[HN Gopher] Artificial consciousness: a perspective from the fre...
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Artificial consciousness: a perspective from the free energy
principle
Author : sabrina_ramonov
Score : 35 points
Date : 2024-07-21 15:59 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (link.springer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (link.springer.com)
| zug_zug wrote:
| Philosophy mumbo-jumbo. Consciousness is not a scientifically
| meaningful term if it is not defined in a falsifiable way.
| robxorb wrote:
| Is it possible to do that and also retain a meaningfulness?
| adrianN wrote:
| That is an open question.
| naasking wrote:
| Falsifiability is likely not what strictly necessary or
| sufficient delineates science from pseudoscience. It's good for
| some sciences but not others.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Falsifiability is a requirement for any scientific
| hypothesis. I don't know about pseudoscience but a non-
| falsifiable hypothesis is not science.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| And what has NOT been falsified, do you then consider that
| solid science, or just not yet falsified?
| janalsncm wrote:
| If it is falsifiable but not falsified, that's considered
| a credit to the hypothesis. The strongest of our
| scientific theories have been tested thousands of times
| but not falsified.
| naasking wrote:
| Debatable:
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/#Fals
|
| Popper even thought evolution by natural selection was not
| falsifiable.
| abeppu wrote:
| Strictly, I think your first sentence is correct:
| pseudoscience sometimes does make falsifiable claims.
| Homeopathy advocates believe that their preparations actually
| help heal.
|
| But for your second sentence, do you have in mind a
| hypothesis which you think is not testable but is still part
| of scientific inquiry?
| blackbear_ wrote:
| > do you have in mind a hypothesis which you think is not
| testable but is still part of scientific inquiry?
|
| Atomism was certainly not testable when it was first
| proposed by the ancient Greeks, and yet here we are. What
| is unscientific today could be scientific tomorrow (or in a
| thousand years). I would argue that figuring out how to
| (dis)prove something is also part of scientific inquiry.
| mannykannot wrote:
| Is it wrong to mention the word "consciousness" until it is
| defined in a falsifiable way? What would it take to define it
| in a falsifiable way anyway? It is not a proposition.
| blueprint wrote:
| What if the nature of consciousness is you can't falsify any
| proper definition of it? Would you reject its possible
| correctness? Sounds like a blind spot - perhaps the only one
| you have left?
| adolph wrote:
| > Philosophical mumbo-jumbo.
|
| Would you expand on that? Having done a small amount of
| learning adjacent to this work, I'd like to find out more.
|
| I was introduced to Friston's work through "The Hidden Spring"
| by Mark Solms [0]. It seems well grounded in theory that there
| exist certain materials that maintain a specific range of
| entropy (S). Within some of those materials (i.e. biological),
| there are meta materials that enhance entropy maintenance by
| forming communication/processing networks. These networks are
| bounded in certain ways, say within the behaviors exhibited by
| a single cell organism, to much more broadly between neurons of
| an animal that has them. People then get hung up on what is
| meant by Bayesian and "Markov blankets." [1]
|
| Stipulating thoughts arise from biological underpinnings rather
| than something supernatural doesn't strike me as "mumbo jumbo."
| Applying math based on a well defined (but may well be
| incorrect) physics theory to define the meta material from
| which thoughts arise seems to be a quantization that may lead
| to stronger links between biology and psychology. To the degree
| that consciousness is primarily a psychologically defined
| phenomena, this is work that could reduce much mumbo jumbo.
|
| 0. https://www.amazon.com/Hidden-Spring-Journey-Source-
| Consciou...
|
| 1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/04/god-help-us-lets-
| try-t...
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Wiese provides a good but indirect definition of what he
| operationally means by "consciousness" in the footnote on the
| first page.
|
| And his interest is with evaluating if there are or can be
| rigorous criteria for stating a computation system--embodied or
| not--is capable of "consciousness" (I'm adding the scare quotes).
|
| It is only philosophy mumbo-jumbo if almost all philosophy
| (including Dennett, Churchland and many others) strikes you as
| mumbo-jumbo.
|
| I find this a worthwhile contribution worthy of an attaboy, not
| knee-jerk derision.
| mannykannot wrote:
| I agree that it should not be dismissed as mumbo-jumbo, but I
| am not (at least at first sight) particularly impressed by it.
| It is an example of the long tradition of trying to identify an
| unbridgeable ontological divide between things that are
| conscious and things that compute digitally (or more
| specifically here, von Neumann computers.) As I regard
| ontologies as being little more than ways of relating what we
| think we know, I feel this is putting the ontic cart before the
| epistemic horse.
|
| About half-way through, the author raises a terrible argument
| from Searle: a simulated rainstorm does not make you wet (to
| which I reply, a simulated Enigma machine really does encode
| and decode messages - which analogy is relevant here?) To his
| credit, he does not leave it at that: he follows up with
| (quoting Chalmers) _" Hofstadter's insight is that whether or
| not we recognize a simulated hurricane as a hurricane depends
| on our perspective. In particular, it depends on whether we're
| experiencing the simulated hurricane from inside or outside the
| simulation."_
|
| He goes back-and-forth with this for another paragraph, until
| _One could object that this criterion is too strong... That is,
| we should ask: can we upload the virtual agent to a robot in
| our level of reality? Of course, I do not have a knock-down
| argument against this reply. I can only say that the conscious
| beings we currently know are different, and that this
| difference might matter._
|
| So here we end up with a very weak "well, maybe" - i.e. we
| don't know enough to be sure, which is where all arguments of
| this type that I have looked at so far (and are not simply
| begging the question) end up.
