Adding to that, if you can compose multiple sub networks together then you've really got something. You can build a lot of different buildings from bricks without needing to invent new kinds of brick basically.
For instance, think about the large number of domains that robust computer vision would be useful in. Then think about the fact that if the computer understands the 3D space around it, it can hand that model off to a network that does predictive physics simulation. Now you've got something that would be useful across a extremely wide range of domains.
What we're discussing here is merely a starting state of something that'd have to rebuild itself.
Or maybe evolving modalities within one network is easier than putting it together.
Maybe a third neural network that knows how to purchase cloud compute?
Amazon has entered the chat
Personally, I suspect consciousness is intrinsically connected with whatever lets humans learn things by looking at and thinking about a single example.
>Giant robot pilot looking smug Caption: I am a genius!
Picture break: >same robot pilot now looking horrified. >Caption: Oh no!
I can tell you right frigging now, the average person is trained through education to build up confidence they know what they are doing, then over the next decade plus face-checked against reality to build an aversion/paranoia matrix.
The modern world is essentially orchestrated by people who build self-sustaining support structures of specialists. We've done a great job at building co-dependent specialists, but a terrible one at building generalists.
Edit. Don't really want to be unnecessarily flippant here. Perhaps this is a real person attempting to communicate. Sadly, I was unable to follow through, the text jumps wildly between seemingly unrelated subjects.
E.g., look at how the technological progress it makes is at risk of destroying human civilization. A series of ecological boom/bust cycles could lead toward negative selection for consciousness. Or we might manage to wipe out ourselves or, say, most mammals, leading life on earth to start over as it did 65m years ago.
But even without that, it's not clear to me that consciousness will really win out. Look at the number of successful people who are not only painfully unreflective, but need to be to keep doing what they're doing. I could name a lot of people, but today's good example is Alex Jones, whose whole (very profitable) schtick is based on refusing to be fully conscious of what he's saying: https://popehat.substack.com/p/alex-jones-at-the-tower-of-ba...
And this is hardly a new idea. Vonnegut wrote a novel where humans end up evolving into something like a sea lion. The point being "all the sorrows of humankind were caused by 'the only true villain in my story: the oversized human brain'", an error evolution ends up remedying.
Edit: To be clear, I posit that consciousness is the organ that enables us to distinguish between Good and Evil.
That same professor has done a bunch more work on the topic, as have many others.
Evolution is a strange phenomenon. I invite us to marvel at the transformation of terrestrial quadrupeds into majestic aquatic creatures, over eons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_cetaceans
Evolutionary speaking, cetaceans "share" the front limbs with quadrupeds. And yet there is a qualitatively distinct functional difference. Consider that moral consciousness, as present in humans, is functionally not quite the same as its biological precursor, the moral sense present in dogs or gorillas. And, of course, there are gradual changes along the evolutionary way.
Edit: "Organ", more precise "sensory organ", as in "the visual organ". Perhaps there is a better word here than "organ" here, before we get lost in the medical distinction between eye / retina / optic nerve / cortex / etc.
But I stand by my point. A moral sense is something that provably exists in a lot of social animals. Is it different in each species? Yes. Is it different in each individual? Surely. But unless you're going to claim that all of those animals are conscious, you can't say that consciousness is foundational to a moral sense. Indeed, I think the much easier argument is that a moral sense is foundational to evolving consciousness.
The argument of the article is that DALL-E doesn't respond appropriately to a particular kind of input - two entities in some kind of spatial relationship (that it hasn't often seen). Dall-E's not extrapolating the three-D world but stretching a bunch 2-D images together with some heuristics. That works to create a lot of plausible images sure but it implies to this ability might not, say, be able to be useful for the manipulation of 3-D space.
So, given a "Chinese room" is just a computation, it's plausible that some Chinese room could handle 3-d image manipulation more effectively than this particular program.
Which is to say, "no, the criticism isn't this is a Chinese room, that is irrelevant".
Are we not conscious?
