Comment by putzdown | Hacker News Reader

Comment by putzdown | Hacker News Reader

The article argues that because each little computer is a little “sentient”, and because machine learning builds algorithms that are intractable to the people who nurture them, and because in a house there will be lots of these sentient and intractable “learning” machines, that therefore the house (and car and office...) is full of consciousness, much like primitive ancients would have imagined a forest to be. This is simply terrible logic. It certainly resembles the logic of those primitive ancients. It does not follow that just because you don’t understand something or find it awe-inspiring, that it is therefore conscious, or a spirit, or a god. This is a dangerous error, because to worship, or merely believe in, the consciousness of one’s house is to cling to a fantasy and to place personality where there is no personality. Why don’t you continue to attribute consciousness to the human beings around you who actually have it, rather than wasting regard on soulless man-made calculators? Is humanity doomed to always revert to creating their own gods and worshipping them? What is it in us that longs to do that?

You posit your position as being strictly rational, but do you have any evidence that the machines we built to emulate a component of human thought aren’t a little conscious? ...what, precisely, is the mechanism by which networks of neurons conveying electrical signals given rise to consciousness, but networks of metallic fibers conveying electrical signals do not?

It seems to me that you’re telling people they’re wrong based on your opinion — and not a scientific conclusion.

Similarly, the human proclivity to invent “gods”, “spirits”, etc is because that’s the historic mechanism to discuss the behavior of complex systems — in analogy to our own complex behavior arising from the chemical and electrical interactions of brain regions. This is actually an effective mechanism, as we see that it semi-routinely identifies a phenomenon faster than a strictly “rational” approach. (I put that in quotes because it’s mostly a religious claim; it’s neither a rational conclusion such things don’t exist nor a rational approach to not use semi-accurate estimators when doing analysis.)

Let’s talk about a forest. Do you have any support for the position that the complex interplay of chemistry and other signaling along mycelium networks, etc in a mature forest doesn’t give rise to some form of consciousness in the same way that our brains do? ...what precisely is the distinction in your mind between neuronal networks and mycelium networks, which indicates that while both give rise to complex feedback and behaviors, only one has any kind of consciousness?

It seems to me that the minimal position is any system based on signal passing of a certain complexity begins to develop an awareness, given the huge diversity we’ve seen across the animal kingdom.

What’s the support for your position?

To further your point, there definitely seems to be a collective conciousness that emerges from human networks, very evident in the markets, where it is expressed in bull and bear markets, confidence and panic, and the collective concious is aware of itself.

Since nobody knows what consciousness is, we're all going on opinion here, including yourself. So, unless you converse with the fridge in your house and cry a little when it brakes, there's no point in bringing up the lack of scientific arguments in parent's post. You seem to make some assumption based on electric signals and complexity, but they're just assumptions.

I think maybe you interpret the concept a little too literally. The point is that beyond a certain level of incomprehensible complexity, you can no longer model things as deterministic machines - you must adopt a "theory of mind". The abstractions you use resemble those you apply to conscious beings. You don't say "this machine is behaving in this manner because it possesses internal state reflecting X fact about the world and it has been designed to execute Y instructions on that basis" - you say "the computer wants to do Y because it believes X".

The reason we believe in spirits is because it allows us to co-opt our over-evolved social brains to model otherwise intractably complex systems.

^ This. Even just on a linguistic level, personifying technology creates a subtext of: "The details are not relevant to my point or is too complicated to explain."

For example, talking about bodies of water "wanting" to be level.

Not even very complex systems: up until very recently anything that exhibited more-than-merely-physical behavior was alive.

The spinning governor, arguably the first feedback-based machine, processing information, was described as "alive" and "making decisions" by contemporary observers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifugal_governor

Line-following robots, as simple as they are, appear alive.

Nothing like this existed in the world other than living things until the last ~250 years.

A less metaphysical take on the concept is to think in terms of how much human thought went into creating the world around you. As society and technology become more complex, the more you have to rely on abstractions to understand everything.

thank you for pointing this out so quickly and well -- meanwhile, horrific, record setting forest loss in California over the last twelve years rarely is discussed. Here is another analogy for you .. the "great battelfields" of previous wars, hold the incalculable human pain of death and dismemberment, but who could feel it now? Do you think the living beings in the great forests of California felt no pain in the last twelve years ? Throw in the great starvation of the Pacific Oceans in the last twenty years.. any pain there?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifteen_Decisive_Battles_o...

[1a] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/11/clima...

[1b] Measuring and Monitoring Plant Populations -- BLM Technical Reference 1730-1 BLM Technical Reference 1730-1

[1c] https://www.citylab.com/life/2013/11/world-has-lost-forest-t...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/16/world/blob-seabird-study-intl...

>What is it in us that longs to do that?

It is animism, the belief that everything is alive, active and imbued with spirit and it is very natural. It arises because we perceive things only indirectly, via our mental representations of them. We (our minds) live in an inner, virtual, world. It matches the outer world only partially. The match is limited by matters such as how rational we are, how much we know, how much our culture knows, what our misconceptions and mistakes are, and so on. All very much in line with Karl Popper's epistemology.

Our mental representations are alive in the sense that they are labile and interconnected in all sorts of ways that make up our worldview. Creative geniuses don't consider their tools dispassionately. They literally relate to them, e.g. a certain equation might be like an old friend.

The problem for the animists is that just because things (trees, rocks, equations) are connected in our minds does not imply they are connected in the real, external universe. There aren't spirits 'out there'. If there is a spirit, it's 'in here' working behind the scene. It's the operation of our own brain. So primitive cultures had a very limited knowledge of how the outer physical world worked outside of necessary activities such as hunting. Scientific knowledge came later.

Materialists, on the other hand, i.e. most of us nowadays, assume that they perceive external physical reality directly. They forget they had to spend months just learning to see things when they were babies. (Or that this process was more about sorting out what was what than about building a telescope.) They assume that objects are are unconnected, like atoms in a void. This is of course true on the wider physical level but merely self-fulfilling in the inner world. Thus their mental representations of things (not us) remain relatively dormant. They never hear the 'wind in the willows' and never realise their full creative power.

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