscious and
| professes that it is should then be treated as if it were, if for
| no other reason than the likely outcome of not doing so -
| creating "synthetic distrust and enemity" between "conscious"
| machines and humanity.
|
| It seems like if we are going to ignore the "utility" argument
| for consciousness, we then must prove that other humans as well
| are actually conscious, and not just appearing to be so.
|
| Seems like a bad place for the species to go, for a multitude of
| reasons.
| anon-3988 wrote:
| If we are talking about intelligence or "agency", then I don't
| see why something other than carbon can do it.
|
| But if we are talking about "there's there there", then I am not
| sure if we will ever find an explanation for this. Let's say that
| X is what gives rise to "there's there there". What does this
| tell me? Nothing.
|
| This is perhaps the most interesting, most important, and most
| baffling mystery of the universe. It requires no equipment other
| than one's own mind. Esoteric contemplatives have spent millenias
| on this and none of them have the answer to the ultimate
| question.
| prolyxis wrote:
| I am hopeful that advances in brain-computer interfaces will
| start to provide a partial answer to the question of "what's
| there" and why it's there. It seems to me the ability to
| controllably augment one's own consciousness with precision
| will tremendously clarify the necessary ingredients for
| consciousness.
| lottin wrote:
| I think the main ingredient is a living being.
| Thiez wrote:
| Why?
| mrangle wrote:
| After reading the abstract, the message received is that they
| intend to redefine consciousness to match whatever they are able
| to achieve; however limited.
|
| The upside will be a lot of possible gaslighting. I remember when
| kids thought that Teddy Ruxpin was conscious. What's society's
| tolerance for how alt a consciousness can be?
| light_triad wrote:
| The problem with consciousness is that it's both a vague term
| that's been difficult to define and it has social roots that are
| not really universal.
|
| The debate reminds me of a sequence in Werner Herzog's 1972
| documentary 'The Flying Doctors of East Africa' where multiple
| people are asked to point at a picture of an eye. Some have
| difficulty with the task. Even though it's not scientific it
| makes you realize how much of what we see and recognize is a
| learned behavior through year of social training rather than an
| innate ability.
|
| Here's the scene (starts at 40min it's in German but you can auto
| translate subtitles):
| https://youtu.be/MZ3MMEe3Qmk?si=i0ydc3DN3aohnrIO
| martin-t wrote:
| Do we know why they failed at the task? My immediate thought is
| that it's a failure of translation. My second is to "debug"
| their reasoning by asking them to describe the pictures.
|
| There's gotta be somebody who knows more but the information
| was lost on the cutting room's floor in favor of a moral
| lesson.
| light_triad wrote:
| Agreed it's not possible from the footage to draw any
| definite conclusions - the whole exchange and portrayal is
| deeply flawed. I wonder if anyone has seen some scientific
| papers with a reproducible methodology that look into the
| deep differences in cultural framing along those lines?
| ACV001 wrote:
| We don't really need artificial consciousness. Actually, we
| should avoid it. We already have Artificial General Intelligence
| (contrary to common perception). Artificial consciousness will
| only complicate things. A lot. Better keep on enhancing the AGI
| we have and use it as a tool rather than having to deal with the
| emotional and ethical aspect of the AI in case it gets
| consciousness.
| strangescript wrote:
| "Is this thing we defined to make us feel special achievable?"
| What we define as "consciousness" is just an emergent property of
| large, dense neural networks w/memory.
|
| The human brain is a marvel of mechanical and electrical
| engineering, not a mystical, otherworldly device. Maybe there is
| something going on at a quantum level to explain the incredible
| performance our brains achieve, but that is still nothing that we
| can't build.
| refulgentis wrote:
| > What we define as "consciousness" is just an emergent
| property of large, dense neural networks w/memory.
|
| Wow. That settles a ton of questions across fields.
| Fascinating.
|
| Source?
| d_theorist wrote:
| How do you know?
| cscurmudgeon wrote:
| Positions 1 and 2 are not consistent (all our neural networks
| are classic)?
|
| 1. "emergent property of large, dense neural networks w/memory
| "
|
| 2. "Maybe there is something going on at a quantum level"
|
| 3. consciousness is mystical, otherworldly device
|
| A lot of people who oppose 1 and agree with 2 are unfairly
| lumped with position 3.
| __loam wrote:
| The brain is not a product of engineering, but of evolution. As
| a biomedical engineering graduate, I feel obligated to point
| out that even though I think consciousness is a result of
| physical process that in theory can be replicated, we have so
| far failed to achieve that. Saying consciousness is "just" an
| emergent property of dense neural networks is kind of a signal
| to me that have a pretty ignorant view on this stuff that's
| more rooted in machine learning terminology than actual
| biology.