The Chinese Room and the brain of a Chinese-speaking person are completely different physical processes. Looked at on an atomic level, they have almost nothing in common. Mind-body dualists may or may not agree that the room is not "conscious" in the way a human is, but if consciousness is purely a material process, I can't see how the materialist can possibly conclude all the relevant properties of the completely dissimilar room and person are the same.
Those that would argue the Chinese Room is "conscious" in the same way as the Chinese person are essentially arguing that the dissimilarity of the physical processes is irrelevant: the "consciousness" of the Chinese person doesn't arise from molecules bouncing around their brain in very specific ways, but exists at some higher level of abstraction shared with the constituent molecules of pieces of paper with instructions written in English and outputs written in Chinese.
The idea our consciousness exists in some abstract sense which transcends the physics of the brain is not a new one of course. Historically we called such abstractions souls...
It turns out that when one looks at the argument in detail, and in particular at Searle’s responses to various objections (such as the Systems and Virtual Mind replies), it is clear that he is essentially begging the question, and his ultimate argument, “a model is not the thing modeled”, is a non-sequitur.
It's a sound argument to the extent that qualia clearly exist, but no one has any idea what they are, and even less of an idea how to (dis)prove that they exist in external entities.
It's the materialists who are begging the question, because their approach to qualia is "Well obviously qualia are something that just happens and so what?"
Unfortunately arguments based on "Well obviously..." have a habit of being embarrassingly unscientific.
And besides - written language skills are a poor indicator of human sentience. Human sentience relies at least much on empathy; emotional reading of body language, expression, and linguistic subtexts; shared introspection; awareness of social relationships and behavioural codes; contextual cues from the physical and social environment which define and illuminate relationships; and all kinds of other skills which humans perform effortlessly and machines... don't.
Turing Tests and game AI are fundamentally a nerd's view of human intelligence and interaction. They're so impoverished they're not remotely plausible.
So as long as DALL-E has no obvious qualia, it cannot be described as sentient. It has no introspection and no emotional responses, no subjective internal state (as opposed to mechanical objective state), and no way to communicate that state even if it existed.
And it also has no clue about 3D geometry. It doesn't know what a sphere, only what sphere-like shading looks like. Generally it knows the texture of everything and the geometry of nothing.
Essentially it's a style transfer engine connected to an image search system which performs keyword searches and smushes them together - a nice enough thing, but still light years from AGI, never mind sentience.
Even if it were about qualia, calling the argument sound “to the extent that” we don’t know enough to tell whether its premises are correct would be a misuse of ‘sound’ and a rather blatant case of burden-shifting - effectively saying “so prove me wrong!” to skeptics.
Materialists can and do make question-begging claims, but that does not somehow cancel out Searle’s own question-begging (furthermore, somewhat ironically, Searle describes himself as a materialist!)
The soundness of the argument cannot be established by showing that current technology is far from being strong AI, as the argument claims much more than just that - it claims it to be impossible in principle. Anyone making such a claim has assumed a heavy burden that demands stronger arguments than you are making here.
Have you ever used a map?
If not, I'd like you to get one and I want you to point out your home in every one. Can you use a magnifying glass, then look at the map hard enough to see yourself looking over a tinier map? Ad infinitum?
That is what Searle means. A map is a model of the world. The model of a world that is a map is not, in fact, in any way equivalent to or interchangeable with the thing it models. It is merely a distilled representation that provides a facsimile representative enough to be useful. So to would be any attempt at modeling consciousness.
If the argument you present here could be so easily generalized, it would work just as well for “proving” that a computer model of an Enigma cypher machine cannot encipher text.
What if there's just no way to build consciousness from the building blocks that are within our reach?
Of course parts of regular computers involve "quantum stuff", like details of how transistors and hard drives work, but that doesn't mean they're magic.
I haven't found a definition of consciousness which is quantifiable or stands up to serious rigour. If it can't be measured and isn't necessary for intelligence, perhaps there is no magic cut-off between the likes of Dall-E and human intelligence. Perhaps the Chinese-room is as conscious as a human (and a brick)?