| dlkf wrote:
| It's interesting to consider whether a simulated rainstorm is
| in fact possible. Not a crude numerical simulation like those
| used for forecasting, but one fine-grained enough to
| accurately predict the trajectory of every drop.
| poikroequ wrote:
| > computational functionalism, according to which performing the
| right computations is sufficient (and necessary) for
| consciousness.
|
| This is akin to magic, and utter nonsense.
|
| Think about how a computer works and all of its individual
| components. The CPU has registers and a little bit of L1 L2 L3
| cache. There is some stuff in RAM, highly fragmented because of
| virtual memory. Maybe some memory is swapped to disk. Maybe some
| of this memory is encrypted. You may have one or more GPUs with
| their own computations and memory.
|
| Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together and
| forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the
| greatest miracle the world has ever seen.
|
| Let's be real. The brain has evolved to produce *meaningful*
| conscious experience. There's so many ways it can go wrong, need
| I say more than psychedelics? There's tons of evidence to support
| the theory that the brain evolved and is purpose built for
| consciousness and sentience, albeit we don't know how the brain
| actually does it. To assume that computers miraculously have the
| same ability is one of the dumbest pseudodcientific theories of
| our time.
| tgv wrote:
| That's not what the abstract says. It says: _IF_ computational
| functionalism is true, _THEN_ could a conscious ANN exist?
|
| > There's tons of evidence
|
| There's also tons of evidence and lack of counter-evidence that
| the brain is simply physical and performs computable functions.
| ainoobler wrote:
| What computable functions is it performing? Can you show me
| the code for these computable functions?
| poikroequ wrote:
| Admittedly taken out of context, but that doesn't make what I
| said any less true.
| haswell wrote:
| This only makes sense to me in the context of the "all matter
| is conscious" theory, in which there's something that it's like
| to be say, an electron, just not very much.
|
| As the theory goes, the more complexity there is in a system,
| the more the possibility space of potential experience grows.
|
| It's an interesting theory that some serious people take
| seriously, but like all current theories of consciousness,
| we're not in a position to test it.
|
| I find it far more plausible than computational functionalism
| at least.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| > Am I supposed to believe that this all somehow comes together
| and forms a meaningful conscious experience? That would be the
| greatest miracle the world has ever seen.
|
| We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal activity.
| Do you think no other substrate could give rise to
| consciousness?
|
| > The brain has evolved to produce _meaningful_ conscious
| experience.
|
| That strikes me as quite a leap. Another take on this might be
| that evolution has selected for intelligence, and that
| consciousness came along for the ride. It doesn't seem
| plausible that consciousness, let alone meaning (whatever that
| means here), could be selected for directly.
| adolph wrote:
| > We already know consciousness can arise from neuronal
| activity. Do you think no other substrate could give rise to
| consciousness?
|
| Conjecture of another is reported by "Light Eaters" [0] which
| I've just started. Of course, materially sufficient is less
| than a slam dunk given plausible theory that many mental
| states are learned not innate [1] and consciousness is
| relatively recent development in humans [2].
|
| 0. https://www.amazon.com/Light-Eaters-Unseen-Intelligence-
| Unde...
|
| 1. https://www.amazon.com/How-Emotions-Are-Made-
| Secret/dp/15098...
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_
| in...
| poikroequ wrote:
| Meaningful. Sensible. Coherent. Our conscious experience is
| NOT random nonsense.
|
| An analogy, tune an old analog TV to a station and you get a
| meaningful picture with meaningful sound. Tune it to a
| station that doesn't exist, and you get random static and
| white noise, not meaningful.
|
| If computers are producing conscious experience, it's going
| to be the latter, random and incomprehensible. The underlying
| computation does NOT matter in this case, because computers
| are simply incapable of producing meaningful conscious
| experience.
|
| Maybe consciousness is an inevitable consequence of neural
| activity, but the complex coherent consciousness we
| experience today is most certainly a product of natural
| selection. That much is no accident.
| visarga wrote:
| Consciousness is a tricky concept, hard to pin down even after
| centuries of debate. It's not very useful for understanding how
| minds work.
|
| Search might be a better idea to focus on. It's about looking
| through possibilities, which we can study scientifically. Search
| is more about the process, while consciousness is vague. Search
| has a clear goal and space to look in, but we can't even agree on
| what consciousness is for.
|
| Search happens everywhere, at all scales. It's behind protein
| folding, evolution, human thinking, cultural change, and AI.
| Search has some key features: it is compositional, it's discrete,
| recursive, it's social, and it uses language. Search needs to
| copy information, but also change it to explore new directions.
| Yes, I count DNA as a language, code and math too. Optimizing
| models is also search.
|
| We can stick with the flawed idea of consciousness, or we can try
| something new. Search is more specific than consciousness in some
| ways, but also more general because it applies to so many things.
| It doesn't have the same problems as consciousness (like being
| subjective), and we can study it more easily.
|
| If we think about it, search explains how we got here. It helps
| cross the explanatory gap.
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