| cs702 wrote:
| Before we can answer that question, don't we need a method for
| determining whether an entity is conscious?
|
| As far as I know, such a method doesn't exist yet. We have no way
| of verifying if other entities are conscious.
|
| I'd settle for a more mundane goal than "consciousness:" reliable
| machine intelligence.
| aleksiy123 wrote:
| It seems to me that our definition of consciousness is just our
| own state of mind. A scale that starts with our own individual
| sense of consciousness (most conscious) and goes to infinite
| (least conscious).
|
| Do we believe there is anything more conscious then our own
| individual self at the current moment in time?
|
| The more similar we perceive and empathize with another entity
| the more conscious we believe them to be.
|
| But I think in a practical sense it doesn't matter too much.
| Theres no global hierarchy of consciousness.
|
| A rock isn't very similar to us. But once that rocks starts
| talking/communicating with us enough that we can empathize with
| it and think that it understands us. We will call it conscious
| and probably give it the rights we think it deserves.
| ypeterholmes wrote:
| You're making this harder than it needs to be. Things that have
| self awareness via an internal world map can be considered
| conscious, meaning self aware. A rock has no such mechanism.
| Most animals including humans do.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| The Pythagorean Philolaus claimed that "The soul is introduced
| and associated with the body by Number, and by a harmony
| simultaneously immortal and incorporeal....the soul cherishes its
| body, because without it the soul cannot feel"
|
| So, what I like about this is how consciousness (feeling--
| sensation-sentience) is distinguished from the soul. Further, it
| is precisely by the combination of the soul and body that
| consciousness arises. And note that the soul is, essentially, the
| same sort of material as number and mathematics -- immaterial,
| eternal, etc.
|
| I don't know of other perspectives on soul like this.
| causality0 wrote:
| We had really better hope that biological brains are
| fundamentally "bad" at consciousness, because if a human brain is
| as efficient at generating consciousness as other biological
| brains are at doing much older, more refined tasks, we're totally
| fucked. For example, a dragonfly brain takes visual input from
| thousands of ommatidia and uses it to track prey in 3D space and
| plot intercept vectors using only sixteen neurons. How many
| transistors does a computer need to do the same thing? Now scale
| that to however many neurons and synapses you guesstimate a human
| brain needs to create consciousness. The numbers are bad news.
|
| There's little doubt that eventually we will be able to design a
| computer version of a human soul. Whether that sapience fits in a
| computer smaller than a zip code or thinks any faster than a
| person is an entirely different question.
| nobrains wrote:
| From Google Gemini:
|
| - This is an article about artificial consciousness.
|
| - It discusses whether it is possible to create artificial
| consciousness by studying the human brain.
|
| - The authors argue that some features of the human brain are
| necessary for consciousness.
|
| - These features include a specific biochemical makeup and slow
| information processing speed.
|
| - Current AI technology does not have these features.
|
| - The article concludes that it is unlikely that AI will achieve
| human-level consciousness in the near future.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > To date computers (and AI in general) operate prevalently in an
| input-output mode. This is strikingly not the case for the human
| brain which works in a projective - or predictive - mode
| constantly testing hypotheses (or pre-representations) on the
| world including itself (J.-P. Changeux, 1986; Friston et al.,
| 2016; Pezzulo, Parr, Cisek, Clark, & Friston, 2024). This
| projective/predictive mode relies on the fact that the brain
| possesses an intrinsic - spontaneous - activity (Dehaene &
| Changeux, 2005). The earliest forms of animals do exhibit a
| nervous system where spontaneously active neurons can be recorded
| (e.g., jelly fish, hydra). Such spontaneous oscillators [...]
|
| > Last in agreement with our views, the active inference theory
| formalizes how autonomous learning agents (whether artificial or
| natural) shall be endowed with a spontaneous active motivation to
| explore and learn (Friston et al., 2016), which other studies
| confirmed to be sufficient for the emergence of complex behavior
| without the need for immediate rewards
| (https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10316).
|
| ...
|
| What I take from this is that there needs to be something of a
| [negative] feedback loop in the AI for it to get to
| consciousness, and if we think about how that works in nature,
| that means we need several negative feedback loops, including the
| AI equivalent of various hormones and signaling agents. Think
| dopamine.
|
| Now, AI already has feedback. But I'm talking at a different
| layer. The AI's interaction with the world has to help drive and
| modulate what the AI seeks to do through that interaction. The AI
| needs motivation in the form of pain, pleasure, and instincts.