Can't it be both? What's the difference? Evolution just responds to the environment, so a method of complex interaction with the environment like "consciousness" or "ever-polling situational awareness" seems like par for the course.
Giraffes didn't get a long neck because the food was out of reach, giraffes have a lock neck because the one without just died.
If I introduce an antibiotic into a culture of bacteria and they evolve resistance, then they appear to be responding to it on a collective level.
https://health.mo.gov/safety/antibioticresistance/generalinf...
Mutation happens all the time because cell replication isn't perfect, some mutation are irrelevant, some deadly, some bring better chance of survival.
It's not a response just the result. Or how does the bacteria know it's an antibiotic and not just water? It doesn't, water just isn't a evolutionary filter, antibiotics are.
You might get a kick out of this paper (though some may find it's proposal a bit bleak, I think there's a way to integrate it without losing any of the sense of wonder of the experience of being alive :) )
It analogizes conscious experience to the a rainbow "which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them".
Chasing the Rainbow: The Non-conscious Nature of Being (2017) https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.0192...
> Though it is an end-product created by non-conscious executive systems, the personal narrative serves the powerful evolutionary function of enabling individuals to communicate (externally broadcast) the contents of internal broadcasting. This in turn allows recipients to generate potentially adaptive strategies, such as predicting the behavior of others and underlies the development of social and cultural structures, that promote species survival. Consequently, it is the capacity to communicate to others the contents of the personal narrative that confers an evolutionary advantage—not the experience of consciousness (personal awareness) itself.
So consciousness is more about what it subjectively feels like to be under pressure/influence to broadcast valuable internal signals to other (external) agents in our processes of life; aka other humans in the super-organism of humanity. I analogize it to what a cell "experiences" that compel it to release hormonal signals in a multicellular organism.
> to allow introspection
Evolution doesn’t do things “to anything”. It repeats what works, and kills the rest. Our brains have allowed us to adapt to the changes in the environment better than the rest. Conscience came with the pack. It might not have an actual “purpose”- it could be an “appendix”.
My personal belief is that consciousness started as the self-preservation instinct that most animals have, and we developed introspection as a way to strengthen our ties to other members of our family or tribe. And then we “won” (for now)
Philosophical consciousness is what the oft misunderstood quote cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, was hitting on. Descartes was not saying that consciousness is defined by thinking. He was trying to identify what he could know was really real in this world. When one goes to sleep, the dreams we have can often be indistinguishable from a reality in themselves, until we awake and find it was all just a dream. So what makes one think this reality isn't simply one quite long and vivid dream from which we may one day awake?
But this wasn't an appeal to nihilism, the exact opposite. The one thing he could be certain of is that he, or some entity within him, was observing everything. And so, at the minimum, this entity must exist. And the presence of this entity is what I think many of us are discussing when we speak of consciousness. In contrast to physical consciousness, you are philosophically conscious even when sleeping.
Of course like you said philosophical consciousness cannot be proven or measured and likely never will be able to be, which makes it an entirely philosophical topic. It is impossible for me to prove I am conscious to you, or vice versa, no matter what either of us does. Quite the private affair, though infinitely interesting to ponder.
There a few interesting thoughts about consciousness that I've found in those books. One is that the boundary between consciousness and "real matter" is imaginary: consciousness exists only because of change in that matter, when the change stops - so does consciousness, consciousness creates reality for itself, and the two are in fact just two sides of the coin. In other words, static consciousness isnt a thing, and hence the need for "reality".
Human consciousness is a sum of many consciousnesses that exist at wildly different levels of reality. There are primitive cellular consciousnesses, and those sometimes influence our mental consciousness. Our neural cerebrospinal system has an advanced consciousness capable of independent existence: it manages all the activity of internal organs, and only loosly interacts with our higher mental consciousness. That cerebrospinal system is even self-conscious in a primitive way: it can observe its own internal changes and distinguish them from impulses from the outside. There's emotional and mental consciousness that mainly lives in the brain and is somewhat aware of the dark sea of lower consciousness below it.
