Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by igorkraw | Hacker News Reader

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Edit:Shoot, I meant to reply to another comment. Leaving this here and linking it

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IIT is the most coherent definition of consciousness I'm aware of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theor...

People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness.

I think in general, we overexagerate qualities that humans have as uniquely special and important (intelligence, sentience, consciousness), even if the definition of them is fuzzy and any non-fuzzy definition is "too inclusive". I wonder if this is because we are collectively Identity building and creating an "other" out of nature, because otherwise we'd

1. Be much less special as we want to fee

2. Would have to consider a lot of inconvenient externalities for our reasoning (moral and otherwise) to be consistent

And both are slowdowns when you are bootstrapping a post scarcity society out of scarcity, so it'd culturally valuable to reify special qualities that we just determine "we" possess and "they" don't - because it's easier to unify on and allows more actions than making sure everyone can deal with the unfiltered reality of human... unremarkableness in an uncaring world, another social species like so many other with a temporary oligarchy on the planet (without wanting to drone to philosophically, I do think this aspect of Weltschmerz is underappreciated, especially seeing the anxiety amongst my peer group when the topic comes up)

> People dismiss it often, and it has valid academic criticisms, but most "lay" critiques I've seen seem to dismiss it because it gives things they don't consider to be "conscious like them" consciousness.

If your attempt at a formalism provides useful, actionable implications, and only really disagrees with people's intuitions on cases that are generally believed to be edge cases, or maybe that you also have good reason to believe are edge cases on different ground, then you might have a decent definition.

If your attempt at a formalism provides useful implications, but disagrees with everyone's intuitions on what the words you're using mean, you've probably defined the wrong thing. That's not to say that you aren't defining something sensible (you might still be), but strongly suggests it's not what you want it to be.

Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries.

> Selling IIT as a description of consciousness is roughly the same flavor of hubris as defining berries to include oranges and cucumbers and exclude raspberries and raspberries.

Not trying to defend IIT, but the only reason your example works here is because from our human perspective (eating these plants) we find it absurd to include cucumbers and exclude raspberries.

So talking about hubris: Wouldn't plants (if they could) very likely have a totally different perspective? To then it would probably seem totally absurd that we use taste or shape of the fruit as a grouping feature and not something that might be totally more defining that plants can experience.

Of course it is intuitively understandable to look at ourselves and animals we understand when defining consciousness. Even like that it is hard to define. Trying to incorporate things that show conscious-like behaviors, but in totally human-unrelatable ways is not a bad next step, but it is hard to know where to draw the border. A rock could have conscious processes running in it on geological timescales — how would one falsify that?

You have acknowledged that there are valid academic criticisms of IIT, and for those wanting to get an idea of what those might be, a good place to start is with Scott Aaronson's responses in his blog: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=1799

Note that the issue that you are concerned with here and the usefulness of IIT are separate concerns, and critics like Aaronson are not taking that position on the basis of the attitudes you claim are behind many 'lay' critiques.

I appreciate Aaronsons critique, he himself makes my main point of disagreements, i.e. that when constructing a physical systems that has the properties he describes (modified Vandermonde Matrix) it might give nontrivial surprises.

But even accepting that IIT is wrong in the "consciousness might imply high IIT score, but not vice versa" sense, I'm simply not aware of any definition which is as *attackble* because of it's formal specification.

This is not me going "well you don't have anything better", but me asking to be pointed to similarly strictly defined notions of consciousness

I found the conversation between you two interesting (as well as Scott Aaronson's post), so I figured I could contribute with a potentially relevant piece of reading: "Hard Criteria for Empirical Theories of Consciousness" (24-page PDF) at https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

In the same ballpark as IIT, I've seen many mentions of GWT/GNT (global neuronal workspace theory). But the PDF covers that and many others. I don't have any particular "conclusion" myself, but it's just a fascinating discussion to be swimming in even when utterly clueless.

EDIT: And I forgot the most obvious link that I actually had read in the past, Stanford's page on conciousness talks about theories: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#SpeTheCon

I am not aware of anything similarly strictly defined, but that is not, of course, evidence for the correctness or even usefulness of IIT, and nor does it somehow counter the specific objections that Aaronson raises.

IIT is a nice intuition pump, but it's missing essential parts. Consciousness should be related to survival, replication of information and its own energy costs. It's not just some integrated information for no purpose at all. The purpose is survival if it is conscious.

If you add that to IIT, then you suddenly get a new filter for what could be conscious - something that competes for information replication, not just something with high IIT score.

It sounds like you've maybe read Steve Grand's book, Creation: Life and How To make It?

That is his entire pitch; if you've not read it I wholly recommend it.

>> Consciousness should be related to survival

Is that not just your intuition too? Is it not possible to imagine an artificial consciousness that does not care one way or the other for its own survival?

No because survival is closely tied to evolution. By mere survival an agent creates its own structure and values. It can't evolve if it doesn't risk its skin in the game. The price of our present day intelligence has been very high.

But you can piggyback AI training on human culture and embody the agent in our environment so it can still function like a conscious biological agent. The AI is just passing the buck to humans, without us it wouldn't even have a goal.

On the other hand all living things have goals without human help. Maybe when AIs can self replicate their information into the future like us, without external help, they could be eventually conscious. We don't know yet how to make physical self replicators that evolve. Only nature solved this riddle so far.

BTW, AlphaGo was subjected to evolutionary techniques, and it shows. The agents had to duel with clones and past versions of themselves. Survival was conditioned on win rate. Suddenly AI can surpass humans in this little environment, but that came at the price of discarding so many unfit earlier versions.

> it has valid academic criticisms

That's probably because the rest of researchers ignore it like the plague. If everybody had to comment on it for some magical reason, it would be probably be burned down to the ground and then some.

IIT doesn't capture much or any of what we consider important about consciousness. If it's the most coherent definition we have, we don't have a coherent definition.

If other animals are just as special as us we can't boil them alive. Just imagine the inconvenience of delivering a less painful death to lobsters.

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