| coldblues wrote:
| I think it's possible that machines could become conscious in the
| future. Do I think it matters? No. A lot of people mistakenly try
| to empathize and think ethically. I think it's the Effective
| Altruism brainrot. If you are a physicalist, consider this:
| consciousness is a phenomena that can be replicated and modified
| any which way. Right now, you are having a subjective conscious
| experience. This experience of yours is seamless regardless of
| what happens. Whether you are in a coma, asleep or dead, your
| subjective conscious experience will indefinitely be there
| regardless of your memories. You will continually wake up. You
| will continue to experience until it is impossible for any
| consciousness to ever form. That means an indefinite amount of
| suffering. This is not a greater than life threat. It's all
| physical. Pain and suffering are evolutionary products. You want
| to minimize them because of your biology. You have evolved to be
| able to relate with someone's pain and this has presented the
| advantage of being able to work together and care for one
| another.
|
| I am intrigued by non-human consciousness. A higher form of life.
| Seeing more colors, feeling more emotion, perhaps being a part of
| a hivemind. Do you ever think why the hivemind is vilified?
| Realistically there's nothing wrong with it. It's just so foreign
| that we can't ever possibly imagine it. It's a scary thought. We
| lose our human experience, something unique to us.
| filipezf wrote:
| I've been working on computatioinal modelling consciousness and
| came to similar conclusions: there is a continuum between
| patterns of matter that have consciousness (humans and other
| animals, maybe a biological enough computer, etc) which leads
| to all sorts of crazy stuff being possible. Evolved human
| ethics and feelings of care are incompatible with these
| amorphous extended possibilities. It can lead to some ultimate
| copernican revlolution that ends human exceptionalism, to
| outlaw consciousness tinkering (for how long?), or to put our
| heads into sand.
| avastmick wrote:
| I really cannot understand consciousness. And if I am honest nor
| do I see peoples fascination with it. Especially now that
| scientists are trying to measure, they seem to come up short and
| some posit that it must a quantum effect or something else.
|
| I am not sure what new learning all the research and thinking
| brings: I am lost it all the "arguments"; I really do not
| understand.
|
| A lot of way smarter people than me think it's a worthwhile
| concept to wrestle with. Maybe I'm just not smart enough to get
| it.
|
| A lot of people way smarter than me agonised over the nature of
| the soul too. Is it that debate replayed? Are we just trying to
| justify humans "specialness"?
| blamestross wrote:
| Once you start considering it just metacognition, it gets to be
| a much more useful concept, but most people seem to desperately
| want it to be "special".
|
| Ask any therapist, consciousness has limits, it has bound
| depth. It takes a lot of work to re-train it. It isn't a
| magical human only special thing.
| moffkalast wrote:
| I think the core concept is pretty simple, it's meta cognition.
| A feedback loop of observing oneself for the purpose of
| understanding which part of your observations is yourself and
| which is the environment. Just like inteligence, its scales
| from rudimentary in animals to overdeveloped in humans.
|
| The only way to know if it's genuinely occurring or not is to
| observe the internal state... which is a bit problematic for
| biological organisms since we tend to die in the process. But
| for AI it should be fairly straightforward to verify once DNN
| analysis progresses enough.
| h_tbob wrote:
| I sat in a philosophy class in high school. I went to a prep
| school, so it was a Ph.D. teaching. I adamantly explained that
| neurons firing is the same as a feeling of pain. But he kept
| telling me that my feeling of pain is distinct from the firing in
| my brain. It took me weeks to realize what he was saying. That a
| conscious feeling is a distinct thing. That I could be in "the
| matrix", and no brain is actually firing. That the feeling is the
| only thing we know is real.
|
| So I would suggest that simulating consciousness has nothing to
| do with it. I would suggest there must be technology in the brain
| to produce it that operates on a level we have no comprehension
| of. Maybe quantum or something.
| chess_buster wrote:
| Get low on blood sugar and perceive how your brain stops
| working and consciousness falls apart
| Thiez wrote:
| I always think of this comic when people try to mix quantum
| mechanics and consciousness https://www.smbc-
| comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 . You have to show an actual
| relation here, you can't just connect these two concepts on the
| basis that they're both complex.
| light_triad wrote:
| In many ways 'consciousness' is a human projection onto machines.
| The whole debate might be, in some sense, irrelevant. Here's 2
| scenarios:
|
| - Your robot companion gets so good at mimicking a human, knows
| all your preferences and is able to have natural conversations,
| that over time you forget you are interacting with a robot and
| start to develop feelings for them.
|
| - A robot swarm interacts with the environment to further its
| goals and continues to grow long after humans have disappeared
| from the scene.
|
| In both cases is there consciousness? Does it matter?
| davesque wrote:
| This echoes my feelings on this whole debate. The question of
| consciousness matters much less than the question of how we
| decide to treat things that we view as being very much like us.
| crazy5sheep wrote:
| It really just a state machine
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