Most people are conscious in dreams, as they can perceive in that state. However they cant make (yet) distinction between inner processes (self) and external effects (others), so to them it appears as if everything is happening inside their mind, i.e. they are not self-conscious. That's consciousness of a toddler. Some are more advanced, they start seeing the me-others difference and can form memories from dreams.
I'm often struck by how stark this is in ancient fantasy art. The 'monsters' are usually just different animal parts remixed -- the head of one on the body of another, things like that. Fundamentally, we're all doing DALL-E-ish hybridization when we're being creative; it's very difficult to imagine things that are truly alien such that they're outside the bounds of our 'training data'.
Looks like it's still available for free from the author's website [0]
Blindsight is an excellent book in its exploration of consciousness, but the speculative part is that a working sense of self isn't necessary for embodied intelligence (like the scramblers), which I tend to doubt. An agent without a model of itself will have difficulty planning actions; knowing how its outputs/manipulators are integrated into the rest of reality will be a minimum requirement to control them effectively. It is certainly possible that "self" or "I" will be absent; humans can already turn the ego off with drugs and still (mostly) function but they remain conscious.
It looks like we’re beginning to get the building blocks of consciousness together. But we don’t yet know how to combine the wave functions into a chorus necessary to achieve GI
A person who is sleeping or in a vegetative state is not currently getting new inputs fed into some parts of their brain, so it's not surprising that their brain "lights up differently," nor does it imply anything about a piece of software that is getting new inputs that might be being integrated into its model (of course, a model that is trained and then repeatedly used without further integration is not in any way comparable to a brain).
This more abstract idea of consciousness is definitely not a solved problem - people can't even manage to agree on whether non-human animals have it. And a lot of internet arguments for why this or that neural network can't be conscious probably also rule 5 year olds out of it too.
The best we can do with humans (and maybe animals) is behaviorism and inference on our own personal consciousness at this point, with brain imaging to demonstrate at least gross prediction of consciousness in humans.
Just neural circuits are not going to be conscious by themselves, for one they need to learn concepts from the environment and those concepts shape the neural circuits. Thus the way they act shape how they develop. You can't separate consciousness from the environment where it develops.
In other words it was not the neural net that was lacking, but the environment.
How can someone possibly report when they are not experiencing consciousness?
By an absence of reporting it. If I sit at a desk getting my neurons moderated by testing equipment and say "I am conscious" every subjective second that I am experiencing consciousness then I could at least help narrow down when consciousness is lost. If I am simply unable to speak or respond at all, but still conscious, I would report that fact later. Only in the case of locked-in conscious awareness without later memory of the experience would this kind of experimental setup fail, and this is where brain imaging could probably help determine that everything except motor or memory neurons were active.
Doesn't that fall back to the old consciousnesses trap that nobody knows how to resolve? How do you know if the human reporting that he's conscious is actually conscious and not philosophical zombie?
We don't know what generates consciousness because we don't know how to measure it, and if we can't measure it, we will always have to take the words of an seemingly conscious entity for it.
I don't buy the philosophical zombie argument simply because consciousness does alter behavior. I wouldn't participate in this conversation the same way if I didn't experience consciousness. It would be more like vivid imagination (as apposed to moderate aphantasia) where I find it curious but don't have it. As in the novel, unconscious beings probably behave noticeably different.
There are, apparently, some people who have a very reduced sense of consciousness. I know I have done and said things when I'm not (memorably) conscious, for example when half asleep or coming out of anesthesia, and my behavior has been altered according to witnesses. I wasn't quite "myself". I can also hyper-focus and reduce conscious awareness of my surroundings and of my own body and mind, but that still feels like I have an internal awareness and memory of the experience. I am fairly certain I would be able to tell if that is switched off for a time.
I don’t think you’re conscious. Prove me wrong.